Addiction and Anxiety: Pastoral Acting Out

Addictive emotional processes affect everyone within their influence. Congregations are not the only ones susceptible to addictive emotional processes. Pastors are also vulnerable. This vulnerability may lead to pastoral misconduct, including sexual misconduct.

Patrick Carnes is one of the most respected pioneers in the area of sexual misconduct. In Contrary to Love: Helping the Sexual Addict, Carnes provides remarkable insights regarding the progression of addiction in general and sexual addiction in particular. His books make the anxiety-addiction connection undeniable. Perhaps one of Carnes’ most important premises, echoed by the writings of many others, is that addictions seldom appear as a single addiction. Instead, they nearly always come in multiples. For congregations, this means that consultants, pastors, leaders, and members will have to find ways to untangle the web of intertwined, overlapping, and confused—but interrelated—foci of the addictive process. The key for untangling the web is to address the root cause: uncontrolled and improperly managed anxiety.

For pastors, this means that when misconduct occurs, it is not just one issue—the sexual misconduct—that must be dealt with. Instead, the misconduct may involve acting out an entire complex of multiple addictions, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and out-of-control childhood issues within the context of an anxious congregational setting. The higher the levels of organizational anxiety—covert or overt, acute or chronic—the higher the likelihood that pastoral anxiety will increase. Tragically, with increased anxiety one can expect a corresponding increase in misconduct.

Pastors entangled in the whirlwind of congregational anxiety often find themselves overwhelmed with myriad unidentifiable sources of anxiety. Ironically, the harder those who don’t understand the anxieties try to identify and work through them, the more anxious they become. As anxiety triggers a sense of being out of control, anxious pastors begin acting out their anxiety in a variety of unhealthy out-of-control ways. This may include everything from sexual misconduct, leaving the ministry, becoming overly rigid or overly flexible, expecting perfection from those around them, or becoming apathetic.

Whatever the nature of the acting out, pastors, their families, and churches experience great pain. As in the case of Humpty-Dumpty, picking up the pieces after the great fall is often extremely difficult and painful. Sometimes it can seem impossible. Successful recovery requires several years and removal from unhealthy environments.

When acting out occurs, the answer is not merely to discipline the individual. Simply being judgmental and removing the pastor is not really helping the hurt, nor is it directing the pastor to healing. Often, simplistic solutions such as "just get rid of the pastor" or "you’re gone" are not only naïve; they may also be rooted in the anxiety of those who throw the first stone. Too afraid to risk dealing with the offender, too anxious to face the possibility of extending forgiveness and trust, and lacking the capacity to talk, trust, and feel, these individuals may simply cast hurting pastors aside, often toward greater pain and hurt.

Without compromising God’s will in these matters, healthy intervention is necessary for both the pastor and the congregational system in which ministry was conducted. Both parties are affected. Both must deal with the intense multiplicity of anxious interactions that propelled the acting-out behavior. If possible, intervention should guide the individual—and congregation—through intense brokenness, forgiveness, renewal, and restoration to an appropriate place within the Kingdom of God and the experience of grace.