Social Work at the Edge of Existence
From Dissertation to Essay
Social work often begins where ordinary answers no longer reach far enough.
A person has lost trust in others.
A child has been betrayed by those who were supposed to protect them.
A body is experienced as alien or unclean.
A family has fallen apart.
A person feels ashamed not only of something that happened, but of the person they believe themselves to be.
There is no simple method that can undo these experiences. No conversation can return a person to life as it was before. No professional can promise that the pain will disappear.
Yet this is precisely where social work has its task.
Not because the social worker possesses all the answers.
But because no person should have to stand alone when the answers are absent.
At the Edge
In the introduction to my doctoral dissertation, I wrote that social work encounters people at the edge of existence.
By this, I did not mean a particular geographical or institutional place. The edge of existence arises where a person’s fundamental relationship with themselves, with others, and with the world is threatened.
It may occur when trust collapses.
When self-worth disappears.
When the body no longer feels like one’s own.
When the past fills the whole present.
When the hope of another future becomes difficult to imagine.
The edge is not necessarily visible from the outside. A person may go to work, care for a family, and participate in everyday life while at the same time living close to an inner abyss.
Social work can therefore never concern only what can be recorded.
Housing.
Income.
Diagnosis.
Capacity for work.
Ability to provide care.
All of these are important. People need material conditions, rights, and concrete services. But behind the visible problems, another question is often present:
Do I still have a place among other human beings?
The Person Who Comes for Help
The professional often encounters the other person through a defined problem.
An application.
A referral.
A report of concern.
A diagnosis.
A need for assistance.
To some extent, this is necessary. Institutions need categories in order to organise their work and distribute responsibility.
But the category is never the person.
The person who comes is not merely “the survivor of abuse,” “the traumatised person,” “the difficult mother,” “the vulnerable child,” or “the client with shame-related difficulties.”
Behind the description is a lived life.
A person with memories, relationships, hopes, contradictions, and experiences that do not fit into the boxes of a case record.
Social work at the edge of existence begins when the helper manages to hold on to both truths:
The problem must be taken seriously.
The person is more than the problem.
Beginning Where the Other Person Is
One thought accompanied me throughout the work on the dissertation: If we are truly to succeed in helping another person, we must first find them where they are.
The thought is associated with Kierkegaard, but it is also a fundamental insight within practical social work.
Beginning where the other person is does not mean that the helper must agree with everything the person says or does. Nor does it mean affirming self-contempt, hopelessness, or destructive actions.
It means attempting to understand what the world looks like from the other person’s position.
What does the silence protect?
Why does help feel threatening?
What has mistrust learned from earlier experiences?
Why does the body feel dangerous?
What is at stake if the person tells?
Without this understanding, help may become something carried out upon the other person.
The intervention may be professionally correct and still be experienced as a new violation.
The person is once again explained, assessed, and acted upon without being allowed to participate in the understanding of their own life.
Beginning where the other person is therefore requires more than empathy.
It requires the helper, for a time, to set aside their own pace, solution, and story.
No Collection of Ready-Made Answers
Professional social work needs knowledge.
It needs research, legislation, methods, and experience. Those who work with children, violence, abuse, poverty, or mental suffering cannot rely upon good intentions alone.
But professional knowledge does not provide a finished answer to what should be done in every individual encounter.
Human life is too complex.
Two people may have experienced something that is described from the outside by the same term, yet require entirely different forms of help. One needs to speak. Another needs no one to demand more words. One needs closeness. Another needs distance. One wants contact with the family. Another needs protection from it.
Social work cannot therefore be reduced to a collection of answers applied to increasingly difficult situations.
Knowledge must be interpreted.
It must be tested against the concrete situation.
It must be adapted to the person actually sitting in the room.
This is where practical wisdom begins.
Practical Wisdom
Practical wisdom is not the same as following one’s intuition.
Nor is it an excuse for acting without professional justification.
Practical wisdom arises in the encounter between knowledge, experience, ethics, and attentiveness to the concrete situation.
