Helping Others
On the Quiet Courage of the Helping Arts
He sat at the edge of the chair with his hands folded between his knees.
No eye contact.
His file was thicker than many of the books I had read that year.
Aggressive.
Acting out.
Poor impulse control.
Behavioral problems.
The words had already been written before he entered the room.
I remember thinking:
How many times can a human being be described without ever truly being understood?
For a long time he said nothing. The silence filled the room. I allowed it to remain there. After a while he looked up and said quietly:
“You know what the worst part is? Nobody asks who I really am.”
I have carried that sentence with me through an entire professional life.
Because perhaps this is the true center of the helping arts: not techniques, methods, or diagnoses, but the question of how one human being meets another when life has begun to fall apart.
Through many years in social work, teaching, and practical philosophy, I have seen how decisive such encounters can be. Not because helpers save people. We rarely do. But because the way we meet people can make it possible for them to rediscover something of themselves.
Lawrence Shulman wrote about this in The Skills of Helping Individuals, Families, Groups, and Communities. He described helping as something deeper than interventions and procedures. Helping is relational. It is profoundly human.
The older I become, the more I believe this to be true.
When Human Beings Become Cases
Modern helping systems are necessary. Without structures, documentation, laws, and institutions, many people would never receive support at all.
And yet every system carries a danger:
That the human being slowly disappears behind the categories.
Over the course of a long professional life, I have read thousands of reports. Many were thoughtful and professionally sound. Some were even written with warmth and wisdom. But I have also read files in which an entire human life was reduced to symptoms, dysfunctions, and deviations.
There is something strange about such texts.
The more detailed the description becomes, the easier it is for the person to disappear.
Richard Sennett writes that shame can arise when people are defined by others in ways that rob them of parts of their own identity. The individual ceases to be the subject of his or her own life and becomes an object of evaluation.
I believe many helpers underestimate how deeply this can wound a person.
A child repeatedly described as “a problem child.”
A young person reduced to “the addict.”
A woman becoming “the mentally ill patient.”
A human being gradually learning to see themselves through the language of institutions.
Sometimes the worst thing that happens to people is not what they experienced before entering the helping system. Sometimes it is the experience of losing themselves inside it.
That is why helping does not begin with classification.
It begins with presence.
To Be Seen as Human
I remember a woman who came to see me after many years in a violent relationship. She was almost invisible when she entered the room. Her body was tense. Her voice low. Her eyes restless and searching.
She had already met many professionals.
Later she told me that she had often felt examined, assessed, and documented — but rarely truly met.
In the middle of one conversation, she began to cry quietly. Then she said:
“You don’t look at me like I’m a monster.”
It is difficult to describe how powerful such moments can be.
People who live with shame, violence, or repeated failure often carry a deep fear that they will be rejected if others truly see them.
Perhaps one of the most important tasks in helping professions is this: to meet people in a way that allows them to remain human even when life has collapsed around them.
Martin Buber wrote that we can encounter others either as an “It” or as a “Thou.” When the other person becomes an object, something living disappears from the relationship. But when we meet another human being as a “Thou,” a different form of presence emerges.
I believe much of social work stands or falls with this.
Not only what we do.
But how we see.
Silence as a Place of Work
One of the most important things I learned through the years was how to endure silence.
Young helpers are often frightened when silence enters the room. They begin to explain, question, or fill the space with activity. But people carrying deep pain often need time before words can find them.
Shulman writes about the importance of being able to “reach into the silence.”
It is a beautiful expression.
Because silence is not emptiness.
Sometimes silence is full of shame.
Sometimes of fear.
Sometimes of memories that still cannot bear language.
I remember a boy who had witnessed violence against his mother. During our first meetings, he barely spoke. Many would perhaps have interpreted this as resistance.
But I do not think it was resistance.
I think it was protection.
Eventually the words began to come. Not because I found the correct technique, but because his silence was allowed to exist without being pushed away.
The older I become, the more I think genuine help often begins where our own anxiety ends.
When we no longer need to control everything happening in the room.
Controlled Emotional Presence
For many years professionalism was associated with emotional distance. The helper was expected to remain objective, calm, and unaffected.
But people quickly sense the difference between authentic presence and professional performance.
Shulman uses the phrase “controlled emotional involvement.” I have always appreciated that expression because it captures something essential: helping requires humanity, but also responsibility.
Not emotional coldness.
Not limitless emotional fusion.
But a presence capable of remaining close to suffering without fleeing from it.
I have sat in conversations where tears came.
Not because I lost control.
But because human suffering can sometimes become so real that complete emotional distance would itself feel unethical.
Can one cry with another person?
Can one show anger at injustice?
Can one be deeply moved?
I believe the answer is yes — if those emotions serve the other person rather than the helper’s own emotional needs.
There are helpers who hide behind professional language because closeness frightens them. But people who suffer often sense this immediately.
They know the difference between technical competence and genuine presence.
The Quiet Power of the Helper
As the years passed, I became increasingly concerned with power.
Not primarily obvious power. But quiet power.
The power to define.
The power to write reports.
The power to decide who will be believed.
The power to describe another human life.
Sometimes this power is exercised with wisdom. Sometimes without reflection.
