CPSP Pastoral Report

    What I will offer up for your consideration this morning is not something new or earth-shaking in itself.  I hope you’ll take it as encouragement to be more psychodynamic or perhaps, I should say, psychoanalytic in your efforts to help those in ministry vocations resolve conflict. In the short amounts of time that we actually spend with these individuals it is difficult, if not impossible, to say that we can finish a healing process but we can certainly assist seminarians and ministers in attaining more self-awareness. This may also seem like a rather unconventional approach for me to take because I am someone who was trained clinically, first by a student of Bowen and then by a student of Minuchin.  When I advertise my clinical expertise I point to marriage and family therapy. But I recognize that a systems approach to all situations has limitations. All too often when I consult with students, or ministers and their families, I hear them seeking to locate the reasons for the conflicts they are embroiled in outside of themselves. Blame and finger-pointing abounds.  Ministers often come feeling beleaguered when they seek my help and often by that time they have little hopeful to say about the congregations they serve. It is a sad situation for all concerned.  These ministers have been abused by their congregations and in many instances the conflict has escalated to the point where a resolution for a particular minister is not possible.  As we say in my denomination, local conditions necessitate the termination of the call with nothing negative reflected back on the minister or the congregation.  But of course, injury has occurred to all concerned. When it has reached this fever pitch, I attempt to take the approach of “what can be learned from this difficult situation so that next time things will be different?” 

    The differences between process and content in the conflict are often misunderstood.  Systems approaches to conflict intervention have been attempted and failed because there wasn’t any consultant available to help or to take the heat in the way that interim ministers frequently do. Ministers attend leadership seminars in which they learn about systems techniques but then they return to their congregations and attempt to apply what they have learned without supervision, often making the situation worse.  I’m sure that many of you in this room have witnessed, if not experienced, something like this. I don’t want to sound as if I am blaming clergy for the difficult situations they frequently find themselves in; especially when we consider that the “clergykillers” (as Rediger defines them)1 in congregations are often individuals with personality disorders that would frighten even a seasoned therapist. I would like to suggest, however, that a great deal can be learned by turning the mirror back upon the self. Following Michael Nichols’ lead I want to ask the very important question of “What has happened to the Self in the system?”2 Systems theory is very valuable and I’ve learned a lot from it but a return to psychoanalytic theory, in the field of pastoral theology is, in my mind, long overdue.

    Specifically, I want to look at how Heinz Kohut’s understanding of the self will enable us to provide a helpful framework for seminarians and ministers who want to better understand their own roles in conflict situations.  A consequence of this engagement with the self is that they will be better prepared to respond to the “clergykillers” in their midst.  And maybe respond in such a way that these clergykillers become what I like to think of them as—anklebiters. (Something like a terrier who can nip at our ankles without causing much harm.) What I am really attempting to say here is that members of congregations, at least to some degree, have only as much power over the ministers who lead them as the ministers themselves grant to them.  This is to say that when ministers and other church professionals react to individuals based on past experiences from their internal world, they will often unleash a process that they did not expect.  All too frequently that is a process with an unhappy or unfortunate ending for the minister.

    Here it is important to understand how I differentiate a response from a reaction.  A response according to Ronald Richardson is:  (taken from Ronald Richardson’s understanding of self-differentiation) “the ability to think clearly and wisely about possible options for action and the likely consequences for each of these options; and, the ability to act flexibly within the situation on the basis of these perceptions, thoughts and principles.”3  “Reactivity” on the other hand, “is the emotional expression of people’s sense of threat”4 ; Responding means I will not create a perception of threat when there really isn’t any threat to my well-being in the first place.  A joining of systems theory and self psychology is beneficial because the often perceived threat (which isn’t there) is related to an individual’s internal world which remains unexamined. I try to coach, even beginning students, to see that even and most especially, if personal attack is intended by someone against me, I do not need to interpret their actions in that way.  So just what does lead a minister to become his or her own worst enemy?