It does not ask only:
Which method is recommended?
It also asks:
What is good and right to do for this person, at this time, under these circumstances?
Sometimes this means acting quickly.
A child must be protected.
A danger must be stopped.
A right must be secured.
At other times, it means waiting.
Not passively, but attentively.
Allowing the words to come at their own pace.
Enduring the fact that trust cannot be demanded.
Understanding that what appears from the outside as resistance may be necessary protection.
No rule can tell us in advance exactly when to act and when to wait.
It must be decided within the situation.
Social work is therefore not only the application of knowledge.
It is also judgement.
A Moral Profession
Social work is a moral profession because it intervenes in the lives of other human beings.
Social workers assess care.
Distribute benefits.
Write reports.
Recommend measures.
Conduct conversations that may change how a person understands themselves.
They participate in decisions concerning where children will live, what assistance families will receive, and which demands will be placed upon them.
None of this can be value-neutral.
But there is a decisive difference between a moral voice and a moralising voice.
The moralising voice places the helper above the other person.
It knows in advance who the person is and how they should live.
It distributes shame.
The moral voice does something else.
It asks who possesses power.
Who bears the consequences.
Who is heard.
Who is denied their rights.
Where responsibility actually belongs.
A moral voice may be clear without humiliating.
It can say that an action was a violation without reducing the whole person to that action.
It can protect the child, hold the adult responsible, and at the same time refuse to use shame as an instrument.
Help Can Itself Create Shame
It is easy to think that shame exists only within the person seeking help.
But institutions can also produce shame.
It may happen in a waiting room.
In a form.
In a conversation where the person must explain their distress yet again.
In a letter that reduces a lived life to a code or the language of an administrative decision.
In a professional tone that tells the other person that the one who possesses knowledge sits on one side of the table, while the person who must be explained sits on the other.
The helper may also create shame through the gaze.
Impatience.
Surprise.
The rapid explanation.
The need to bring the whole story into the open before the person is ready.
This does not mean that the social worker can avoid every situation in which a person experiences discomfort or shame. Some necessary questions are difficult. Some boundaries must be set. Some actions must be confronted.
But the helper must ask:
Is this pain a consequence of something necessary being said?
Or am I adding a new humiliation?
The difference may be difficult to recognise.
The helper therefore needs self-knowledge.
The Helper’s Self-Knowledge
No social worker encounters the other person with a neutral gaze.
We carry our own history.
Our values.
Our fears.
Our ideas about the good life.
Our experiences of guilt, power, closeness, and distance.
This is not a flaw that education can remove. It is part of being human.
But what we do not recognise within ourselves may begin to govern the encounter without our noticing.
The person who cannot endure powerlessness may act too quickly.
The person who fears strong emotions may make the conversation technical.
The person who needs to be regarded as helpful may take over the other person’s responsibility.
The person who feels rejected may describe mistrust as resistance.
Self-knowledge is therefore not a private addition to professionalism.
It is an ethical necessity.
The helper must continually ask:
What is happening within me in this encounter?
What do I want the other person to do—and why?
Am I following the person’s needs, or my own need for progress, order, or gratitude?
From I–It to I–Thou
Martin Buber’s distinction between I–It and I–Thou held a central place in the dissertation.
We cannot avoid the I–It relationship.
Professional work requires us to examine, categorise, plan, and assess. To some extent, the other person will become an object of professional knowledge.
The problem arises when this becomes the whole encounter.
When the diagnosis conceals the person.
When the case replaces the life.
When the helper looks for features that fit the theory, but no longer allows themselves to be surprised by the other person.
The I–Thou encounter does not abolish professionalism.
It changes the way professionalism is carried.
The other person is not met only as someone who has a problem, but as a human being who interprets, acts, and responds.
A Thou can never be fully mastered.
It cannot be reduced to our understanding.
The dialogical encounter therefore also involves a risk for the helper.
The other person may contradict us.
Reject our advice.
See the situation differently.
And perhaps change our own understanding.
Allowing Oneself to Be Changed
We often speak about how social work should change people.
