Pastors are caretakers, a characteristic of those who answer the call to ministry. We need to be needed. In that sense, perhaps we’re all a little codependent, making caregiving an emotional hazard of our profession.
—Jim Smith
My prayer was neither theologically nor politically correct. With my green Chevy Vega idling at the corner of Mockingbird and Greenville in Dallas, Texas, I broke down. “Lord, I’m the only thing that stands between these people and hell,” I prayed shamelessly. “They’ll have to go to hell ’cause I’m going home. I quit.”
When I had left the office that evening, my secretary had apprised me of my eight-month waiting list and the forty or so phone calls screaming for my attention. I was overwhelmed by it all, tyrannized and oppressed by the guilt. Playing the role of messiah had taken its toll. Like the lifeguard who gets pulled under while rescuing a drowning victim, my workaholism was dragging my own emotional health under water.
Pastors are susceptible to emotional fatigue. Yet the minister’s emotional health is indispensable for effective counseling and longevity in the profession. Historically, pastors are caretakers. We need to be needed. And in that sense, perhaps we’re all a little codependent, making caregiving an emotional hazard of our profession.
I’ve discovered since this crisis that the psychological hazards of counseling can be avoided. A meaningful and ongoing prayer life, of course, is the central element to a pastor’s psychological health. Prayer not only puts our ministries into perspective, it is the means by which we are given divine strength and wisdom to do the work God has called us to.
In addition to prayer, I’ve found a few other practices also help.
Monitor Your Pulse
Just like the pulse needs to be checked at the beginning of a physical, so does the pastor’s psychological pulse. I monitor my psychological pulse by asking myself a series of questions.
• Am I emotionally available at home? The inability to be emotionally present with my wife, Jan, or my daughters is a good indicator I’m on relational overload. If on the drive home from work, I find myself hoping and praying they’ve had a good day so I don’t have to hold the bucket for their tears, my emotional tank is on empty.
And if I’m watching tv, tearing up over a plot not warranting my weeping and sobbing, I’m emotionally needy. I don’t have enough emotional reserve to take it in stride. It may be a tragic plot, for example, where a parent is abusive to a child. Under healthy conditions, though, I’d be angry at the parent: “What a rat! You fink!” But if I’m emotionally breaking up over it, that’s a reliable barometer about the plight of my soul.
• Am I snookered? Getting “snookered,” or hooked, is counseling jargon, at least at our church, for letting your own concerns cloud and distort the counseling process.
Growing up in an alcoholic family, I played the role of protecting my mother. As an alcoholic, my father was verbally and emotionally abusive to my mother. So my tendency in marital counseling, if I’m out of balance, is to unconsciously side with the woman against the man. I feel more empathy for the woman; I lose objectivity. Getting snookered may indicate my own emotional needs are on the skids.
• Am I abusing power? Power is endemic to pastoral counseling. But the misuse of power, like leveraging clients for your own needs, is evidence of psychological sickness.
Not long ago, I could have quadrupled my money overnight in the stock market simply because I heard some inside information from one of my clients. That’s never been a serious temptation to me. But information about businesses and families is privy to pastors, and we need to beware of the temptation to cozy up to people for financial rewards or perks.
Counseling pastors are entrusted with a wealth of information about their clients. Manipulating them with potentially damaging information is unethical and unprofessional.
• Am I voyeuristic? Voyeurism means gaining sexual gratification from a safe distance. By asking questions irrelevant to the counseling process, pastors can become voyeurs, using the guise of counseling to gratify their unmet needs.
If I’m counseling a couple, for example, and the husband complains the wife is not freed up sexually, I need more information to understand what he means by that. Does it mean she dresses in the closet? Or does it mean she won’t use whipping cream and swing from the chandelier? I need to ask appropriate questions to help them work through their issues, but not the sort of questions that titillate my own sexual curiosity.
If I start asking questions for my arousal, I’ve become voyeuristic, which removes me from a position of healing.
• Am I believing my own press releases? There are people who demand to see only me. They believe I’m the only person in the world who can help them. At our church, we call it the Hem-of-the-Garment Syndrome: “If I could just touch the hem of Jim’s garment …” The humor helps us keep perspective. But it’s serious business. If you start believing you alone have the answers for all the world’s problems, you’ve crossed over the line of what makes for psychological balance.
• Is my level of what’s acceptable diminishing? After constantly counseling D-minus marriages, it’s easy for me to start believing that a C-plus relationship is not that bad. If I’m emotionally spent and listening to a couple drone on about their marriage, unconsciously I could begin to muse. Why are you so uptight? Your C-plus marriage is better than most! I lose hope for the A-plus marriage that God offers them. God’s ideals, then, become a casualty of my emotional overload.
Setting Limits
Maintaining emotional equilibrium also requires that I set personal limits in five areas.
