A True & Effective Healer Respects Your Trust & Confidence
The easiest thing to break isn't the heart. It's trust.
An installment from Eyes Wide Open: Avoiding Re-Traumatization, tools to recognize and prevent getting burnt or re-traumatized in therapy and self-help. Installments are standalone pieces and can be read in any order. Depending on my healing cadence, published weekly or biweekly, as I am able.
All installments can be found here.
Essential Trait #8, Respects Your Trust and Confidence
The easiest thing to break isn’t the heart. It’s trust.
Love is resilient. Trust is delicate, the first to shatter, the last to heal. If at all.
In a healing relationship keeping someone’s trust and confidence is sacred. You aren’t just sharing ideas. You’re sharing your story, your heart, the guilt and shame it holds, as well as the love, the hope you’re almost afraid to have, and your dreams.
The person you work with isn’t just an advice dispenser. They are a witness to this leg of your journey, a responsibility to be entered into and upheld with respect and integrity.
To open up, to trust in such a deep way, even with trepidation, is a courageous act. That trust should not be betrayed, especially when your entire life’s experience, or a life-changing moment, has taught you to trust no one.
An exception
If you seek help from a licensed therapist or counselor, they are bound by a professional code of ethics to keep your confidence or confidentiality (links to the code of ethics for various mental health professions). The exception is when what you share falls under mandated reporting. What constitutes mandated reporting, and even who must report, varies somewhat state by state, but a common thread is that if you pose a threat to yourself or to others it must be reported.
The person you work with may not be a licensed professional bound by a professional code of ethics, but any individual can have a personal code of ethics.
Ask. Inquire as to their policy on confidentiality. The fewer safeguards there are for keeping what you say confidential, the more you must rely on personal trust.
Two questions to ask yourself is just how much harm would it cause, to yourself or to others, if your confidence were breached, and do you feel the trust you give them is merited to proceed?
The greater the harm you or others would suffer if that trust were broken, the greater care you should take in giving it.
It’s not an insult to specifically state your expectation of confidentiality before you begin. Be careful of the person who is annoyed, makes light of your vigilance, or is personally insulted you even have to ask.
Forget about being careful. Take that as your cue to walk out the door.
These are major red flags.
Opportunity and agenda
Unfortunately, some people see trust as a weakness to exploit. After all, you exposed your own throat, so the fault is yours. Your confidence is their leverage.
Some people love conflict. What you confide in them gives them fuel, something to toss on the fire of drama they need to keep going, showing up as peacemaker/mediator, or sitting back to make popcorn and enjoy the show. Or both.
Others are simply careless. Not really malicious, but just not mature or trustworthy enough to treat your confidence with the respect it deserves.
What can breaching confidence/breaking trust look like?
You might imagine someone leaning over to another, hand hovering over their mouth, muting the sound of whispering all your secrets away. And that may be exactly how it plays out.
But breaching confidence or breaking trust isn’t just telling your story to someone else.
It looks not so much like betraying you to another, whether to your face or behind your back but suggesting they can. It’s a sleight-of-hand blackmail, an under-the-radar-hostage-taking of your peace of mind. This can be conveyed through a knowing look, a drop of a phrase, a barely perceptible hint of threat in their tone of voice, an allusion to something no one else gets but stops you cold.
It looks like an out-of-the-blue assault. Quick. Fast. No pretense, no warning, just using what you told them in your pain, in between your sobs, or in numb agony, to cheap-shot their anger, frustration, or retaliation at you.
It looks like deliberate and calculated, take-their-time aim and fire with what you shared at the opportune moment they know will draw the most blood. They don’t break just your trust. They break you.
It looks like initial attention, even caring, and then disinterest, which may culminate in withdrawing, without telling you they are. They just kind of fall off the map. Perhaps they bit off more than they could chew, or they don’t understand, or weren’t prepared for the commitment holding space in this capacity means. The breach lies not in that your confidence isn’t important to keep, but that it isn’t worth receiving.
Would a practitioner do this? I’ve seen it. In one-on-one peer support, or support groups, with mentors and teachers, some of whom I was introduced to through social media algorithms and ads.
I’ve also met some amazing people through these same venues, remarkable healers and practitioners, peers who are mindful of what they can give and what they can’t. Sometimes social media algorithms and ads can offer up gems who are extraordinarily well versed in the healing process, caring, and ethical.