The Burdens of Estrangement

    If your experience of helping others—especially those who are called to ministry—is anything at all like mine, then you can resonate with an observation that Richard Lischer offers in his recent work, The End of Words: “We preachers ourselves bear the burdens of estrangement.  Who in our own family has escaped divorce, abuse or conflict?  According to an Alban Institute researcher, up to one half of clergy come from what Roy Oswald terms ‘dysfunctional or traumatically unloving families.’”5  How do situations of abuse, divorce, neglect or conflict in early childhood establish patterns of relating that impede our abilities to minister effectively? In what ways do early childhood deficits especially with parents or parental objects lead to fragmented selves or selves that lack cohesion? Women students who have survived incest appear at my office door all too frequently. At times the pain is so great the experience is blurted out in a classroom and the day’s lesson or objectives are set aside to help the student process the experience with stunned classmates. (More than 60 million adult survivors of incest and sexual child abuse live in the U.S.)6  Thus, pastoral care is learned as Dittes might say, “on the spot.”7  Other narratives of clergy or seminarian despair include: 1) living through divorce with teenage children acting as symptom bearers; 2) engaging in various forms of self-medicating behavior in futile attempts to escape pain (an aside, a cursory look at the Duke Divinity School “pulpit and pew” website indicates that as many as 30-40% of ministers feel stressed out, depressed or on the verge of burnout)8 ; 3) ministers who feel like failures because they are serving small churches that don’t measure up to mega church standards and their depression intensifies.  These are just some of the stories that I hear in my office.  What are the narratives that need to be re-authored in order for these church leaders and future church leaders to be able to function in healthier ways? What are the internal world issues that result in difficult or problematic countertransferences? I imagine the examples I just listed are the tip of the iceberg for most of you since you are all far more involved in hands-on counseling than I am at this point in my career. Even this short list is beyond the scope of what I can address adequately this morning. And if these narratives of despair are on the rise among the clergy then they are rising in the congregations that clergy serve and in the populations we treat.  I don’t consider preachers or other church professionals, or therapists for that matter, to be more unique than other human beings so this observation may really say more about our culture and the rapidly changing expectations that individuals have of ministers.  I am here particularly interested in vulnerabilities that arise as a result of forms of loss which could be classified as narcissistic injuries.

    Despite my own interest in unresolved losses which fuel conflict, I feel compelled to ask: Is it truly the case that families, especially the ones clergy are raised in, in 21st century North American culture are more dysfunctional and thus, unloving than previous generations of families, or is it the case that we are more willing to speak about these traumatic failures of loving today than we were even 20 years ago? I’m afraid that I don’t have an answer to my question that I can document but I have a clinical hypothesis that the truth is somewhere in-between. And so to Lischer’s observation I would add, that we preachers, chaplains and supervisors, and psychotherapists bear the burdens of estrangement and self-estrangement as well. This may begin to sound vaguely like Paul Tillich’s understanding of sin—it is.9  Now, to raise the issue of a minister’s self-estrangement more as a question than an indictment: In what ways do we collude in constructing our stories of despair?  Or, In what ways do we seek to avoid the arduous process of examining our internal worlds, thus contributing to our sense of estrangement? 

    As Julia Kristeva wrote, we are inevitably strangers to ourselves (in a book by that title). Indeed, she suggests anyone who is “other,” a stranger in our midst, (an alien, a foreigner, an exile) confronts us “with the possibility or not of being an other.”10   The distinction of stranger or foreigner determines who is an insider and who is an outsider. When beginning a new call, I would argue, a minister is a stranger to the community and if the minister isn’t careful, he or she may become the next scapegoat.  Thus, the minister lives out the possibility of not being an other. In addition, life with “the stranger” confronts us with the fact that as Kristeva notes: “[s]trangely, this foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.”11   Put yet another way, the stranger within resides in our unconscious; the stranger is the very things we fear, deny, and subsequently repress. Kristeva maintains, however, that recognizing this stranger within bears hope for the future disappearance of the stranger as foreigner or someone who represents an enemy on the outside.  That is, once we have recognized the stranger who resides within, there will no longer be a need to direct violence at an enemy on the outside.  Recognizing the stranger within is the foundation for reconciliation with an “other.” What does this have to do with our topic at hand?  I hope to make that clearer as I go on but let me say for now that in order for a minister to exist not as her own worst enemy but as a friend or ally to the self she does need to reconcile with that stranger within.  Then each new encounter with an “other” doesn’t need to represent a potential conflict.  Why? Because each new person we meet may well resemble a selfobject that was more enemy than friend but when self-estrangement is healed the other does not need to be viewed as an adversary with whom we enter into battle. What then leads us to live our lives estranged from one another and what are the burdens?

