Beginning Where the Other Person Is

Kierkegaard and the Secret of the Helping Art

A person comes to us because something in life is no longer working.

It may be a child who refuses to attend school. A parent who has lost custody of a child. A young person who uses drugs. A patient who does not follow treatment. A person living in a relationship they ought to leave but cannot bring themselves to end. An older person who refuses the help that everyone else considers necessary.

The professional often sees quite quickly what ought to change.

The child must return to school. The parent must acknowledge responsibility. The young person must stop using drugs. The patient must follow the advice. The person exposed to violence must leave. The older person must accept help.

The goal may be reasonable. It may be professionally justified and ethically necessary.

And yet the help may fail.

Not because the helper lacks knowledge. Not because the wish to help is insincere. But because the helper begins somewhere other than where the other person actually is.

Søren Kierkegaard formulated this as the secret of the helping art: if we are truly to succeed in leading a person to a particular place, we must first find that person where they are and begin there.

The words seem simple.

In practice, they make some of the most demanding claims that can be made upon anyone who seeks to help.

To find a person where they are, we must be willing to leave the place in which we ourselves feel secure. We must set aside some of our haste, our certainty, and our desire to know the way on the other person’s behalf.

We must attempt to see the world from a place that is not our own.

The Helper Often Knows the Goal Before the Starting Point

Professional help is usually organised around goals.

The problem must be assessed. Needs must be identified. Interventions must be planned. Progress must be documented. The service must be able to show that something has improved.

This is necessary. Without goals, help can become vague, arbitrary, and unaccountable.

But goals can also make us impatient with the person.

We begin to think about where the person should go before we have understood where the person is standing.

The young person who uses drugs is presented with a plan for abstinence. Yet drug use may also be what makes daily life bearable. It may provide community, identity, or temporary relief from memories and distress. If the helper sees only the drug use as the problem, the help may simultaneously try to remove what the young person currently experiences as the only available solution.

The woman exposed to violence is told that she must leave her abusive partner. Yet the relationship may also contain love, financial security, shared children, hope, and fear. She may know that she ought to leave and still experience leaving as impossible.

The older man refuses home care. The helper sees risk, poor nutrition, and danger of falling. The man may see a loss of dignity, strangers entering his home, and yet another sign that his life no longer belongs to him.

The helper may be right about what needs to happen.

But the right goal does not automatically produce the right help.

Before asking how a person should move forward, we must ask what it will cost to leave the place where they currently stand.

Beginning Where the Other Person Is Does Not Mean Remaining There

Kierkegaard’s formulation can be misunderstood.

Beginning where the other person is does not mean that the helper must accept everything. It does not mean that the other person’s understanding is always correct, or that every action must be respected simply because it makes sense to the person.

People can harm themselves and others. Parents can fail children. Violence must be stopped. Children must be protected. Sometimes professionals must act against a person’s wishes.

Beginning where the other person is therefore does not mean remaining where they are.

It means taking the other person’s reality as the point of departure, even when the goal is change.

The professional may say:

“I understand that alcohol helps you get through the night. At the same time, I can see that it is harming your body and your relationship with your children.”

“I understand that you love him. At the same time, the violence is unacceptable, and you need protection.”

“I understand that you do not want strangers in your home. At the same time, I am concerned that you are not getting enough to eat.”

Understanding does not abolish responsibility.

But it changes the way responsibility is exercised.

When the helper recognises the meaning of what must change, help can become less humiliating. The other person need not be portrayed as irrational, unmotivated, or difficult simply because change does not occur at the pace the system desires.

First Understanding What the Other Person Understands

Kierkegaard writes about finding a person where they are. This involves more than knowing the person’s address, diagnosis, or social circumstances.

We must try to understand how the person understands their own life.

What does the person experience as the problem?

What does the person experience as a solution?

What do they fear losing?

What do they hope for?

What has previous help meant?

