Standing in the Hallway

On the Threshold of Shame

The person who comes seeking help does not necessarily enter the room.

They remain standing in the hallway.

Not because the door is closed. Not because anyone has asked them to wait. The door to the living room is open, and the people inside know that someone is expected. Yet the person seeking help remains on the threshold. There, it is possible to be present without becoming fully visible.

In extensive interview material from a Norwegian support centre for survivors of incest and sexual abuse, several staff members describe this as a recognisable pattern. New users may remain in the hallway because they do not want others to see them. They experience themselves as ugly, repulsive or dirty. This is not how others see them. But it is how they imagine themselves being seen.

Shame has already entered the room before the person dares to do so.

A threshold between two worlds

A hallway is normally a place we pass through. It is not a destination, merely a connection between rooms. But for someone who feels ashamed, the hallway can become a temporary place of refuge. It lies between concealment and visibility, between isolation outside and community within.

Entering the living room involves more than moving one’s body a few metres. It means stepping into the gaze of others. The survivor does not know what those gazes will discover. Perhaps they will see the entire history. Perhaps they will see what the person experiences as unclean. Perhaps they will understand why this particular individual has sought help at a centre for survivors of incest.

Shame does not merely say: The others can see me.

It says: The others will see what I really am.

The threshold therefore becomes existential. On one side is the desire to be understood. On the other is the fear that understanding will confirm the worst image one has of oneself.

The person who remains in the hallway is not necessarily rejecting help. Perhaps standing there is their first attempt to approach it.

The body protects what words cannot yet protect

When the person eventually enters the counselling room, the threshold does not disappear. It moves into the room with them.

Some sit with a cushion held in front of their stomach. Others wrap themselves in a blanket, let their hair cover their face or fix their gaze on the floor. Their feet move restlessly. Their shoes must constantly be adjusted. A set of keys turns around and around in their hands.

From the outside, such movements may look like anxiety, avoidance or lack of engagement. But in the material, they also appear as forms of protection. The body is doing something necessary while the person attempts to remain in a situation experienced as threatening.

The cushion is not merely a cushion. It creates a boundary between me and you.

The keys are not merely something to fidget with. They give the hands a task when the emotions become too powerful.

The hair falling across the face makes it possible to remain in the room without becoming fully visible.

These are not necessarily obstacles that the helper should immediately remove. They may be the temporary conditions that make conversation possible. A person whose boundaries have been violated does not need another human being to tear away their protection in the name of safety.

One helper therefore explains that, at first, the conversation may take place through a cushion. The cushion is allowed to remain. The blanket may stay wrapped around the body. The gaze may remain lowered. Only when safety has been given time to grow can something begin to change.

The feet become calmer. The keys are put down. The hair is brushed aside. The cushion is lowered slightly.

The change may be seen before it can be explained.

When the voice does not come

Some people do not even reach the hallway. They telephone the centre but say nothing when the call is answered.

The silence may continue. The helper does not know who has called or whether the person is still listening. But instead of demanding that the caller speak, the helper tries to create a simpler form of contact: If you are there, press one of the buttons.

A beep is heard through the telephone.

It is not a story. It is not an explanation. But it is a beginning: I am here.

The conversation can continue with one or two keystrokes. The helper speaks, and the other person responds with sounds from the telephone. The caller is allowed to be present without stating their name and without revealing the voice that might disclose gender, age, fear or tears.

Others find a way through letters, email or text messages. One participant explains that sending an email is easier than writing a letter. A letter can be torn up before it is posted. An email can be sent before shame has time to withdraw the words. Another person can barely speak face to face but gradually manages to formulate complete sentences in text messages.

There are therefore other thresholds besides the physical doorway. There is a threshold between silence and speech, between thought and writing, between composing the words and allowing another person to read them.

The art of helping may consist in finding the smallest opening through which contact becomes possible.

The dangerous story

It is tempting to think that the person who finally begins to speak has crossed the threshold. The silence has been broken. The secret has been told. Healing can now begin.

But the original material shows that it is not so simple.

Speaking may intensify shame. After a conversation, the person may feel that they have exposed themselves, betrayed the family or been disloyal to the abuser. Some regret what they have said. Others go home and attempt to regain control through self-harm, starvation or other self-destructive actions.

The research interviews reveal the same ambivalence. Several participants want to contribute. They hope their experiences may help others. At the same time, they know that there will be after-effects. They may regret speaking afterwards, even though they meant what they said.

We must therefore be cautious about the simple narrative in which speech liberates and silence imprisons. Silence can be a prison, but it may also have served as protection. When that protection is opened, the person becomes vulnerable in a new way.

What matters, therefore, is not only whether the story is told, but whether someone is able to receive it—and whether the person who has spoken is allowed to return afterwards.