I often think about something my mentor, philosopher John Lundstøl, once described as “the bending of humiliation.” Human beings who are repeatedly degraded almost begin to bend physically toward the world. Their gaze lowers. Their voice weakens. The self slowly retreats.
I have seen this bending many times.
In children.
In people struggling with addiction.
In those who have been crushed by life and by systems around them.
That is why dignity is not an abstract philosophical idea in social work. It is something profoundly practical.
It is present in how we speak to people.
How we write about them.
How we use our authority.
Even small actions can either strengthen or weaken a person’s sense of worth.
From Expert to Companion
Earlier forms of social work were strongly influenced by a medical model: assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.
This model contributed important knowledge. But it could also turn the helper into an expert on another person’s life.
And then a danger emerges.
One person knows.
The other is evaluated.
But human beings are not merely problems to be solved. They are lives trying to find meaning under difficult conditions.
An important shift in social work occurred when practitioners began to see individuals within the context of relationships and environments: family, school, work, culture, and society.
This also transforms the role of the helper.
The helper becomes less a judge and more a companion.
I believe this is deeply connected to the hermeneutic understanding of human life. Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that understanding is never detached observation but dialogue. We come to understand through encounter.
The same is true in helping relationships.
No human being can ever be fully understood from a distance.
Resources for Change
One of the most beautiful aspects of Shulman’s work is his belief that people always carry possibilities for change within themselves.
This is not naïve optimism.
Some people are deeply wounded by life. Some carry trauma, grief, and loneliness that never fully disappear.
And yet even among those who have almost lost hope, there often remain small traces of vitality.
I remember a woman who described herself as weak and worthless after years of violence and control. But the more she spoke, the clearer it became that she had survived under nearly impossible conditions.
She had protected her children.
Held her family together.
Found ways to endure.
What she called weakness also contained strength.
Sometimes helping is precisely this: helping people see aspects of themselves that shame has hidden.
Not through empty encouragement.
But through the slow rediscovery of dignity.
Helping in a Fragmented World
We live in a time marked by increasing loneliness, fragmentation, and rootlessness. Families are more fragile. Relationships more unstable. Many young people grow up between competing identities, expectations, and digital realities.
At the same time, helping systems have become increasingly specialized.
One agency handles addiction.
Another mental health.
Another finances.
Another education.
But human beings do not live divided lives.
A child struggling in school may also live with violence at home. A depressed teenager may be trapped in profound loneliness. A person battling addiction may carry grief nobody has ever asked about.
This is why I believe the helping arts of the future must become more holistic again.
Not less professional.
But more human.
We need research.
We need theory.
We need methods.
But we also need wisdom.
And wisdom rarely grows from manuals alone. It grows through encounters with human beings.
“What Do I Do Then?”
In my lectures I often paused at a question many helpers carry silently within themselves:
“What do I do then?”
When the relationship has been established.
When the person genuinely wants help.
When all the methods have been learned.
What does one do then?
I believe this question points toward something fundamental in all helping work: uncertainty.
Because no method can fully predict a human encounter.
Sometimes profound change occurs in a single conversation. Other times one works for months without visible progress.
This requires humility.
The best helpers I have known were rarely the most certain. More often they were people capable of enduring complexity without losing sight of the human being before them.
The older I become, the less I believe in the helper as expert with all the answers.
And the more I believe in the person willing to remain inside the questions together with another human being.
Endings
One of the most underestimated aspects of helping work is endings.
People often seek help during periods of profound vulnerability. Therefore endings can awaken grief, anger, fear, or emptiness.
I remember a young man who said to me on our final day together:
“You’ll probably forget me.”
I answered that some people remain with us throughout life.
And it is true.
Faces, voices, and stories remain.
Perhaps this is also why helpers must care for themselves. Not by becoming emotionally cold, but by finding places where their own vulnerability can also find language.
Because if one carries the suffering of others alone for too long, one may eventually lose the ability to remain close.
A Quiet Ending
When I look back on a long life in helping professions, I think less about systems and more about people.
Children carrying too much alone.
Parents struggling to stay afloat.
Young people convinced their lives were already ruined.
And I think about how fragile the helping arts truly are.
They do not primarily live inside methods.
They live in the way we meet one another.
In the voice that does not judge.
In the silence that is endured.
In the gaze that does not turn away.
People often forget what we said.
But they rarely forget how it felt to sit in the room with us.
Perhaps this is the deepest responsibility of the helping arts:
Not to make another human being feel more alone in the world than they already are.
References
Addams, J. (1910). Twenty years at Hull House. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Scribner. (Original work published 1923)
Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). London, England: Continuum.
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lundstøl, J. (1970). Det myndige menneske. Oslo, Norway: Gyldendal.
Lundstøl, J. (1999). Om å gjøre andre gode. Oslo, Norway: Høgskolen i Oslo.
Marecek, J. (1999). Trauma talk in feminist clinical practice. In S. Lamb (Ed.), New versions of victims: Feminist struggles with the concept (pp. 158–182). New York, NY: New York University Press.
Richmond, M. (1917). Social diagnosis. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Sennett, R. (2003). Respect in a world of inequality. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Shulman, L. (2009). The skills of helping individuals, families, groups, and communities (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
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