We speak less often about how the encounter also changes the helper.
Through the interviews in the doctoral research, I was brought into experiences I could not encounter without being affected myself. The nineteen people who shared their stories did not merely provide material for analysis. They challenged my understanding of shame, guilt, the body, relationships, and professional responsibility.
To understand another person does not mean taking over their experience.
But genuine understanding rarely leaves the helper entirely unchanged.
This is not a problem that must be removed in order for the work to become scientific or professional. It is a reminder that the encounter has moral significance.
When a person entrusts us with their story, we do not merely receive information.
We receive a responsibility.
What does this knowledge do to the way we meet the next person?
From Exclusion to Inclusion
The dissertation described a negative movement:
Violation leads to shame.
Shame leads to negative self-evaluation.
The person withdraws.
Feelings are concealed.
Trust becomes difficult.
The other person is kept at a distance.
In this way, shame may create a spiral of exclusion and suffering.
But the material also revealed a movement in the opposite direction.
When a person is met with respect and recognition, they may gradually dare to reveal more of themselves. Feelings may be given language. Trust may grow. New experiences may challenge the old understanding of the self.
The person may begin to see themselves through a less condemning gaze.
This does not happen because the helper tells them who they really are.
It happens because the relationship provides experiences that make another understanding possible.
I told you, and you did not leave.
I set a boundary, and you respected it.
I disagreed, and I did not lose my place.
I showed shame, and you did not meet me with contempt.
Inclusion then becomes more than being admitted to a service or a community.
It becomes the experience of being present without having to conceal one’s whole self.
Taking Oneself Back
A central expression in the concluding part of the dissertation was taking oneself back.
This may sound as though there is an original, undamaged self that simply has to be rediscovered.
That is not necessarily the case.
A person rarely returns to who they were before the violation. Life cannot be rewound.
Taking oneself back means instead reclaiming the right to participate in one’s own life.
The right to the body.
The voice.
The boundaries.
The story.
The choices.
The future.
It means being able to say:
This happened to me, but it is not the whole of me.
I carried the shame, but the guilt was not mine.
I need help, but my life still belongs to me.
The helper cannot do this on behalf of the other person.
No one can take another person’s self back for them.
But social work can contribute to relationships in which the person once again dares to step forward as a subject.
Not only as a recipient.
Not as an object of intervention.
But as a participant and co-creator.
Rights and Recognition
Recognition is not only a matter of the warm encounter between two people.
It also has a legal and social dimension.
A person who is listened to with kindness but denied necessary rights is not fully recognised.
Children do not need only caring conversations. They need protection.
People living in poverty do not need only understanding. They need material conditions that make a dignified life possible.
A person subjected to violence does not need only support to find inner strength. She may need housing, financial security, and legal assistance.
Social work must therefore hold the personal and the social together.
Shame may be experienced deep within the self, but it is often created and reinforced by social conditions:
Poverty.
Exclusion.
Stigmatisation.
Lack of rights.
Institutions that do not listen.
Recognition without justice may become kind words without effect.
Justice without recognition may become correct administration without a human encounter.
Social work needs both.
Making Life Possible
The helper cannot rescue another person from the whole of their history.
Cannot promise healing.
Cannot remove the loss.
Cannot guarantee that trust will never again be broken.
Perhaps the professional’s task can therefore be described more modestly:
To make life a little more possible.
To create a space where the person can breathe.
To ensure that a child does not stand alone.
To help make a right real.
To carry hope when the other person is temporarily unable to carry it themselves.
To remain long enough for a person to experience that not all relationships end in betrayal.
This may seem small compared with the extent of the suffering.
But sometimes the small thing is decisive.
A person does not always need someone who can show the entire way.
They may need someone who stands with them at the beginning.
Not Turning the Gaze Away
Throughout this series, we have followed shame in many forms.
It engulfs the whole person.
It lives in the gaze of the other.
It makes the person hide.
It takes away language.
Destroys trust.
Makes the body alien.
Places guilt upon the child.