Narcissistic Vulnerabilities—The Byproducts of the Burdens of Estrangement

    A recent study of college students conducted by psychologists at San Diego State concluded that today’s college students are more narcissistic than any other generation that preceded them.12   Dare I suggest that we are beginning to see evidence of the same among seminary students? For those of us acquainted with the work of Christopher Lasch this should come as no surprise.  Using the seminal work of Otto Kernberg as a springboard for his own thesis, Lasch argued in the late 1970s that narcissistic disorders were on the rise both because of: 1) a shift from an emphasis on primary to secondary narcissism in clinical literature; and, 2) changes in contemporary culture which have an effect on patterns of object relations.13   In the first case, one might want to argue that we as diagnosticians find what we are looking for (Yes, we can all agree with that?). It is the second point that Lasch makes which concerns me most. It is, the patterns of object relations that I’m interested in primarily insofar as they may predispose us to what Pamela Cooper-White identifies as narcissistic vulnerabilities.14   Some of her recent work centers on the use of self in pastoral care and counseling. She focuses on the importance of the countertransference as not necessarily pathological but rather as useful information or part of the “shared wisdom” in a therapeutic relationship. Not all of the countertransference material is something to be worked through but rather it provides information that can guide the work to be done in a therapeutic relationship.

    Admittedly, what I am suggesting today is more in keeping with a classical (as opposed to post-modern) understanding of countertransference but: What if we were to take the same approach to assisting ministers in conflict situations?  What if we were to help them identify their countertransference issues that arise specifically in conflict situations in churches?  I would like to apply Kohut’s understandings of transference to the countertransference experiences ministers have in conflict situations, especially as they relate to personal loss. What if, when working with a CPE group, for instance the supervisor makes deliberate connections between personal losses in a chaplain’s life and the potential for conflict in ministry settings if the loss is not worked through?  I’m not suggesting that this work isn’t being accomplished but I’d like to encourage that it be more deliberately connected to potential conflict of the unhealthy variety. I’d like to suggest that we not pathologize the experiences of our students or clients, but rather help them to understand these feelings and experiences as useful information.  What do my feelings tell me about myself and the situation I find myself in today?  What traumatic failure of loving existed in my past that I react with this sort of anxiety in the present? Am I reading the situation accurately or have I allowed my injuries from the past to color my understanding of  the contemporary situation? Am I projecting my anxiety into a situation and making it more difficult? Here I am suggesting that the countertransference needs to be worked through but I do not want to label a minister as “sick” nor do I want to suggest that the reason for the conflict is solely the minister’s responsibility. What is the source of my anxiety?

    When I work with students doing verbatims these are, in fact, among the questions we pursue. It is my thesis that certain countertransference experiences, when they remain unidentified as such, will inevitably exacerbate conflict or even incite unhealthy conflict in congregations or other ministry settings where it did not exist previously.  Moreover, I contend that certain kinds of deficit experiences (like incest) will necessarily require more diligence on the part of a minister who has experienced this kind of abuse. Now before anyone leaps to the conclusion that I am attempting to engage in some form of gate-keeping for ministry based upon negative past history, let me reassure you that is not my goal.  I do, however, believe that certain experiences of loss will necessitate more diligent self-reflection for some individuals.  The kinds of losses or traumatic failures of loving that I have worked with most recently include stories of incest, domestic violence and growing up in an alcoholic family.  Time will not allow me to use each such instance as a case study but an illustration using the story of an incest survivor here may be instructive.  I choose this particular illustration because I have worked with the individual over a significant period of time and I have her permission to tell it.  I also choose to speak about incest today because the silence surrounding the survivors even today is alarming and I continue to hear from students and ministers who still struggle with the horror of their experiences.  In the year 2003 10% of verified child abuse cases were cases of sexual abuse which represents 90,600 children in the U.S.15