1. I have to recognize the number of clients I can emotionally handle each week. For myself, I’ve noticed that if I counsel six clients per day, I’m fine. If I do seven, I’m marginal. But if 1 see eight, I’m dead—I’ve hit emotional overload, and then my soul takes a nose dive. Time for legitimate emergencies and crises also need to be figured into my weekly schedule.
2. I put a ceiling on the number of draining cases in my counseling load. Many psychologists will not work with more than two borderline personality disorders at one time. That’s wise advice for the counseling pastor. Their constant depression can easily sabotage the emotional condition of the pastor.
3. I balance my counseling load with clients I truly enjoy working with. I couldn’t do just crisis intervention and survive. My first love is teaching, and so I would rather school clients on how to have marital intimacy than to constantly mop up the aftermath. I’m not much of a sewer cleaner. And so I keep a lid on the cases that drain me emotionally and balance the rest of my load, as much as possible, with what I love to do the most.
4. I create artificial barriers between me and my ministry. My secretary is an artificial barrier, my insulation from the instant demands of hurting people. She’s like the wicked witch of Endor: no one sees me until they sneak past her! I’m too nice to people. She, on the other hand, is direct with those who would encroach upon my schedule.
Another barrier may be screening the phone calls at home with an answering machine, or simply taking the phone off the hook. Ready statements like “Why don’t you call the office tomorrow” or “I need to check my calendar” also serve to buffer the pastor against the barrage of needy people.
5. I refuse to accept my client’s problems as my own. I always delineate whose problem is whose.
Recently, a teenage boy kicked out of the house by his parents and with no place to go camped out in my office. I felt as if he was waiting for me to locate a place for him to stay. If I had gotten on the phone and tried to find him a place to stay, I would have rescued him.
And though I hurt for him—the poor guy was obviously scared—I consciously refused. We finally decided he should check into a motel at his expense.
“Well, there’s the phone,” I announced. So he called the motel and reserved a room until things cooled down at home.
When a person comes and complains about not having a job, my temptation is to call someone I know and try to help the person find work. I musn’t do that, because then it becomes my problem.
Instead, I’ll say, “Let’s talk about some options. But it’s your job to go and find a job. I can’t do that for you.”
Occasionally that’s a tough line to define. Sometimes people really do need financial help. Sometimes there’s a legitimate need—for example, a husband has just walked off and left a wife and children without any resources. Those people we do help.
But a lot of people just want to come in and feel better. And there’s a tremendous temptation to free people from their pain. But there’s efficacy in pain; pain is a great teacher. By refusing to alleviate their pain, we strengthen them in the healing process and safeguard the emotional well being of our soul as well. If I get sucked into their problems, I can’t be a counselor.
Finding a Soul to Lean On
Ongoing supervision for the counselor is another fundamental to long-term emotional health.
At our counseling center, we supervise each other. In addition, I meet monthly with three different friends in psychology to discuss my cases. We never name names, of course; that would violate confidentiality. But we are specific about details. (In the counselee’s intake sheet, we clearly spell out to them that outside consultation may be necessary.)
Often I’ve encouraged pastors to find a mental health professional, so that every couple of weeks or once a month, they can get the perspective of a veteran psychologist on their cases.
For the rural pastor, that’s impossible. Other local ministers, however, make competent supervisors, even if they are from a theologically “foreign” denomination. And even a mature friend, with little or no psychology background, can offer acumen and perspective on counseling cases.
Accountability, as much as supervision, is another reason why ministers need a soul mate, whether close friend or spouse. Especially with a spouse, though, the pastor must be careful not to poison the spouse’s attitude toward individuals in the congregation . Confidentiality still demands the anonymity of the client, even from a spouse.
How much you do share with your spouse, however, depends on the size of your congregation. Since our church is quite large and my wife, Jan, is mostly uninvolved in the ministry, I feel comfortable in sharing some of my counseling situations with her, especially the humorous ones. It draws her into my world, giving her a sense of what I have to contend with on a regular basis.
Sexual accountability, however, is a different ball game. Divulging an attraction for a client may be too threatening for some spouses. “I’ve got a parishioner who creates fantasy problems for me; she and I need to be held accountable” is a confession for the ears of a colleague, not a marriage partner.
Relational overload and fatigue can make the counseling pastor especially vulnerable to sexual temptations, especially when his or her own emotional needs are unmet. In such situations, counseling relationships can drift unsuspectingly towards a sexual ambush. Admitting sexual temptations to a trustworthy friend, though, takes the sting and the mystery out of the attraction.
Accountability bolsters the resolve of pastors, keeping them apprised of their own needs and alert for psychological duplicity.
A Constant Sense of Growing
In the ministry, our walk with the Lord can be easily sacrificed to the urgent; this is especially true in pastoral counseling. Often we become so busy that we forget to nurture our own spiritual needs. A constant sense of spiritual growth, though, forces us to confront our own issues. We don’t have to be perfectly whole before the Lord will use us. We do, however, need to be experiencing the presence of Christ in the hidden parts of our psyche.