A door that opens also needs hinges strong enough to bear its weight.

Being seen without being exposed

A person who feels ashamed may fear that others can see something that is not actually visible. When someone says hello, the person may wonder how they can bear to do so. When someone offers a hand, the thought may be: If you knew whom you were touching, you would pull your hand away.

It does not necessarily help to reply: “You have nothing to be ashamed of.” The words may be true, but they do not always reach the person. Recognition glances off because the individual is not yet able to connect it with themselves.

In the material, change occurs instead through repeated experiences. The helper meets the person in the same way the next time. And the time after that. She remembers what was said. She does not withdraw. She tolerates the silence, the anger, the tears and the gaze that turns away.

Slowly, the survivor may discover that there is another gaze besides the gaze of the abuser and the gaze of shame.

One woman describes how meeting another survivor changed her relationship with her own body. She had experienced her body as strange and damaged. But when she saw the other woman, she did not see a damaged body. She saw an ordinary human being. This changed the way she could see herself.

She was able to borrow the other person’s humanity.

This is recognition before it becomes a concept. It does not arise because someone explains that all human beings possess equal worth. It arises because one person sees another and discovers that the damage shame claims is visible cannot, in fact, be seen.

When the group opens the room

Something similar happens in the focus groups. The participants do not speak only to the interviewer. They listen and respond to one another. Through the active interview, meaning is created between the people in the room.

One participant says that she cannot call anyone a friend. She believes that no one truly wants to spend time with a person like her. Another reminds her that they recently went to the cinema together. She would not have invited her if she had not wanted her company.

It is a small event. No theory is presented. No therapeutic method is applied. Yet something essential happens.

The first participant’s self-image is met by a concrete experience that does not fit it: another person actually wanted to be with her.

This is more than positive affirmation. The other participant offers her own action as evidence. In effect, she says: You may believe whatever you like about yourself, but I invited you because I wanted you to be there.

In this way, community can open a room that shame had kept closed.

Not everyone remains in the hallway

The original material also contains countervoices. Not everyone hides. Not everyone experiences the body as shameful. One of the men explains that he eventually became able to say aloud on the bus that he was on his way to the support centre. He could almost provoke those around him by making public what had previously needed to remain hidden.

Another protects his story and shares it only with a selected few. This does not necessarily mean that he has made less progress. Owning one’s story also means having the right to decide who may hear it.

The goal, therefore, cannot be for everyone to tell everything, meet every gaze or enter every room without protection. Visibility is not liberating in itself. The public gaze can also violate.

Dignity does not mean living without boundaries. It means being able to decide where those boundaries should lie.

The helper at the threshold

What should the helper do when a person remains standing in the hallway?

Do not pull them inside.

Do not call out that there is nothing to fear.

Do not interpret the hallway as evidence of insufficient motivation.

Perhaps the first task is simply to notice that the person has arrived. To greet them without demanding a response. To leave the door open. To make it possible to enter without turning the entrance into a test that must be passed.

Martin Buber described the ethical encounter as an I–Thou relationship. But such a meeting cannot be forced. The other cannot be commanded to become a Thou. The encounter arises when both are allowed to be present without one turning the other into an object of their own project.

For the helper, this means tolerating the fact that the other person is still standing on the threshold. Understanding cannot be hurried into existence. Trust does not arise because the helper declares that it is now present. It must be experienced by the person who has the greatest reason to doubt it.

Perhaps this is the practical philosophy of the threshold:

Helping does not always mean leading someone to the other side. Sometimes it means standing nearby, without blocking the doorway and without abandoning the person who does not yet dare to enter.

And if the telephone remains silent, one can continue speaking calmly and say:

You do not have to tell me anything yet. But if you are there, you can give me a small sign.

Then, perhaps, a faint beep is heard.

Not an entire story. Not a healing. Only a person who is still hiding, but who, for the first time, allows another human being to know:

I am here.

About the background of this essay

This essay emerged from a new reading of the original material from my doctoral research on shame, sexual abuse and recognition. The material consists of focus-group and in-depth interviews conducted in 2006 with nineteen people connected to a Norwegian support centre for survivors of incest and sexual abuse. The doctoral dissertation was completed in 2009.

The conversations were conducted as active interviews, in which meaning was not regarded as something already formed and waiting to be extracted from the participants, but as something that could develop in the encounter between the participants and the researcher. In 2026, I returned to the original 26 transcripts (around 200 000 words from five focusgroups), and reread them in conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT. The earlier thematic analyses were set aside. This essay is therefore not a summary of the dissertation, but a new interpretation of a motif that emerged from the original material: the person who remains standing in the hallway.

To protect the participants, their experiences have been synthesised and anonymised. The essay does not reproduce the story of any single individual.