Passes accusation on to the mother.
But we have also followed the movements in the opposite direction:
The words that return.
The gaze that does not condemn.
The trust that slowly grows.
The body that may again be experienced as one’s own.
The past that finds a place without having the final word.
The person who once again dares to act.
At the centre of these movements is the encounter with the other.
Not because another person alone can heal us.
But because shame that arose and was maintained in relationships also needs relational experiences that contradict it.
Social work at the edge of existence therefore requires a gaze that does not turn away.
Not a limitless gaze.
Not a gaze that intrudes and demands that everything become visible.
But a gaze capable of seeing suffering without turning the person into the suffering.
A Voice Without Taking Over
In my doctoral dissertation, I wanted to write with a moral voice without becoming moralising.
That intention remains after this new series.
Giving voice to experiences does not mean speaking on behalf of people who can speak for themselves. Nor does it mean turning their lives into examples for our own philosophical reflections.
The task is to listen.
To treat what is told with care.
To make injustice visible without exposing the person who was subjected to it.
To allow knowledge to lead to responsibility, not to renewed shame.
The nineteen people who participated in the dissertation research spoke of experiences that had largely remained hidden from others. Their stories made it possible to investigate shame as more than an abstract concept. They showed how shame may permeate the relationship with the body, family, sexuality, self, and society. They also showed that recognition, respect, and new relational experiences may open another path.
The knowledge therefore does not belong to the researcher alone.
It arose in the encounters.
Social Work as Humanism
At the edge of existence, social work is confronted with its fundamental view of the human being.
Do we believe that the person is primarily the sum of their problems?
That life can be explained through the diagnosis, the case, or the action?
Or do we believe that a human being is always more than we are currently able to understand?
Humanistic social work does not begin with a romantic belief that every problem can be solved.
It begins with the conviction that human dignity is not abolished by suffering, powerlessness, or failure.
The violated person still possesses dignity.
The person who needs help still possesses freedom.
The person who has committed an injustice remains responsible precisely because they remain an acting human being.
Humanism therefore does not reveal itself through the absence of boundaries and demands.
It reveals itself in the way boundaries are set and responsibility is placed.
Without humiliation.
Without reduction.
Without forgetting that the other is a Thou.
At the Conclusion
This series began when I returned to an old text.
The doctoral dissertation was completed in 2009. It was submitted, defended, and placed in the library. But the questions were not finished.
What happens when shame becomes a judgement upon the whole person?
How can the body carry a story for which words have found no room?
Why is the child given guilt for the adult’s action?
What does it mean to be met with recognition?
And what can social work do when nothing can be undone?
Through fifteen essays, I have attempted to bring these questions out of the scientific architecture of the dissertation and give them a freer space.
Not in order to simplify what is difficult.
But to come closer to the human concerns that were always the true subject of the dissertation.
At the edge of existence, there is no final answer.
There is an encounter.
A person who suffers.
Another who dares to remain.
Between them, something may arise that no method can guarantee:
A beginning trust.
A word.
A boundary that is respected.
A new experience.
A small piece of future.
Perhaps this is social work’s most modest and at the same time most demanding task:
Not to take over life.
Not to promise that everything will turn out well.
But to meet a human being with knowledge, practical wisdom, respect, and recognition—and thereby contribute to making life possible again.
Perhaps this is social work’s most modest and at the same time most demanding task:
Not to take over life.
Not to promise that everything will turn out well.
But to meet a human being with knowledge, practical wisdom, respect, and recognition
—and thereby contribute to making life possible again.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This is the fifteenth and concluding essay in the series “From Dissertation to Essay.” The essay is based particularly on the introduction to the doctoral dissertation and its concluding discussions of social work: exclusion and inclusion, negative and positive self-evaluation, taking oneself back, practical wisdom, self-knowledge, respect, and recognition. The dissertation concludes that help must begin where the other person is, support their struggle for respect and recognition, build trusting relationships, and open possibilities for new identities through intersubjective encounters in which life stories are received with dignity: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. NTNU.
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