Some ministers, believing themselves called by God, have ended up in the ministry for all the wrong reasons. In reality, the call of God may have been distorted by errant motives and childhood pain. But whatever the issues—sexual addictions, marital difficulties, or narcissistic personality tendencies—pastors, to be healthy, must be working through their own issues, experiencing firsthand God’s healing in their own lives.
And it’s this healthiness that makes for effective counseling in the long run. I know one former pastor, for instance, who during his pastoral ministry was distressed that not many came to see him for counseling. And when people did come, he was rarely successful at helping them work through their struggles.
Years later, he recognized that he had been hindered in counseling others because he himself had yet to work through the struggles he was having with intimacy. For some time he had been dosing himself off from his wife, his church, and his friends, sharing less and less of himself with them. His people sensed his reserve and found it difficult to entrust themselves to him.
“If I had had a periodic checkup with another counselor myself, I think I would have seen this pattern earlier and dealt with it. As it was, my counseling ministry was handicapped. I missed an opportunity to help a lot more people.”
Psychological health, to a large extent, is a matter of degrees. Emotional balance for the pastor, then, is not about personal perfection but a growing self-awareness.
Professional growth also contributes to my emotional condition. The field of human dysfunction is broad, and counseling pastors, to stay relevant, need continual professional development. The constant process of integrating psychology with what I understand biblically and theologically is food for my own psyche. That’s why my monthly rendezvous with friends in psychology is so vital. A constant sense of professional maturation serves to maintain my sense of psychological health.
Redeeming Humor
Over the last twenty-five years of ministry, the prolonged exposure to the human predicament has sobered me. In a way, I suppose, pastoral counseling has scarred me. Seeing so much sadness and inhumanity has rubbed some of the shine off my disposition.
That’s why humor is more important to me than ever. I’m convinced that a sense of humor can put some shine back in my disposition. It’s another component critical to emotional equilibrium in the ministry.
Humor also cuts through the grimness and heaviness that envelopes the pastor when he’s up to his eyeballs in needy parishioners. Part of a balanced approach to counseling, then, is looking for the folly in their pain—not in an insensitive way, of course.
One cartoon by Doug Hall shows a woman standing during a prayer meeting, praying, “Lord, 1 lay before you the prayer concerns voiced this morning … even though most of ’em sound like whining to me.” That’s how I feel about counselee’s problems sometimes, and to see it put humorously defuses my frustration.
Humor also is a key not to taking myself too seriously. There’s only one Messiah, and that position’s already taken. Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Minneapolis, aptly puts the pastor’s role into relief: “If somebody has a situation that absolutely demands that you attend to it in the next twenty-four hours, you’re not capable of dealing with it anyway.”
So I allow humor to become a regular part of my life. You can’t force humor into your relationships and your way of thinking, but you can be open and receptive when it comes. When I’m with colleagues and we’re discussing our cases, not everything has to be serious. We sometimes poke fun at each other and our clients and ourselves, and as long as we don’t become flippant and sarcastic, the laughter that results is a healing balm.
I also try to set an atmosphere where humor is encouraged. In the reception area of my counseling office, I often place a book of cartoons for people to thumb through, offering them a humorous glimpse on our plight as humans. When people get to know me, they often send me cartoons and humorous ditties, and I encourage that.
We all have little quirks that besmirch our personalities and frustrations that get in the way of ministry. Chuckling at our human entanglements liberates us from taking ourselves too seriously. A healthy dose of humor allows the pastor not to lose sight of the forest while counseling in the trees.
Getting Away
Whether it’s hiking, golfing, or gardening, pastors should cultivate activities that divert their energies from ministry. That’s even more true of those who do a lot of counseling.
My wife owns her own company and is not available on my regular day off. So on Thursdays, my day away from the grind, I hit the road with a fishing pole or if it’s hunting season, a shotgun in my hand. So I’m either casting a line or in the field dressing a quail on my day of rest.
The great outdoors are a diversion for me. I find that my own emotional health requires activities that refresh and distract me from the constant drain of my clients. Sitting in a boat, wetting a worm and “yukking it up” with my friends, takes care of my needs.
When my friend Robbie comes to visit, we immediately head for the lake. It’s our time to “laugh and scratch” and do all those male bonding things that fishermen do. Fishing and hunting are two pills that keep me in counseling ministry for the long haul.
My frightful prayer at that memorable comer in Dallas broke my workaholism and my fixation to be the messiah for everyone that came down the pike. It wasn’t a dramatic rum—I didn’t take a sabbatical or completely restructure my life and ministry. I just started to take one day at a time, one client at a time. I still struggle at times with the yearning to fix everybody’s problems. But I’ve started paying more attention to my psychological health. And that, ironically, has helped me attend more effectively to the psychological health of others.
Copyright © 1992 by Christianity Today