What experiences have taught them to trust or distrust others?

Two people may occupy the same outward situation and experience it entirely differently.

Two young people may both have left school. One may be afraid of failure. Another may experience school as meaningless. A third may be exhausted by caregiving responsibilities at home. A fourth may have been bullied and experience absence as self-protection.

If all of them are met with the same explanation and the same intervention, help does not begin where they are.

It begins where the category says they are.

Professional knowledge needs categories. Without concepts and patterns, experience becomes unmanageable. But the category must never become more important than the person.

A diagnosis may say something true and still fail to explain what the diagnosis means in this particular life.

The Hidden Power of Help

The person who helps has power.

This is also true when help is offered with warmth and good intentions.

The helper often has access to knowledge, services, money, documents, and decision-making spaces that the other person does not possess. The professional’s words are written into journals and reports. Assessments may influence treatment, financial support, custody of children, and access to housing.

Power also lies in the right to define the problem.

The professional may say that the client lacks insight, is insufficiently motivated, resists treatment, or refuses to cooperate. Such descriptions may be relevant. But they may also conceal the fact that the client understands the situation differently from the helper.

The person who does not want what the service offers may be understood as the obstacle to help itself.

The professional’s plan then becomes the measure of the other person’s rationality.

Beginning where the other person is therefore requires an awareness of power.

The helper must ask:

Who has defined the problem?

Who has decided the goal?

What happens if the person says no?

What genuine choices exist?

Is participation real, or may the other person choose only between alternatives we have already determined?

Help does not become free from power because we call it help.

It becomes ethical only when the helper takes responsibility for how power operates.

The Humiliation That May Be Contained in Receiving Help

Needing help can be deeply vulnerable.

A person may have to tell strangers about finances, illness, drug use, violence, sexuality, neglect, or psychological distress. They may have to answer questions that the helper would never accept from a stranger.

The person seeking help often has to display what is not working.

This may create shame.

Professional encounters can intensify this shame when the helper arrives with a ready-made understanding and a ready-made solution. The other person becomes the one who lacks something. The helper becomes the one who knows.

Even well-intentioned advice may be experienced as a reminder of inadequacy.

“You just need to set boundaries.”

“You need to pull yourself together.”

“You need to understand that this is not good for you.”

“You need to become more motivated.”

Such statements may be factually correct and humanly useless.

They tell the other person that the helper already stands at the place the person ought to have reached.

Kierkegaard’s helping art begins with a different movement. The person who wishes to help must first bend down to the place where the other is.

Not in order to make themselves smaller than they are.

But in order not to make the other person smaller than they are.

Humility consists in acknowledging that the professional does not fully know the life in which the help is meant to work.

Entering Some Way into the Other Person’s World

Beginning where the other person is requires empathy, but empathy is not the same as believing that we know how the other feels.

The statement “I know exactly how you feel” may be intended as comfort. But it may also close the conversation.

We never know completely.

Even when we have experienced something similar, we have experienced it within another life, another body, another history, and other relationships.

The hermeneutic attitude is therefore more cautious:

“I am trying to understand.”

“This is how I understand what you are saying. Have I understood correctly?”

“What is it that I am not seeing?”

The person who enters the other’s world must also allow it to remain the other’s world.

We should not take over the story. We should not fill it with our own experiences. Nor should we make the stranger’s life understandable only by translating it into something we already know.

Some things must remain unfamiliar long enough to teach us something.

Motivation or Meaning?

Professionals often speak about motivation.

The client is motivated or unmotivated. The patient is ready for change or not ready. The young person is willing to cooperate or unwilling to cooperate.

The concept of motivation can be useful. But it may also conceal another question:

Does the proposed change make sense to the person?

A person may want a better life and still have little motivation for the intervention being offered. A young person may want employment but not believe that the course will help. A parent may want better contact with a child but experience parental guidance as humiliating. A patient may want to recover but fear the side effects of treatment.

