Student Chaplain L

To have trust, to have trust in life, to have trust in God. "Trust" is a word that recurs again and again in the reflections of the student chaplains, as the interview quote from Student Chaplain L illustrates. This points towards what we might call "down-to-Earth" social and material enactments that go on outside the pastoral care room. Trust is here intimately related to feelings of connectedness—to others, life, the world, and God. Trust and connectedness seem to be central in the related psychology, too.

"To mentalize" (Fonagy 1991) is about attending to mental states in the self and others; it is about "holding mind in mind"—"seeing yourself from the outside and others from the inside" (Allen et al. 2008, p. 3). To be able to mentalize is to be able to imagine what is behind the other's behavior and, at the same time, imagine how one is affecting the other. The point of highlighting the concept of mentalizing in pastoral care is that mentalizing, in its ideal form, provides intimacy. That is, mentalizing can nourish a loving feeling of connectedness with the reality of another person (Allen and Fonagy 2006). In pastoral care, it is necessary that chaplains are able to draw on imagination and ideas, and this is what mentalizing is referring to.

The psychologist Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have argued that mentalizing plays a part in the process of change as a "common language" in the therapeutic process regardless of the details, nuances, or particulars present in the conversation and regardless of the way the professional shapes the conversations (Fonagy and Allison 2014). Drawing on newer research in the area of communication and learning processes concerning "common factors" in psychotherapy, Fonagy and colleagues argue that limitations in clients' capacity to learn from their experiences—that is, where the client is difficult for the professional to reach—can be generally overcome by letting the clients feel understood. To feel understood serves to reconstruct/restore a capacity for social understanding, that is, mentalizing (ibid.).

However, newer developments in the concept of mentalizing have further developed this argumen<sup>t</sup> and call attention to the development of "trust" (Fonagy and Campbell 2015). To feel understood does not only restore social understanding but also creates the trust needed to learn from social experience. The prerequisite for being able to open oneself to good advice, guidance, notions, and contact is the willingness of the individual to regard new knowledge as trustworthy and relevant—and thereby as worth integrating (Campbell et al. 2021). "Epistemic trust" is defined as "openness to the reception of social communication that is personally relevant and of generalizable relevance" (Bateman and Fonagy 2019, p. 15). In short, Fonagy and colleagues sugges<sup>t</sup> that a rise in epistemic trust is the potent driving force in therapeutic change and that restoring epistemic trust may be at the core of all effective therapeutic work (Fonagy and Campbell 2015).

Taken together, social understanding (mentalizing) and increased epistemic trust build some basis for life outside the therapy room upon which new information about oneself and the world may be acquired and internalized. Ultimately, this may imply that the changes happening in therapy (or pastoral care) are not just due to new skills or insights which are acquired in the professional room. Rather these are due to the capacity that is implied in the therapeutic (or pastoral care) relationship, which creates a potential for learning about oneself, others, and the world outside the therapy room (ibid.).

Fonagy et al. (2017) describe the therapeutic change in terms of three processes that facilitate the development of epistemic trust and the capacity to mentalize: Communication System 1: "The teaching and learning of content that lowers epistemic vigilance"; Communication System 2: "The re-emergence of robust mentalizing"; and Communication System 3: "The re-emergence of social learning". The following analysis is inspired by these three processes and weaves them together with McFague's Models of God (Mother, Lover, and Friend) and also with the chaplains' efforts in pastoral care based on the interviews. The aim is to show how trust-building activities and movements in Trinity traverse the pastoral conversations taking care of the "blind spots" of stress arising from climate change (cf. Student Chaplain C).

#### **6. A Down-to-Earth Pastoral Care Model: "Mothering the Content", "Loving Vital force", and "Befriending the Environment"**
