Trust Is Not Simply Something We Have
On Kristine Lauve Steensen’s Scholarly Article as Practical-Pedagogical Insight
Some scholarly articles explain a phenomenon from the outside. They define, delimit, analyze, and conclude. Other articles do something more demanding. They allow the author herself to step into the field being studied. Not in order to make the text private, but in order to make the knowledge more truthful.
Kristine Lauve Steensen’s peer-reviewed article in Norsk Gestalttidsskrift, “‘Trust Is for the Privileged’ – An Autoethnographic Study of Trust in Encounters with People with Substance Use Problems,” belongs to this latter kind. She examines trust through her own experiences as project leader for a grief-group initiative at Huset Oslo, using autoethnographic method. The article is clearly situated within a scholarly landscape: Gestalt therapy, dialogical philosophy, trauma theory, stigma, and relational ethics. Yet what makes the text especially strong is that she does not allow theory to remain at a safe distance from life. She lets theory encounter the body, shame, unease, and the human being standing before her.
This is where the article gains its practical-pedagogical significance.
For what does it really mean to create trust?
In many professional contexts, we speak of trust as if it were a method. We must “build trust.” We must “create safety.” We must “meet the client where he is.” All of this is true enough. But such formulations can also become too easy. They may give the impression that trust is something the professional can offer the other, almost like a room, a conversation, or an intervention.
Kristine’s article shows something more uncomfortable and more true: trust is not only something we give. Trust is also something by which we ourselves must be examined.
She describes how, on her way into Huset Oslo, she feels her body react: unease, tightness in the chest, coldness along the spine, uncertainty, and the desire to turn back. It is a powerful opening because it does not embellish the helper’s role. She does not enter as the finished, secure, prejudice-free professional. She enters as a human being, shaped by society, gender, class, language, experience, and imagination. She wants to meet others as equals, yet at the same time discovers an impulse to keep her distance.
It is precisely this discovery that makes the article pedagogically important. It teaches us that professional development is not primarily about formulating the correct attitudes in one’s head. It is about daring to discover how attitudes, fear, and social power structures are already held in the body.
I recognize this from social work, child welfare, therapy, supervision, and teaching. The decisive moments often come before method. They come in the small movement of the body, in the need to withdraw, in the quick assessment of the other, in the almost invisible movement by which a human being becomes a “case,” a “service user,” an “addict,” a “difficult client,” or someone who “does not fit in.”
Kristine questions precisely the term “people with substance use problems.” Although the expression is more dignified than older and more stigmatizing labels, she shows how even such categories can gather people under a single characteristic and make the life story smaller than the problem. Language then becomes more than descriptive. It becomes formative. It can help create distance between “us” and “them.”
This is a core point in practical pedagogy: our language teaches us. The words we use about other people shape how we see them. And how we see them shapes how we meet them.
Here, too, lies the ethical weight of the article. It does not merely state that people with substance use problems are stigmatized. It asks: How does this stigmatization live in me? How do I myself become part of the field I wish to change? How can I work for trust when my own body is already marked by distance?
That is a courageous question. Not because it is confessional, but because it is professionally responsible.
In the article, Kristine draws on Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy. Buber distinguishes between I–Thou and I–It. In the I–It relation, I observe the other from a distance. I analyze, assess, and place. In the I–Thou relation, I enter into an encounter in which the other is not first and foremost an object of my understanding, but a human being who may also change me. Kristine uses this to understand trust as something bodily and interpersonal, not merely as a system or a social contract.
This is beautiful, but also demanding. In professional work, we need the I–It. We need concepts, assessments, systems, reports, and interventions. But if the I–It becomes dominant, we lose sight of the human being. The helper may then become an expert at a distance. The other may be defined before he or she has truly been met.
Kristine’s text reminds us that all genuine pedagogy, all genuine help, and all genuine therapy must preserve the possibility of I–Thou. Not as sentimentality. Not as warm words. But as a bodily, ethical, and practical openness to the fact that the other is always more than my category.
The strongest moment in the article is the encounter with the man who tells her about his life. She thanks him for his trust. He answers: “Trust is for the privileged.” This sentence carries the whole article. It pulls trust out of professional self-evidence. It shows that trust is not equally distributed. Some people have lived lives in which it has been reasonable to trust. Others have lived lives in which trust may be dangerous, costly, or unrealistic.
For a practitioner, this is a necessary lesson. We cannot demand trust from people who have good reasons not to have it. We cannot turn mistrust into an individual problem located in the other. Sometimes mistrust is a form of life experience. Sometimes it is wisdom. Sometimes it is the body’s memory.
The task of the helper, then, is not to persuade the other into trust, but to become someone who may, slowly and without demand, prove worthy of it.
Toward the end of the narrative, the man’s head falls heavily against her shoulder. She adjusts herself carefully so that she can support him. She drinks cold coffee and feels relieved that she no longer needs to say anything. She can simply be. This small moment may be the deepest pedagogical point in the article. For here trust does not arise through explanation, method, or intervention. It arises in a quiet bodily situation where one person allows himself to be supported, and the other is able to remain as support.
It is not spectacular. It is not easily measurable. But much professional work lives precisely from such moments.
Kristine’s article shows that trust cannot be reduced to technique. Trust is a practice. It requires self-insight, sensitivity, theory, ethical responsibility, and the capacity to be disturbed in one’s own self-image. It requires that the helper not only asks: Who is the other? But also: Who do I become in the encounter with the other?
This is why the article is not only about the field of substance use. It concerns all professions in which human beings meet other human beings under asymmetrical conditions. It concerns social work, child welfare, therapy, education, health care, and care work. It concerns the difficult art of meeting the other without making that person smaller than their life.
As a father, I read the text with pride. As a scholar and practitioner, I read it with respect. As a practical-pedagogical human being, I read it as a reminder: the good helper is not the one who is free from prejudice, unease, or distance. The good helper is the one who dares to discover these things within herself, examine them professionally and ethically, and still remain in the encounter.
Perhaps that is where trust begins.
Not in saying the right words.
But in the other person sensing, for a brief moment: here is a human being who does not flee.
Reference
Perhaps that is where trust begins.
Not in saying the right words.
But in the other person sensing, for a brief moment: here is a human being who does not flee.
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