Lack of motivation is not always lack of will.

It may be lack of trust.

It may reflect experience of failed help.

It may be fear of loss.

It may be that the goal has been formulated in language that does not belong to the other person.

Before trying to motivate a person, we should therefore ask what already matters to them.

Change gains strength when it is connected to something the person themselves wishes to protect, regain, or become capable of.

Helping Is Not Transporting the Other Person Like an Object

Kierkegaard writes about leading a person to a particular place. But a human being cannot be led like an object.

Help is not transportation.

We cannot lift the other person out of one life and place them where we think it would be best. Even when we use power, the person must later continue living in the life that has been changed.

Lasting change therefore requires that the other person, in some way, becomes a subject in their own movement.

This is the difference between doing something to a person and doing something with them.

Social work, treatment, and education can easily become governed by an intervention logic. The professional assesses, evaluates, sets goals, and follows up. The person becomes the recipient of a plan.

Yet the deepest question of helping is not only:

What should we do about the problem?

It is also:

How can this person gain greater capacity to act in their own life?

Help does not fully succeed if it solves a problem while simultaneously making the person more dependent, silent, or alienated from themselves.

Good help seeks to restore agency.

When the Helper Moves Too Quickly

Helpers may be under pressure to move quickly.

Not necessarily because they are impatient people, but because the system is organised around progress. Goals, change, and results are expected.

The other person may need something different.

A person in crisis may first need to experience safety before considering solutions. Someone who has lived with violence for a long time may need to relearn trust in their own judgement. A young person who has met many helpers may need to see that this adult will actually remain.

When the helper moves too quickly, the other person may experience the help as passing them by.

Advice comes before trust.

The plan comes before the story.

The goal comes before the person.

It may look like resistance when the person does not follow.

But perhaps the distance between them has become too great.

Beginning where the other person is also concerns pace.

The professional must be able to distinguish between necessary action and unnecessary haste.

Sometimes it is ethically right to intervene quickly. At other times, waiting is part of the work.

Remaining Close Without Remaining There Forever

The helper should not settle permanently in the other person’s powerlessness.

Empathy can become stagnation if it does not also open towards possibility.

It is possible to understand so much that one ceases to make demands. The young person’s difficult history becomes an explanation for why nothing can be expected. The parent’s own childhood becomes a reason to avoid responsibility. The patient’s fear leads to the withdrawal of every challenge.

Then understanding may become as limiting as condemnation.

Beginning where the other person is also means believing that the person can move.

The helper must hold together two truths:

This person has good reasons for being where they are.

And this person is more than the place they currently occupy.

The professional must be able to recognise suffering without turning it into identity. To see limitations without reducing the person to them. To understand the past without turning it into destiny.

Hope is not the denial of reality.

It is the refusal to make today’s reality the only possible one.

The Ethics of Making Demands

Help sometimes involves making demands.

Children need parents who take responsibility. Treatment requires participation. Agreements must be kept. Violence cannot be accepted. The helper cannot always be satisfied with understanding.

But demands can be made in different ways.

They can be made from above, as a judgement:

“If you really cared, you would change.”

Or they can be made from within understanding:

“I can see how difficult this is for you. At the same time, your child must be safe.”

The second demand is not weaker.

It is often stronger because it does not need to humiliate the person in order to be clear.

Kierkegaard’s helping art is not sentimental. It does not release the person from responsibility. It asks how responsibility can be communicated in a way that still allows the other person to encounter it as an acting human being.

A demand that destroys dignity may make change more difficult.

A demand that recognises both responsibility and human worth may open a path.

When Help Must Be Given Against the Other Person’s Will

Some situations make Kierkegaard’s idea particularly difficult.

A child may need to be removed from parental care. A seriously ill person may need treatment without understanding the need for it. A person may pose a danger to themselves or others.

In such situations, help cannot wait for full agreement.

Yet the requirement to begin where the other person is does not disappear.