One Story of Incest Survived

    A middle-aged woman, raised in the deep south in a family of four, with a younger brother was sexually abused by her father during her high school years.  She was frequently demeaned by the men in her life—father, brother, husband—as well as friends and professional colleagues.  She was and continues to be extremely bright but her gender, as well as her anger, was and still is an impediment to career advancement and intimate relationships. She currently serves a small rural congregation which pays her below the suggested minimums stipulated by her denomination; she is only able to do so because she has a pension from her first career as a nurse. She spent years in therapy after her divorce, then pursued ministry as a second career and by the time I came to meet her, her anger was palpable.  I wondered how it could be possible that not one of the therapists she had worked with had succeeded at helping her to work through her anger. Please don’t hear me blaming her therapists now, I’ve certainly worked with more than my fair share of intractable clients who exhibited signs of borderline personality disorder.  In fact, at one point during my clinical training I wondered aloud with my supervisor about whether the percentages in the DSM-IV were accurate.  Secondarily I wondered if I had done something to offend local clergy since they were the source of many of my referrals and statistically there were too many women who exhibited clinical symptoms of BPD. (We all know the joke about sending these clients to therapists we don’t like.) Nevertheless, this woman was somewhat surprised that I recognized her anger so easily without knowing her personal history. When engaging male students in conversation in a seminar, if they became silent in the face of her anger, she became hostile even while fighting back tears.  Accusations were hurled about not being taken seriously. 

    The misunderstanding occurred around the fact of a male minister’s silence. The men participating in the seminar didn’t know what to say or how to respond to her accusatory style of conversation. Her yearning was for honest, open, intelligent conversation but her affect caused most of the seminar participants to retreat into themselves, both male and female. The silence she experienced in class was reminiscent of the silence surrounding her abuse. She felt as if she had been dismissed, especially by her male colleagues. What began as a seminar started to feel more like group therapy and I started to feel as though I was losing my ability to manage the group process.  We were learning as a group but not necessarily the content outlined in the syllabus. Eventually two other women participants would confide that they too, were survivors of incest or marital abuse. When I met with this individual alone in my office, I wondered aloud with her if what we had experienced in the seminar was a pattern of relationship frustration that she experienced regularly.  She admitted that it was and expressed a desire to learn more appropriate ways to engage colleagues in conversation. I asked her if she could identify patterns in her own conversation during the seminar that had been unhelpful.  We worked at this together. What she wanted in collegial relationships was more open and honest sharing of self; what she received because she didn’t know how to ask for it, except to be belligerent, was silence. We began to look at ways that she might ask for what she wanted and needed more appropriately so that she might feel successful. Rather than assigning a label or diagnosis here, I’d like to suggest that this woman in ministry had a narcissistic vulnerability as a direct result of her experience of incest. Is it appropriate to identify her experience as a loss?  Yes, I believe so at a number of levels. And it was a loss which shaped her pattern of object-relating, especially with men, affecting her career goals negatively.

    Many of you may be acquainted with the work of Anderson and Mitchell, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs,16  in which they outline six basic types of grief:  material, relationship, intrapsychic, role, functional, and systemic.  Even though this book is approaching its 25th year of publication, I still use it in class. What does a young woman lose at age 15, when her father abuses her sexually?  I think one could argue that she experiences a loss at all of these levels; moreover, her father became a predator and in the situation I have outlined, her mother abandoned her, at least emotionally.  Thus, her pattern of object-relating became one of fighting all men who sought her out for only one purpose, sexual gratification in order to demean her intellect.  She was also angry with her mother who did not protect or defend her in the face of her father’s abuse.  Thus, any perceived slight by me, the female instructor, was also interpreted as abandonment by the student. Silence was regarded as suspicious behavior and the only way to establish credibility in the seminar was to demonstrate that she, in this instance, could take on the entire group. Her grandiose self was damaged in adolescence.  What do I mean?

