Guarding Your Heart as You Minister to Needs | By Andrea Anderson Polk
Pastoral care can be a challenge, but it needn’t be overwhelming, especially as you try to grow a church. Discover 5 ways to guard against toxicity.
After over a decade of clinical experience counseling pastors and ministry leaders, one the great needs I see is their need for help in dealing with toxic relationships and wounded people among their team, staff, and parishioners.
Many of them believe a false narrative which states: “You are solely responsible for everything and everyone under your care.” This belief leaves pastors and other ministers feeling overwhelmed and leads to compassion fatigue, depression, and burnout.
Warning Signs and Characteristics of Toxic Relationships:
- This person tries to monopolize your time and consumes a lot of your energy.
- This person is more of a taker than a giver and does not give back to you in the same way.
- You feel responsible for carrying emotional weight of the relationship.
- This person is never satisfied, no matter how much you try to love, help, and please him/her.
- This person twists the truth and avoids dealing with facts and becomes accusatory, critical, or overly emotional when you try to point it out.
- This person leaves you feeling overwhelmed because your purpose in life revolves around him/her.
- You are unable to have a rational conversation with this person because simple things become very complicated.
- You feel manipulated, and your gut is telling you something is not quite right.
- You feel you have been gradually deceived over a period of time, and you realize this person is not who you thought he/she was.
The following are 5 steps that provide you with a helpful strategy for dealing with toxic relationships and wounded people:
1. Honor your reality. Be honest with yourself and face the truth.
People in toxic relationships seek to establish a dynamic where you question your reality and sanity through their process of manipulation, deceit, and control. Therefore, you become vulnerable to believe this person’s lies and consequently cannot see the reality of his/her harmful behavior.
It is important to listen and pay attention to how you feel when this person speaks to you. The first step in honoring your reality is to be honest with yourself.
Give yourself a reality check. Ask yourself questions such as:
- What am I really experiencing?
- Am I being lied to?
- Is something seriously wrong here?
- What are my gut and intuition telling me?
- Is something not OK?
Before the truth can set you free, you must identify which lies are holding you captive.
Facing the truth that you are involved in a toxic relationship allows you to accept reality and let go of lies you are told by this person and perhaps the lies you tell yourself.
You must devote yourself to facing the deepest truths you have avoided in difficult, painful relationships.
As a result, you can get unstuck and stop saying yes when you really mean no.
2. Stop doing their work. Switch the focus from them to you.
It is important to note that switching the focus to yourself is not selfish, Remember, it is not a mutual relationship because you are the one doing all the work.
Wounded people have adopted a learned helplessness attitude and lifestyle. Learned helplessness occurs when a person convinces himself/herself that he/she does not have the ability to change. The person develops a victim mentality.
Refrain from giving the person answers. Instead, listen and empathize by saying such things as, “That must be hard.”
Also, suggest other people who can help the individual: a counselor, an attorney, a mentor, a financial advisor, a doctor, or psychiatrist. By suggesting other people who can help, you are removing yourself from the equation and refusing to take on responsibility for another person.
This also allows the person to seek God and allow Him to intervene in his/her heart and life.
To overcome your tendency to put a toxic relationship’s demands and needs above your own, ask yourself these questions:
How do I feel?
What do I think?
What do I need?
What do I want?
Give yourself the same care, time, and attention you have given to the person you sought to help. There has been too much focus on taking care of the other person while you are suffering. It is not a mutual relationship.
Is this person investing his/her time and energy to genuinely change?
Some people do not want to do the work. In a toxic relationship, they want you do the work for them.
Perhaps you feel responsible for this person, and you carry his/her burdens. Feeling responsible for another person is a major signal that you are investing into a toxic relationship. These responsibilities may be financial, spiritual, social, mental, physical, or relational. Beware of the person’s attempt to use you for your kindness and take advantage of your generosity.
The more you give of yourself, the more the toxic person will take from you.
Resist this temptation and be strong regardless of how badly the person seems to need you.
It is important to develop new and healthy relational patterns. As a pastor or ministry leader, you are a role model for those on your team and under your care.
3. Set boundaries and use your voice effectively.
Good boundaries are objective, simple, and clear. Setting a boundary is an action or behavior change on your part.
Having a voice is just as it sounds: Use your words. For example, start by saying no.