A code of ethics is not a guarantee
A number of years ago, I was in a meeting with my brother, his psychiatrist, his caseworker, some social workers, the administrator for the facility where my brother was staying, and two representatives from the insurance company. I was fiercely advocating for him not to be placed in abysmally, inadequate housing situations, and at ridiculous distances away from me.
One was a domiciliary care, where they wanted him to live in a family’s home. Yes, he was a senior citizen. He was, also, a paranoid schizophrenic, and I could not believe they had given my brother the green light to live with a family that had zero experience with the mentally ill.
They had only ever housed Alzheimer patients. The home didn’t even meet minimum requirements because it didn’t have a common living space for the residents. Just bedrooms adjacent to the kitchen, that they had partial access to.
I was appalled for my brother’s sake and the family’s. I expressed my displeasure in this meeting, politely and articulately. I’m a long-practiced advocate and know how to handle myself.
Toward the end of the meeting, evidently feeling frustrated, his psychiatrist took something she knew about me and how often I saw my brother, which varied depending on his needs and my triggers. She asked me how important I was to my brother that he should be housed closer to me if I didn’t regularly visit him anyway.
I didn’t see that coming.
This was the psychiatrist, who had complimented me on being an advocate for my brother (when she first met me) and how lucky he was to have me, now resenting it, and knowing our personal background, challenged me with a question that would necessitate me sharing, with a roomful of mostly strangers, what I had shared with her and the staff in private.
I was taken so off guard, that I even started to explain about my triggers, and why I couldn’t see him every week, before I realized how wrong this was, and stopped talking.
Happy ending. I got what I wanted for my brother. Much to their (and my) surprise, the insurance representatives agreed with me! They approved my brother to remain with this provider until a suitable place for his needed level of care opened up, for which he would be first in line. Thankfully, that happened soon after.
I was happy for my brother and pissed as hell at the psychiatrist who struck out at me with that cheap shot.
So no, having a professional code of ethics doesn’t mean someone will actually honor it, but I can’t imagine what she might have done without whatever restraint it did offer.
So, deal breaker? Hell yeah.
With a healing practitioner? Absolutely.
With other relationships? Pretty much, yes. But it, also, depends.
Sometimes, people who are closest to us, are close enough to know what buttons to push, what your triggers are and where the sensitive places in your life lie. In a flash of anger, these spurs-of-the-moment attacks can sting. Other times they gut you.
It’s never okay to breach your confidence, either by weaponizing it or any other way, but with some people, family, friends and loved ones, perhaps, you may decide, for your own reasons, that you’re willing to allow the steps to reconciliation. There’s room for redemption. And that’s your right.
But it’s a tiny room, and one you owe to no one.
A practitioner/client relationship? No.
When someone, who is in your life, for the sole purpose of helping you to heal, breaks your trust, they don’t deserve another moment of your time.
In a healer/client relationship, there is no such room to come back from that kind of wounding. No room to recover from cheap shots. No place to reconcile emotional blackmail. No space for un-weaponizing what you confided. No retries for treating you or what you shared as of little value.
I don’t care how many followers they have. I don’t care how popular or well-spoken of they are. I don’t care how many other things they may dangle in front of you. If they can sacrifice their own integrity for whatever momentary or long-term benefit they perceive, they are less than worthless in your healing. They are injurious.
And if someone does break your confidence or your trust, it isn’t your fault.
Yes, we choose who we work with, but if they choose to take advantage of you or betray you, that falls on them. That’s where the responsibility lies.
The empowerment lies in you learning from it and fortifying yourself. Not by never trusting anyone again, but by deepening your knowledge of what “trustworthy” looks like.
Walk your path. Become better about what you want, what you will accept and what you won’t. Be there for your own self. Practice saying no, so you can become better at saying yes to what’s good and true for you.
The trust and confidence you will repair then is your own. Don’t settle for less.
From my heart to yours,
Demian Elaine’ Yumei ~ Silent No More
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Demian, I so struggle with trust…I go completely mob style when that trust is broken — you’ll never have access to me again and I’m grossly frigid. I’m working to maintain the importance of trust (because it’s damn important) but not going nuclear when it’s broken 🤍