Kohut’s Theory of the Self Summarized

    For those of you who may not be familiar with Kohut’s theory of the self,17  I’m going to summarize it quickly relating it to the case study I have already outlined and one other as a means of illustration. Kohut proposed a bi-polar model of the self; one pole is related to ideals (Idealized self), the other is related to ambitions (Grandiose self) and the area or space between the two is comprised of inborn skills and talents.  The poles of the self are developed in relation to selfobjects or the original primary caretakers who fulfill the needs of the developing self. The maternal selfobject is associated with the idealized self while the paternal selfobject is associated with the grandiose self (originally the narcissistic self). These selfobjects are not viewed as separate entities but rather in terms of the way they fulfill or fail to meet the needs of the developing infant.

    Kohut theorized that an infant could tolerate a traumatic failure on the part of one but not both parental selfobjects (or others who may have primary caretaking responsibility). Thus, a paternal selfobject need not be the biological father; it may not even be a male but someone who provides father-like care. The same is true for the maternal selfobject. Now if one subscribes to the idea that what is first negotiated in early childhood development is later renegotiated in adolescence then a traumatic failure on the part of a selfobject is just as dramatic during the adolescent stage of development as it is in infancy. In the case of our minister already described, I’ll call her Pastor Z, her mother failed to support her emotionally and failed to protect her physically. The mother did not and still does not acknowledge the fact of Pastor Z’s sexual abuse at the hands of her husband despite several attempts on the part of Pastor Z to have this conversation. Here then, we also see damage to the idealized self which this woman compensates for with somewhat self-destructive behavior. Her father sexually abused her.  Thus we see the damage to the grandiose self and, especially in her interactions with men, Pastor Z is aggressive and demeaning. At times Pastor Z takes up the same kind of role in her ministry that her father and brother took with her. Her brother was the privileged male child even if he was the second child and she frequently fought to get out from behind his shadow. Thus what we have is a traumatic failure of both parental selfobjects which leads to a fragmented self.  A daughter is not able to idealize important qualities of her mother and internalize them if the mother fails in her very basic responsibility to protect the daughter.  One would expect that a father would mirror back pride in his daughter’s accomplishments thus enabling her to feel like she has the potential to be creative in the world while at the same time accepting her personal limitations and the limitations of those around her. When a father perpetrates incest, the ability to admire him while accepting his personal limitations is destroyed. Damage to self-esteem and one’s ability to experience empathy is inevitable. Even in this very limited description of a minister in conflict we begin to see how the patterns of object-relating learned earlier in life have been regularly repeated to the point that conflict is stirred up in a situation where it isn’t helpful and isn’t warranted (i.e., a seminar). Within her family context she yearns for someone to acknowledge that a wrong occurred so that genuine forgiveness and healing can take place.  When Pastor Z was finally able to come to terms with the idea that her mother was also a victim of abuse she was able to share a holiday celebration with her family that was more meaningful than in the past. 

    The three major constituents of the self (ideals, ambitions, and talents) and the injuries that occur to them shape the three major groups of transference experiences in the analytic process.  As one might expect, the balance between these two poles of the self may be upset at a time later than infancy or early childhood.  In the case I’ve just related it was an adolescent experience of incest but based on how I’ve come to know this particular individual, I would expect that there was a history of emotional abuse from early childhood.  The birth narrative of this individual was not a story of celebration; rather, it was one of disappointment and dread.  This minister’s mother, in fact, experienced emotional abuse in relation to her husband because her first-born was a daughter. The long awaited first-born was not going to be a name-bearer but rather a girl, someone who would be viewed later in adolescence as trouble.

    So how exactly in this case do the three major constituents of the self (ideals, ambitions, and talents) shape the three major groups of transference experiences in the analytic process? And again, what I am suggesting today is that the three constituents of the self also shape the countertransference experiences of a minister in conflict. More importantly, what do we as therapists need to attend to when we assist ministers in conflict situations who have serious narcissistic vulnerabilities?  1) If the area of ambitions (grandiose self) is damaged the client will likely experience a mirror transference.  In the narrowest sense this means that a client will experience the therapist as a separate person (as opposed to an extension of the grandiose self) but only within the framework of needs that exist in the reactivated grandiose self.  Kohut notes  the offending trauma which produces a mirror transference occurs relatively late in development. If the injury to self occurs earlier in development the client is likely to experience a merger with the therapist or see the therapist as an extension of the grandiose self. Kohut’s own language describing the mirror transference reflects Erikson’s in Toys and Reasons,18  as he describes the “gleam in a mother’s eye which builds or confirms the child’s self-esteem.”19  What the client seeks most is confirmation and approval from the therapist. One could say that this was the case for Pastor Z.  At one point in my work with her she asked if circumstances were different if I would be able to accept her as my pastor. Since individuals who experience this kind of narcissistic injury often view others as extensions of their grandiose self, one could expect that conflicts arise when they don’t recognize boundaries between self and other.  Any form of disagreement is viewed as a threat to the self and Pastor Z has definitely sought my approval.

    2) If the area of ideals is damaged then the client experiences an idealizing transference.  Here one would expect to learn of an early trauma that occurred in relation to the child’s early caretaker.  This person failed to protect the child and/or soothe the child when it was upset.  Self-esteem is easily upset and the client looks to the therapist to provide soothing and tension-regulating functions, which they lack, and the therapist needs to be able to tolerate the client’s idealizations.

    3) And finally, if the area of skills and talents is damaged then the patient looks for reassurance in an alter ego or twinship transference. This means that the client will seek to experience the therapist as like him or herself.20   How then, does analysis change from Freud’s original understandings according to Kohut’s theory of the self? In other words, how does analysis provide a cure?  What can those of us who do not practice analysis per se learn here in order to assist those who seek out our help?

What has changed?

    Freud maintained that a narcissist was not curable because a narcissist was not accessible to the influence of psychoanalysis; thus, the patient lacked the ability to invest in a transference relationship. (See “On Narcissism,” 1914.) The noteworthy difference is Kohut’s focus on the treatment and cure of narcissistic personality disorders. One touchstone in Kohut’s analytic process is empathy which he understood as a data-gathering  tool within the analytic relationship, not a cure in itself.21   In my own work with ministers and students who have experienced traumatic injuries to the self, I try to focus on their abilities or inabilities to feel empathy. One may want to ask: Why is empathy in and of itself not a cure? 

    Kohut, using an illustration from Nazi Germany, demonstrated that empathy (or the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes) can be used for good or ill.  The Nazis used empathy to exploit the vulnerabilities of their victims to inflict emotional pain. Nevertheless, Kohut contended that empathy is what ultimately affirms our humanness and makes psychological existence possible.22  In an attempt to correct the many misunderstandings and misappropriations of empathy in the analytic relationship, Kohut offered the following toward the end of his life (1981), empathy is “the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.”23   Indeed, the capacity to experience empathy is one of five qualities identified by Kohut, which signal the transformation of narcissism in the therapeutic relationship.  The origin of empathy is located in the earliest mother-infant relationship as the developing self of the infant takes in the mother’s feelings toward the infant.

    Other determinants of a healthy self include creativity, transience, humor and wisdom.  The therapist is able to observe these qualities developing in the transference relationship. Creativity, quite simply, is a person’s ability to idealize his or her work; it suggests a capacity of playfulness and imagination. One may observe that a client is now able to celebrate his or her innate skills and talents instead of seeking reassurance. 

    Transience is the ability to accept one’s own mortality.  The client demonstrates an ability to surrender the need to be omnipotent, first in relationship to the therapist, and then subsequently in other relationships.  Another way to think about this in relation to the case I have shared this morning is:  transience started to be observable in Pastor Z’s ministry in her handling of a difficult situation with a paid youth group leader in her church.  He had not lived up to her expectations as a paid staff member but instead of berating him for poor performance she was able to sit down and talk about expectations.  She was able to provide the young man with a second chance. Another example of transience was her ability to surrender her need to be “right” in the classroom. Humor, if it is not a defensive posture (e.g., sarcasm may be a defensive signal), suggests an acceptance of transience.  When humor is indicative of a transformation of narcissism, the client has experienced a strengthening of his or her values and ideals.  The therapist witnesses a genuine sense of humor, according to Kohut, as the patient’s ego is able to experience amusement when reflecting upon old rigid configurations of the ego (e.g., grandiose fantasies and exhibitionistic strivings).  Said more plainly, do we have the capacity to laugh at ourselves?

