A Pedestal is a Lonely Place…
by KC Bugg
I was in full-time ministry with Young Life for 12 years. For 8 of those years, I served as the Area Director in a small town in the Bible Belt, where being In ministry gave you a kind of rock star status. People admired you because you were doing “the Lord’s work” and placed you on a pedestal. While lots of perks came with the pedestal (i.e., free dinners, matchmaking services), I ultimately discovered that a pedestal was a lonely place to be. Unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rules came along with the pedestal. You weren’t allowed to misstep. You had to conform. No spiritual or emotional “wimps” were allowed on pedestals. You weren’t allowed to show your real self or be fully human, but instead you were always living under the weight of having to “represent.” The legalistic expectations and demands required a kind of duplicity. To be on a pedestal so often meant you had to put on a false self while your real needs often went unmet.
When your emotional needs aren’t being fulfilled enough, then you are much more vulnerable to unknowingly place your emotional needs on others. You can easily fall prey to the temptation of taking advantage of vulnerable people you are supposed to be caring for—looking to them to fill your own unmet emotional needs. I saw firsthand how ministry colleagues got themselves into dicey situations such as making inappropriate sexual advances towards adult volunteers and thereby destroying their lives, ruining their marriages, and being sidelined from ministry.
I’m grateful that the road to my becoming a psychologist took me through full-time ministry. I knew that I wanted a career in helping people, and ministry was a huge part of that. However, when I started going to my own therapy while I was on Young Life staff, I soon realized that I wanted to help people through offering them therapy—not necessarily because something was “wrong” with them, but so that they could do their own emotional work and live life more fully and freely. Who knows? Perhaps I could even help someone feel less isolated if they found themselves in the precarious position of being placed upon a pedestal.
With a background in ministry, Dr. KC Bugg is a psychologist who lives in New York and has a private practice offering therapy to those looking for a place of emotional respite and growth, as well as evaluating children and adults for neurocognitive and developmental conditions such as Autism, Learning Disabilities, and ADHD.
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Shepherd Heart maintains a national database for therapy referrals. Pastors looking for therapy referrals for themselves or parishioners can visit here, or call SH for a much larger list.
