Michael Hillenkamp is an educationalist, theologian, supervisor, and psychotraumatologist. He has completed further training in marriage counseling (BAG), systemic constellations (ISAIL), NLP, supervision (IBS), family therapy (DAA), conflict training (Galtung), MBSR, and psychotrauma (ZPTN).
After holding positions in student pastoral care, clinics, counseling centers and many years in telephone pastoral care (serving as national chairman until 2023), he now runs a small private practice focused on relationship supervision and experience-oriented training.
Michael Hillenkamp
Speaker
Preserving Dignity – When Empathy Is Not Enough
Speech
Counseling as a Practice of Dignity Work
People experience dehumanization not only through open violence but also through what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.” She used this term to show how dehumanization can emerge when individuals suspend their moral judgment, dissolve responsibility into roles or procedures, and no longer recognize the other as an equal subject of dignity.
In counseling practice, this dynamic appears whenever people are reduced to cases, roles, or functions. Dignity does not arise from declaration but from practice. It becomes visible where counselors consciously refuse to dehumanize the other, even in conflict, failure, or moral tension.
The lecture identifies concrete criteria of dignity-centered counseling and explores how counseling can protect shame, assume responsibility in contact, and resist reducing human beings to functional categories. In the age of digital assistance systems, dignity remains a fundamentally human practice that cannot be automated.