    Last on my list this morning but certainly not least is the quality of wisdom. Wisdom or at the very least a modicum of wisdom may emerge at the end of a successful therapeutic relationship. Like Freud, Kohut suggests that analysis never truly ends but a successful analysis is eventually terminated.  During the concluding phases of analysis, wisdom attained by the client helps to maintain self-esteem even upon recognizing personal limitations.  The patient may exhibit a friendly disposition toward the analyst even though there are conflicts remaining; the patient has recognized the analyst’s limitations as well.  In brief, human frailties are now tolerated with composure instead of being defended against with tendencies toward self-aggrandizement or infantile idealization. This leads me to one final case illustration, also the story of an incest survivor; I’ll call her Pastor X.

    Pastor Z had a tendency toward self-aggrandizement, which turned to aggression in congregational relationships when she felt threatened.  Pastor X tended to compensate more with infantile idealization or I could make the case for immature behavior.  At one point I challenged her seminar group to be more supportive of her ministry experience and the presentation of it.  I asked them to stop their process for a moment and see if they couldn’t find a blessing in the paper they were discussing.  There was again, a moment of silence (that seems to be a red thread running through my experiences) and this Pastor burst into tears and ran from the room.  I was experienced as an authority figure and idealized by Pastor X but I was unaware of all this at that point in time.  My interrupting the group process pressed on her frailty or narcissistic vulnerability.  After she was able to regain her composure she talked with me privately and recounted part of her story of abuse.  When I challenged her group to be more supportive she was already feeling attacked and as the “mother figure” or idealized selfobject in the group it now felt as if I was being unsupportive.  She described her experience like this:  she asked me if I was familiar with the Kelloggs’ miniwheats breakfast cereal commercial on TV which showed an adult sitting at the table eating one minute; the next minute there was a disproportionately small child with a tiny, squeaky voice eating the cereal sitting at a huge table. In the moment that I had taken charge of the group process this image or metaphor reflected her internal world experience.  I thought this was a profound insight on her part and we worked through some of these issues in a directed study together. Tears were one way of defending against her vulnerability and represent a pattern of object-relating that arouses sympathy if not empathy from those in her web of relationships. I say sympathy and not empathy because eventually those who are close to her become immune to the somewhat dramatic if not histrionic outbursts.  The small, powerless child image became a pattern of object-relating for Pastor X which caused her to blur boundaries in ministry, react in child-like ways when threats were perceived and intensified her feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy.  Again, I want to emphasize that this individual had spent years in therapy and even had a background in social work. The “frosted miniwheats” experience became somewhat of a turning point but I would argue that Pastor X will always need to be diligent in her self-care and attentive to ways in which she unwittingly colludes in conflict that becomes self-destructive.  Two stories of incest survived with two very different sets of defense mechanisms or coping skills.  Yet both are congruent with Kohut’s theory of the self and his proposal for a cure. 

