Over the past eight years, the biggest barrier to my health has been my practitioner’s refusal to trust me. They don’t believe what I say about my body, my experience, my reality. They can’t take in what I need, what I know, or what I’ve been through. It’s exhausting.
I can’t trust them if they won’t trust me, if they dismiss my observations, ignore my data, belittle my efforts, or treat me like a problem to manage instead of a person to collaborate with. If they can’t see, hear, and empathize with me, I can trust this: they will harm me.
In an honest, integrated doctor-patient relationship–one based on mutual respect and interpersonal neurobiology–trust has to go both ways. When it doesn’t, when they refuse to meet me with curiosity and attunement, it makes it impossible for me to trust them.
When my provider disbelieves me, my nervous system reacts. It knows the rupture. It says: “This is not safe.” Suddenly, I can’t receive care, tolerate guidance, or co-regulate with them. Not because I’m resisting, but because my body is protecting me.
Everything I bring–my charts, my studies, my self-awareness–is aimed at deep collaboration. I’m showing up fully. Are they?
I’m not being difficult or controlling. I’m doing the hard work of making healing possible. If they can’t meet me there–if they insist on staying in power-over rather than relationship–I can trust one thing: disconnection in medicine is harm. Maybe not malicious, but real, measurable, damaging harm.
I see it clearly. That clarity is hard-won. It’s part of my power, and it increases my ability to protect myself from practitioners who mistrust the people who turn to them for help.
