19 seconds

Nowhere on planet earth is the love for sports teams greater than in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city is home to three major professional teams: the Penguins, Pirates, and Steelers. They all share roughly the same colors and temperament of fans – black/gold and rabid, respectively.

Children are effectively indoctrinated into the culture of sport from an early age. I know this, because I was one of them.

There’s Mario, Jerome, Barry, and plenty more stars. We pretended to be these legends when playing football or swinging for the fences. All of them are household names in the former steel town. I couldn’t not know them. Memorabilia filled Pittsburghers’ homes, bars, and even schools.

After a midseason Sunday victory, I would enter elementary school to a raucous public announcement that invited us to take out our “Terrible Towels” (gold-yellow cloths with Steelers logos and chants screen-printed on). With a high-energy song playing, the entire class would raise their towels skyward and start swinging them around and around.

I was five or six. It was a Monday. This was first period. We hadn’t won the Super Bowl. I can’t remember if the Pledge of Allegiance preceded — or followed — such debauchery.

Now, with this context in mind, it was practically a day of mourning in the city when the old, Three Rivers Stadium was to be imploded. The iconic field — much like Rome's Colosseum or Apple’s flying saucer headquarters — was a circular fortress. Many — including my mom — attended the demolition in person and everyone else watched it on TV.

On February 11, 2001, the stadium that housed both the Pirates and Steelers fell to the ground in a coordinated groan of concrete and dynamite.

It was done in 19 seconds.

Years of money, politicking, and advocacy went into the groundbreaking. How much effort and time were necessary to make this vision into reality? And from its initial construction in 1968 until 2001, that stadium meant everything to the people of Pittsburgh. Decades of fun and entertainment and meaning.

This demolition taught me something profound about the nature of trust — something that can take years to build can fall in a matter of seconds. The arc of trust is long and progressive, but also has the potential to be violent and implosive. We see cases in the media every day. A politician. A celebrity. Tabloid news. A salacious realization.

My clinical practice is full of these moments of building, working with, and sometimes (thankfully, rarely) losses of trust. I work with clients to create safety with themselves, others, and me. Some clients come into the office questioning their ability to maintain long-term relationships with anyone. Perhaps they cannot trust themselves. Or maybe they don't trust others. The work can be internal — with answers found within the client. At times, it's interpersonal — a dynamic and interplay between a dyad or multiple parties influencing an experience of trust.

I’ve asked hundreds of people the following two questions:

How do you build trust with others in your life?

How can I earn your trust?

Always in that order, I hope to hear what the process looks like outside psychotherapy and how this might impact our office-based work. Typically, clients have never been explicitly asked this question. There’s a common answer for nearly all of them: time.

A relationship — platonic, therapeutic, or intimate — takes effort to flourish and blossom. What is unsaid is what happens in this time. It’s not merely how long someone has known another. One academic has a model to explain what’s happening in that period.

Dr. Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School, proposed a formal model called the “Trust Triangle,” which includes authenticity, logic, and empathy. Authenticity represents someone seeing the "real you." Logic is when a person can see your competence. And empathy is about seeing you care.

Frei talks about how managers can build or jeopardize trust by the way they interact with others. For instance, do you have your smartphone on and in your hands during a meeting? Are your eyes focused on the person speaking? Are you showing up — physically and socially?

Years ago, I was supervising someone in training who was struggling to complete documentation in a timely manner. This relatively banal work requirement is actually vitally important in our field of psychotherapy. Especially when in training, a clinical note is often the only concrete record for what happened in a session and necessary in a crisis situation. If, as a licensed psychologist and supervisor, I don’t have a note, I have no clue what’s happening. The longer it takes for a note to get completed, the more vulnerable clients being served are, as are we as clinicians.

I inquired once. I followed up twice. And the delayed completion of notes remained over and over again. I became confused and upset, wondering why this wasn’t being done – others were finishing their notes on time.

After all these attempts, I shared feeling angry with the supervisee, and I watched as whatever working trust we had drained from their eyes. They responded, “You’re angry?!” In this small, fraction of a moment, I lost my working supervisory relationship with this individual. It would never return.

I felt so sad after this supervision session, and filled with regret. While my feelings were true and expectations were reasonable, my approach was not effective. In retrospect — with Frei’s model in mind — my approach likely lacked empathy for the supervisee and exhibited a "wobble" in trust. From then on, the supervisee was physically present and emotionally absent, which is nearly impossible to work with in this psychologically charged line of work. Tried as I might to reconnect or process this moment with the person, the rapport was lost for my supervisee and couldn’t be built again.

If I could go back to my supervisee, with Frei's model in mind, I would center my conversation around concern rather than anger. I was genuinely worried about them — worried they weren't getting the support they needed, worried about their professional development, and worried about client safety. The meeting of expectations is inherently necessary in training programs, but my supervisee needed to hear that my concern came from wanting them to succeed, not from frustration with their failure.

Three Rivers Stadium has become my symbol for trust. Like that fortress of steel and concrete, trust takes years to build and can collapse in seconds. When we fail to show up authentically, think clearly about others' needs, or demonstrate genuine care, the foundation crumbles. The question isn't whether we'll wobble — we all do. The question is whether we can recognize it before the demolition begins.