Much burnout in “people helpers” is due to an inability to keep personal emotions sufficiently detached to avoid over-involvement in the pain of others. Very bluntly, the issue is: How much can a pastor take the pain of others before it starts to burn him or her out?
The Christian minister or missionary is particularly vulnerable here. He or she is called to be “all things to all people". They are supposed to “bear one another’s burdens” and “weep with them that weep". But how much contact with troubled people can be tolerated if one must become emotionally involved with all of them?
While not becoming indifferent to the pain of others, it is necessary for the minister to develop an appropriate degree of self-protection so that he or she does not become emotionally destroyed.
There are many reasons why ministers are overly affected by the pain of others. They may be guilt prone and use their own “weeping” over the pain of another as a way of alleviating their guilt feelings. Paradoxical, isn’t it? Especially since they preach a gospel that offers forgiveness.
Or they may become overly involved with the pain of another to satisfy some deep personal need (conscious or unconscious). It can also be an excessive need for attention, recognition or appreciation. In some strange way the vicarious pain helps to alleviate these needs and may even be a boost to self-esteem.
Perhaps the most important reason is that pastors are not taught to differentiate sympathy from empathy. They erroneously believe that they are required to feel “sympathy” for all who hurt. Psychologists prefer the concept of “empathy” as a special form of sympathy because it describes a way of relating to another that shows care and love but does not produce a reciprocal pain.
To understand the difference, consider the following: Sympathy (as it is most commonly experienced) is away of comforting another by showing that you also feel their pain. It too easily becomes patronizing. It robs others of the right to feel their own pain and not have you diminish the importance of what they feel. The vicarious suffering with another in sympathy can easily become selfish and self-satisfying.
Sympathy in effect says: “I know how you feel because I feel that way also”. Empathy says “I can never know what you feel because your pain is unique. But I do want to understand how you feel".
Clinical research has shown that empathy is much more helpful and comforting than sympathy. Hurting people only hurt more if they see that their hurt causes others to hurt also. Hurting people are healed by understanding. not by someone else becoming emotionally affected by their hurt.
We should all work out our theology of compassion before becoming involved with a hurting world. On the one hand we must be ready to “weep with them that weep” (Rom. 12:15), but on the other “We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (Rom. 15:1).
We ought to know when we are being motivated by neurotic needs to feel the pain of others and be willing to surrender our neuroticism to the cross of healing so that we can be “blameless and harmless, the sons (and daughters) of God” (Phil. 2:15).
We are hardly “harmless” as ministers when we operate out of a neurotic need to sympathetically feel the pain of others. Not only do we destroy ourselves, but we rob those who are hurting of the respect due to them in their suffering.
Although burnout can be a traumatic. devastating, depressing and even life threatening experience, it can also be the beginning of true maturity. It can be the start of true maturity and the discovery of what God really wants to do with your life.
