Hello Rowland,

This is an exchange between me and one of my professors. He asked my permission to use it in his teaching. I thought that it might be of benefit to others — hence I am submitting it to John Mark Ministries. While I am not putting my name on it, I would welcome any personal responses through you.

MYSELF: I cannot think of any negative counselling experiences, but I can think of a neutral one. I suffered serious burnout after my church exploded in size and I failed to cope in a healthy way. A clinical psychologist taught me coping mechanisms, but while these were good, they did not teach me what I have learned today (a faith approach), and perhaps even long deferred what I really needed to learn at that time.

PROFESSOR: Share with us about some of those coping mechanisms. Perhaps we can anticipate and learn from this experience.

MYSELF: My emphasis now would be on the faith approach rather than the coping mechanisms, because the coping mechanisms were a crutch, the faith approach is a true solution when applied. I burnt out very badly. “X” was an accomplished clinical psychologist, and she told me that I would never make it back to ministry. It was a terrible nightmare. She said that a breakdown is basically due to “global stress” – stress which affects not just one area of life, but all. She did three things:

1. She gave me a wheel of balance – it had six segments: Home Life, Work Life, Rest, Recreation, Social Life, Intellectual Life (I think that Spiritual Life was missing from the wheel — sometimes the wheel includes this). If one of these areas is “unsatisfactory”, a person is endangered. If two or three of these areas are unsatisfactory, a person is almost certainly due for breakdown. In my case, all of these areas were “unsatisfactory”. So she set about returning each segment to a “satisfactory” status. She said that I had to be ruthless in doing so – my survival depended on it. I knew this — and I was ruthless in rearranging my life, and she helped me.

2. The worst problems were Work Life and Home Life. I was medically unfit to continue work for months, so with time on our side (sort of), she tackled Home Life. She sat me and my wife down, and said, “Tell her how you feel.” At first, I was too upset to say a word. My wife was deeply shocked. I told her, for the first time, how I felt. This lessened tensions at home. God took care of Work Life. When I finally was able to return to work, the Church had obviously grown. I thought, “I wasn’t needed.”

3. I had been playing the role of bullet-proof minister. Superman! I had an image to project. And my Church was so successful! But I had been deeply frustrated by many things, particularly a leadership without spiritual vision. And I had never developed a personality that could express my frustrations, or defuse them. I couldn’t bear the thought of being anything less than dignified and detached as a minister, yet at the same time I felt deeply the things that people said. A minister does not argue with people, or confront them, or get involved in their pettiness — or so I thought. “X” helped me to defuse the internal pressure.

“X” “got me going for the show” — only just — but I consider that she delayed the real solution. She did not do me a favour in the long run. Burnout is a big problem in our society, and for a while I used “X”’s wheel of balance in my own counselling. But I don’t use it any more. My real problem was that I did not trust God to take care of my Church. I was driven by fear and anxiety. I was doing ministry by works (as one has salvation by works). And I wanted to protect my own dignity — you can’t do that if you are incarnational. Now I enter into the spiritual fray, trusting God to protect me.

Two weeks ago I met the minister of my old Church, Rev. “Y”. The Church was built under my ministry, to seat 250 people. They had just taken the decision to knock out the back wall and expand its space by a further 40%.

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Rowland’s comment:

Briefly, all this is good, but there’s also the deeper psychological issue: why are we Western males addicted to success? Short answer: family-of-origin dynamics. In our under-fathered / over-mothered culture, where we are not properly initiated into manhood, we define our worth by out-performing our peers. And if/when we do it, the ‘cisterns fail’ each time… So we fail when we succeed, and feel a failure when we ‘fail’ (all the biblical heroes failed)…