Psychological Health of Pastor/Educator
Anyone who thinks about it recognizes that church professions place pastors and educators (P/E) under a lot of emotional stress. The problem is that we don’t think about it very much. Those who don’t think about it include the pastors and educators. Stress comes in many forms. It can certainly come from crisis in our lives or in our churches. It can also come from good experiences, successes, and opportunities. More often than we realize, it comes from the little pressures and irritations that are a regular part of our day. I learned a long time ago that nerve endings that are rubbed raw take longer to heal than what can be accomplished by a good night’s sleep or even an occasional extra day off.
It is important that we develop strategies by which we take care of ourselves emotionally. A key strategy is finding a way to name and own the emotional responses generated by our daily experiences. A simple way of taking your emotional blood pressure is to get a small notepad that you can carry around with you. At least for a couple of weeks, make it a practice of keeping record of how different events and interactions are making you feel. After a few days of record keeping, create a barometer page with feeling level on the vertical line and time on the horizontal line. On the feeling line create a line zero representing an almost neutral emotional level with degrees of happiness and joy going up and disturbance and despair going down. You will also want the time line to extend out to the seven days of the week. With that graph in before you, review your notes and mark how you were feeling at various times of the day and note what was happening at that time with some small notation. What you are looking for is whether there is any correlation between time of day and mood or the days of the week.
You may also want to identify whether there are particular people or particular situations that tend to repeat themselves in affecting your moods. All of this provides you material that you can reflect on. I am working on the assumption that people or situations do not make you happy or sad. It is your response to those situations that affect your moods. I refer to Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” as a basis for that assumption. We can easily be enslaved to our emotional responses but we can also make choices of how we will respond once we have identified the event or person that is repeatedly stimulating a particular response.
The first year after retirement I recognized that I was still experiencing the build up of tension on Saturdays. I had developed such a pattern over forty years of ministry that I had to identify and reprogram my self to decrease that Saturday feeling. There have been certain people who have approached me from a negative perspective enough times in the ministry that I found myself getting defensive even before they spoke. Building on Frankl’s advice that I could choose how I wanted to respond to them, I recognized that I could feel sorry for their negativity but not choose to be defensive. It made my interactions with those people much more positive.
Using your graph and your identification of the repeated people or situations that are affecting you, consider how you would like to change your response. It’s not easy and it is not automatic but it might be a first step towards helping you maintain a healthier response to the events of ministry.