Even coercion can be exercised in ways that are more or less humiliating. Even a decision the person opposes can be explained respectfully. The other person can receive information, be given an opportunity to speak, and influence what can still be influenced.

The professional should be honest:

“This is a decision we are making because we believe the child is not safe.”

“I know that you disagree.”

“I still want to hear how you experience this.”

Listening does not mean that the decision is withdrawn.

It means that the person is not made invisible within it.

The necessity of power never releases the professional from responsibility for how power is used.

The Help That Suits the Helper

Helpers may be inclined to offer the kind of help they themselves are skilled at providing.

The person who is good at conversation offers conversation. The person who works within a programme offers the programme. The person who knows a particular theory sees the world through that theory.

This is understandable. No one can work without methods and professional frameworks.

But it may lead to the person having to adapt to the help rather than the help adapting to the person.

When the intervention does not work, the conclusion may be that the client was not motivated or receptive.

Kierkegaard’s question is more uncomfortable:

Was this truly help from the place where the other person was?

Or was it help from the place where the helper stood?

The professional must be able to acknowledge that a good intervention may be wrong for this person, at this time, and in this situation.

Professional humility also involves being able to let go of one’s preferred method.

The Helper’s Need to Succeed

There is also a personal dimension to helping work.

Helpers want to make a difference. We want to see that our efforts work. We want to experience ourselves as useful.

There is nothing wrong with this. But the helper’s need to succeed can become a hidden force within the relationship.

When the other person does not change, the helper may experience powerlessness, irritation, or disappointment. The client becomes the person who refuses to be helped.

We may then begin to pressure, withdraw, or protect ourselves through professional explanations.

Perhaps the person was not ready.

Perhaps they lacked insight.

Perhaps nothing could be done.

Sometimes this is true.

At other times, the helper must ask whether the need to succeed made it difficult to follow the other person’s pace and path.

The other person does not owe us a change that proves that we were good helpers.

The value of help cannot always be measured by the outcome we hoped for.

Sometimes the most important thing is that the person encountered one human being who did not abandon dignity, even though life did not change as we wished.

Beginning Again

It is possible to have begun in the wrong place.

A relationship may have become locked. The professional may have been too quick, too certain, or too controlling. The other person has withdrawn.

The helper may then attempt to begin again.

This sometimes requires a simple acknowledgement:

“I think I have been more concerned with the plan than with how this feels for you.”

“I think I moved too quickly.”

“I may have misunderstood you.”

Such words can be difficult for professionals. We fear that they may weaken trust or authority.

They often do the opposite.

When the helper can acknowledge an error without placing the responsibility on the other person, the relationship may once again become a place of truth.

Professional authority does not consist in being infallible.

It also consists in being able to correct oneself.

The Secret of the Helping Art

Kierkegaard called this a secret.

Perhaps because it is easy to say and difficult to live.

The person who wishes to help must know something. But knowledge must not make the helper superior.

The person who wishes to help must have a goal. But the goal must not make the other person’s starting point invisible.

The person who wishes to help must be able to act. But action must not deprive the other person of the possibility of becoming a subject in their own life.

The person who wishes to help must be able to remain close to powerlessness without immediately solving it.

And the person who wishes to help must be willing to be changed by the encounter.

Beginning where the other person is does not mean abandoning professional expertise.

It means making professional expertise human.

It means using knowledge in a form that the other person can encounter without first having to give up themselves.

The secret of the helping art may therefore not be a method.

It is an attitude.

A willingness to stand beside the person before pointing out the road.

A willingness to ask before answering.

A willingness to understand what holds the person in place before asking them to move.

And a humble recognition that the path which appears short from the helper’s position may be long and dangerous from the place where the other person stands.

We cannot walk the entire path for another human being.

But we can try to find them where they are.

We can remain there long enough for the way forward to become visible.

Not only to the helper.

But to the person who must walk it.