A Few Final Words

    Raising our own self-awareness and that of the students, clients and ministers we seek to help is, I’m confident, a goal we all share.  If I have one hope today it would be that we do more intentionally and deliberately to assist those in our care to see how their patterns of object-relating have direct connections to conflict situations.  Herbert Anderson wrote an article back in the mid-90s entitled:  “When You Come to A Fork in the Road, Take It”24  which focused on the importance of paradox in pastoral theology especially as it relates to the interdisciplinary nature of the field.  I’m stretching his metaphor somewhat but I view the work I am undertaking in a similar light.  Family systems theory is enormously helpful for understanding and managing conflict in church settings.  I advertise clinical competence in family systems approaches but I think we have for too long emphasized the system at the expense of the self.  So “when you come to a fork in the road” with your clients or your CPE residents, I’m making a plea that you take it.  Even if you are a purist who is more comfortable with one way of being, find ways to help those in pastoral professions to bring systems theory into conversation with more psychodynamic approaches. Countertransference was a word that had all but disappeared from use when I was an M.Div student and my experience was diminished I believe, as a result.  Countertransference, or the use of self, the understanding of self and our personal histories is vitally important to preventive care for clergy. The first time I use the word psychoanalytic with new students in a classroom setting there is usually an audible gasp.  Then there is somewhat of a silence and someone usually raises a question about Freud and whether or not it is appropriate to think along these lines in a seminary?  What about faith after all?  I reassure the students that I do believe in Jesus and that though I don’t agree with everything Freud ever wrote, I have learned much about human behavior from him which has been invaluable for my ministry. So in closing, let me say that I don’t blame ministers for church conflicts, nor do I believe that we are always our own worst enemies.  I do strive to find ways to help those in ministry or who are seeking to be in ministry to understand their personal losses and the ways that unresolved loss can contribute to conflict situations.  I’ve examined one type of serious loss—incest—that leaves a self with serious narcissistic vulnerabilities and unhealthy patterns of object-relating.  There are many other kinds of losses, which could also be examined in this same way.   These losses are the experiences that intensify our feelings of being strangers to ourselves.  I hope in some way you’ll be encouraged in your own work to focus on the recognition of or reconciliation with the stranger within because it makes a small contribution to the cessation of violence.  So let me end, where I began this morning:  “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.  A time to keep silence, and time to speak.”  Thank you.

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1 Lloyd Rediger, Clergy Killers: Guidance for Pastors and Congregations Under Attack (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 1997).
2 Michael P. Nichols, The Self in the System:  Expanding the Limits of Family Therapy (New York:  Brunner/Mazel, 1987).
3 See a discussion of emotional reactivity in Ronald W. Richardson, Creating a Healthier Church:  Family Systems Theory, Leadership, and Congregational Life (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1996),  91-101; 86.
4 Ibid., 91
5 Roy M. Oswald, Finding Leaders for Tomorrow’s Churches (Alban Institute, 1993), 60 as cited by Richard Lischer, The End of Words:  The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2005), 144.
6 See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Child Maltreatment 2003 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005). Online summary:  http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/publications/cm03/index.htm as cited by http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, last checked on 27 March 2007. 
7 James Dittes, Minister on the Spot (Philadelphia:  Pilgrim Press, 1970).
8 See http://www.pulpitandpew.duke.edu/clergyhealth.html for more information.
9 Paul Tillich, The Meaning of Health:  Essays in Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, and Religion, ed. Perry LeFevre (Chicago:  Exploration Press, 1984) 1-15.
10 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13. 
11 Ibid., 1.
12 See http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/news/releases/spring2007/pr022707.htm for more information.
13 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York:  W.W. Norton, 1979), 35.  See also, Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological 14 14 Pamela Cooper-White, Shared Wisdom: Use of the Self in Pastoral Care and Counseling (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2004), 23.
15 See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Child Maltreatment 2003 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005). Online summary:  http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/publications/cm03/index.htm as cited by http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, last checked on 27 March 2007
16 Herbert Anderson and Kenneth R. Mitchell, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs:  Resources for Pastoral Care (Philadelphia:  Westminster Press, 1983).
17 For a helpful introduction to Kohut’s thought see:  Allen M. Siegel, Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self (New York:  Routledge, 1996).
18 Erik Erikson, Toys and Reasons:  Stages in the Ritualization of Experience (New York:  W.W. Norton, 1977), 87.
19 Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (Connecticut:  International Universities Press, 1971), 116.
20 Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? ed., Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1984) 192-93.
21 Ibid., 172-191.
22 Heinz Kohut, The Search for the Self, vol. 4 (New York:  International Universities Press, 1990),  531-32.
23 How Does Analysis Cure? 82.
24 Herbert Anderson, “When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take it,” Journal of Pastoral Theology 5 (1995) 56-64.