Hold your boundaries. Recognize that people who do not respect your boundaries don’t want to understand them and therefore cannot honor them.
Be strong. Stand your ground, no matter what reaction you receive or how selfish and guilty you might feel.
Establishing boundaries allows room for you to hear God’s still, small voice so you can receive His wisdom about your situation.
Having a voice can sound like the following:
- “I am not asking for feedback right now.”
- “I need time to think on that. I’ll respond when and if I am ready.”
In my work with clients, I’ve found the following boundaries helpful when dealing with toxic relationships in one’s life and ministry:
- You are allowed to have a voice.
- You are not the rescuer in every crisis.
- You do not need to defend yourself.
- You do not need to explain every situation.
- You are allowed to have space.
Due to their woundedness, difficult people filter interactions with you through a lens of rejection. Unhealthy people are extremely defensive and operate from a position of shame, usually from earlier wounds that have nothing to do with you, so they can go on the attack and cannot take responsibly for themselves.
It is not possible to be responsible for carrying the feelings of another person because they do not belong to you in the first place.
The person might say he/she wants to heal, needs your help, and wants to change, but time will tell if the person’s actions correspond to his/her words.
The crucial element is for you to do your part as a pastor, ministry leader, or team member by setting boundaries and using your voice effectively in the relationship. If you do those behaviors, you are going to find out whether the person will change or not.
4. Validate your emotions and express your needs.
Validating your emotions means being honest with yourself about what you are feeling and learning how to honor your feelings.
Sadly, many people of faith believe emotions are sinful, emotions should be ignored, emotions are irrelevant to our spiritual life, or emotions are an obstacle to faith.
The truth is: We are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1: 26). Our emotions are a natural part of who we are and how we were created. If we numb our emotions, we are dismissing vital data God intended for us when he created us.
Our emotions are indicators, not dictators, meaning that we do not let our emotions govern our behavior. We are not led by our emotions.
We pay attention to the valuable information they provide us.
Most of us go through life disconnected from our true selves and unaware of who we are, what we feel, and what we need. This is largely due to our childhood, when we were taught, implicitly or explicitly, by our parents and caregivers to ignore or deny our needs and feelings in order to gain acceptance or avoid punishment.
Unhealthy people in toxic relationships consistently invalidate your emotions and dismiss your needs. When you do not know what your feelings and needs are, you do not know how to communicate them or how to meet your needs in healthy ways.
Our needs tell us the truth about ourselves; therefore, when we do not trust ourselves and our ability to make decisions, we struggle to trust God to guide us to truth.
5. Seek professional help. Create a strategy with knowledgeable experts.
Many of my clients are pastors and ministry leaders, and they find themselves dealing with wounded people in toxic relationships. They ask me if that person will ever change, get better, or heal. My response is: “People can change, but you cannot change them.”
I am not disregarding the fact that people can change if they are willing to do the work, but people must exert their own will in this process.
If you find yourself in a difficult, painful, or exhausting relationship with another person and feel stuck, I encourage you to seek help from a counselor to assist you in the process of advocating for your needs, using your voice effectively, setting boundaries, and expressing your emotions in a safe and compassionate environment.
You can also learn specific tools to help you know how to deal with the toxic relationship. Even the most intelligent, compassionate, and spiritual people have difficulty knowing the difference between a toxic relationship and a healthy relationship. It can be tricky.
Remember Proverbs 11:14, “In the multitude of counselors there is safety.”
Ultimately, applying these 5 steps to deal with the toxic relationships in your ministry, church, or personal life will help you avoid burnout, disappointment, self-doubt, and fatigue.
Release yourself from carrying burdens at the expense of losing yourself and your initial passion of serving your Creator and caring for His people.
Toxic relationships can steal the joy of your purpose and thwart your God-given calling to be a vessel. You are a disciple, a follower of Christ. You can usher in freedom to captives and bring healing to the brokenhearted.
We can only take people under our care as far as we are willing to go ourselves.
There is no better time like the present to seek the truth that leads to freedom.
The good news is there is hope. It is never too late to be proactive and to take the necessary steps to obtain freedom. As John 8:32 says, “…you will know the truth, and the truth you set you free.”
This article is excerpted from Andrea's book, The Cuckoo Syndrome: The Secret to Breaking Free from Unhealthy Relationships, Toxic Thinking, and Self-Sabotaging Behavior.
