Are you a walking wounded youth worker?

Bent double over the dining table, trying desperately to plan out a term of meaningful, life-changing projects. Feeling the crushing weight of irony that nothing has felt meaningful or life-changing for a while. You can’t work.

Lying in bed cradling your pillow tightly against your head, staying unnaturally still, holding muscles tense, heart beating in your throat. Replaying conversations and rehearing soundbites of conflicts never satisfactorily solved. You can’t sleep.

Hearing an email tone on your laptop and immediately starting to breathe harder and lose concentration as palpable dread squeezes itself unwelcomed into your psyche. You see it’s just spam then sigh deeply with tangible relief. You can’t switch off.

Moving your head around and around, pinching at various points where your spine meets your skull, trying to release a pressure that has become constant and subversive. Eyes closed, seeking momentary relief looking to remember a time when you weren’t aching. You can’t stop hurting.

Does any of this sound familiar? You might be one of the many walking wounded youth workers.

Adrenaline – The youth worker drug

It was eventually on doctor’s orders that I moved on from my first ministry position. I was a young, inexperienced youth worker in a deeply unhealthy church. I wasn’t able to handle the constant presence of conflict, which manifested as an ever-present and continuously growing shame.

When shame takes root, all decisions become clouded with fear. When you live with fear as a reactionary constant, then adrenaline production becomes part of your body’s usual function. Once you flood a system with adrenaline for more than a few days at a time, the body begins to shut down. Tension headaches, fatigue, insomnia, even dizziness and blackouts soon follow. The cute word for this is ‘stress’, yet the more biologically sound phrase would be impending total meltdown.

When your heart is filled with shame, your reactions driven by fear, your system full of adrenaline, and your biology ruled by stress, then the result is something a little akin to depression – you numb up, and you seize up.

I’m a guitarist, and one of my favourite sound effects is ‘compression.’ What compression does is boost lower signals and limit stronger ones, so quieter guitar strums are made louder and louder strums made quieter – compressing everything into a smaller spectrum for a consistent sound. This happens to humans too; bad things are amplified into unbearable constants, and amazing things diluted and dulled into insignificance.

This is also a little like coming off an addiction. You crash and you crash hard. When the character Matt Albie from Aaron Sorkin’s comedy-drama ‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’ comes off pills, he is told “Miss America could stand in front of you naked and hand you a Pulitzer Prize and you’d be depressed.”

Personally, you might become strongly combative and comparative, glibly writing swaths of people off for mundane things. You could become personally hurt by some peers’ successes, and quietly revel in the downfall of others.

Spiritually, God seems to go quiet, worship ineffectual, prayer hollow and echoey, and true passion becomes a distant memory. The natural result is that you become not very good at your job – so you try harder, fail more, and hurt more.

Any of this sound familiar? You might be one of the many walking wounded youth workers.

The Walking Wounded

I’ve met so many youth workers with stories of work-related hurt, rejection, stress and loss. Some stories are past tense, yet with an obvious weight still carried around their neck like a milestone on a chain. Others happen in real time. I regularly meet youth workers who are, knowingly or unknowingly, the walking wounded.

Is it you? If so, it’s time to act.

If you’re trapped in a job that is literally draining your health, disempowering your work, abating your healthy relationships, and sucking dry your connection with God then that is not ok.

It’s not normal, and it’s not ok. At least not for any prolonged period of time.

Sure ‘it’s ok to not be ok’ – fine, but staying trapped is a bad plan for getting ok again.

God called you to thrive in your mission and ministry through a network of healthy relationships, empowering and releasing worship, connecting church membership, and a growing, accountable connection to authority.

If this isn’t happening, then something somewhere has to give.

Wounds or scars?

When I was a walking wounded youth worker, I remembered these lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s seminal song ‘The Boxer’, and felt painful empathy. Even today they bring a tear to my eye, and a heavy lump to my throat when I remember just how it felt to carry those wounds:

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev’ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains

The hardest thing about carrying wounds is to take the necessary steps to allow the wounds to heal. Treatment is often uncomfortable, awkward, painful, and even debilitating for a time. You have to trust yourself to others, become vulnerable and exposed, and make big decisions that acknowledge and repair the hurt.

Deep wounds will often leave a scar, but a scar is not a wound. It’s a reminder of pain – and that can hurt too – but it’s not the same as real-time pain.

For me, even when I left a difficult job, I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – so I would relive rather than just remember the pain – keeping the wounds from scaring. It wasn’t until a few years later that I saw a therapist and started to address them properly that the hurt began to change shape.

Without treatment, wounds won’t become scars, they will remain as wounds, and you will continue to be the walking wounded, then the crawling wounded, and ultimately just the wounded.

What can you do?

• It might be you need a clarifying, honest, and vulnerable conversation with your leadership.
• You could think about talking to a professional therapist or person-centred counsellor.
• You could list your aims and objectives and think – honestly – about what needs to change to see them happen.
• You could try to measure your work against realistic and achievable outcomes.
• You could take your days off and holidays more consistently. Turn your phone off for a while.
• You could mentally recategorise your work context from local ministry to hostile mission.
• There might be conferences, networks, and support groups to connect with.

OR…

You might just need to get out.

At some point the poop needs to hit the fan. As much as I value and respect youth workers who say they want to be in it for the long haul, that long haul doesn’t begin if you’re always in defence mode. You can be in a position for ten years and not see any growth or maturity.

You might need a conversation.

I’m happy to chat (timgoughuk@gmail.com), but better somebody who knows you well. Pray. Think. Talk.

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash