In an era defined by cultural polarization and consumer-driven demands on therapeutic spaces, there is a growing insistence that therapy must function as an unqualified site of validation. Clients increasingly seek not just therapeutic attunement but affirmation of identity and worldview as a litmus test of therapeutic worth. This cultural imperative for constant validation can incentivize practitioners to collude—consciously or unconsciously—in excessive reassurance, inadvertently turning therapy into a bespoke experience engineered to avoid discomfort rather than facilitate growth.

For individuals with childhood trauma and enduring personality distress, such environments can amplify epistemic mistrust. They develop a refined sensitivity to incongruence: when a therapist’s words promise safety that their affect fails to deliver, the result is not relief but further mistrust. This paper argues that authentic therapeutic trust is not forged through seamless validation but through the disciplined practice of real relational presence—including the uncomfortable, unpolished moments of boredom, agitation, and disagreement. It is precisely these moments of authentic human encounter that disrupt entrenched patterns of mistrust and cultivate real trust.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, the paper explores how early experiences of love and trust shape not just intrapsychic formations but our ongoing relational engagements with power. We suggest that the therapeutic overemphasis on validation mirrors broader social dynamics, contributing to echo chambers in which difference is experienced as threat and discomfort as harm.

In addressing the conference theme, this paper examines how working with epistemic mistrust within the context of validation culture challenges us to reclaim trust not as soothing affirmation but as a practice of presence, vulnerability, and mutual dignity—inside therapy and in wider political discourse.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”- (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Within today’s symbolic order, epistemic uncertainty marked by misinformation, technological mediation, and political polarisation, the question of whom and what to trust has become both urgent and destabilising. This paper explores trust and mistrust as dialectically intertwined psychic and social capacities rather than opposites. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of basic trust and rupture-repair (D. W. Winnicott; Daniel Stern), alongside sociological accounts of trust as a response to systemic complexity (Niklas Luhmann), I argue that trust is fundamentally linked to the capacity to endure uncertainty without collapsing into paranoia or narcissistic isolation.

Central to this argument is the theme of silence. In psychoanalytic practice, silence functions not as absence but as a holding environment that enables the subject to encounter the unknown aspects of self and other. The capacity to be alone in the presence of another - Winnicott’s formulation illuminates how trust develops as an embodied tolerance of not-knowing. When this tolerance is compromised, mistrust may harden into persecutory distrust, fuelling conspiratorial imaginaries and defensive social formations.

To deepen this inquiry, the paper places psychoanalytic thought in dialogue with Indian philosophical reflections on truth (satya), faith (śraddhā), and the limits of language in the Upanishadic tradition. The apophatic gesture of “neti, neti” (not this, not that) offers an alternative model of epistemic humility: truth as relational, unstable, and ethically demanding rather than fixed possession.

By weaving together psychoanalysis, social theory, and Indian philosophy, the paper proposes that trust is the psychic capacity to inhabit silence without foreclosing meaning. Such calibrated trust - neither naïve nor corrosively sceptical which may be crucial for sustaining therapeutic, communal, and political life in an age of epistemic fragility.

Key words: trust, not-knowing, silence

Abstract :
This research examines the ways in which experimental and hybrid filmmaking can represent embodied memory, trauma, and identity in the aftermath of the 2014 genocide of Yazidis by ISIS. This underlines the gaps that currently exist in cinematic responses to trauma theory, ethics and survivor testimony. It provides analytical tools of- and with digital docs-fiction, a hybrid genre that integrates the documentary-, fiction, and experimental aesthetics and ethics to sustain cultural specificity while circumventing political and economic impediments facing Kurdish Yazidi filmmaking.

The portfolio explores memory through gesture, absence, fragmentation, sensing and is developed using practice-based and auto-ethnographic methods that come together in the making of film as a site for knowledge production. This counters linear narration and foregrounds the affective, non-linguistic, and material nature of remembering. Framed by a trauma-informed ethics-of-care, it holds participant dignity, emotional safety, and multiplicity, with an emphasis on cultural sensitivity: and in avoiding re-traumatisation and simplification promotes indirect collaborative storytelling that goes beyond erasure through ambiguity where silence trumps judgment; partial visibility reigns.

The research identifies potentialities for digital docs-fiction in relation to documentary's historical, nostalgic limits and its ongoing promises by emphasising different forms of fictive reconstruction as alternatives, such as sensory abstraction and non-linear temporality. It also highlights trauma's refusal of narrative closure, and reveals embodied witnessing through film and material practices such as ceramic installations against the backdrop of logocentric models of testimony.

The research locates digital docs-fiction at the cut-and-thrust of comparative Holocaust cinema theory, arguing for its critical operation as a mode that remakes or disrupts aesthetic, ethical, and even epistemological conditions built around representing mass violence, where cinema is embodied knowledge, ethical encounter and political resistance.