Getting Into The Work Without Doing The Work

When Helpers Harm

Decades ago - before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram - I counseled a woman who’d been sexually and spiritually abused by a longtime father-figure and pastor. Within months of beginning our work, she shifted from despair to decisive action, deciding rather abruptly to start a non-profit championing abused women.

And I cheered her on.

Within a year, though, many who’d joined her in the work were quitting, not least because they found her leadership to be reactive and hostile. Some even named it as abusive, as she - now the one in power - inflicted harm.

Her rush to help, even amidst unhealed wounds, seemed noble - even to me. But it was tumultuous at best, and toxic at worst.

I learned a lot through that experience of championing her efforts - and I apologized to her.

What I learned is that unhealed wounds will always leak into our leadership, no matter how noble our cause. I learned that the work we do in the world must be matched by the work we do within ourselves, or else our efforts will be reactive rather than redemptive.

What I see now is that I should’ve encouraged her slow, steady work - recognizing that the parts of her rushing to right wrongs were acting from a primal fight response within, not from a place of integrity and wholeness.

Here’s the point: Those of us in these helping spaces aren’t immune to issues of character. We’re not immune to poor boundaries and projection, countertransference and coercion, using and abusing.

In fact, today - when trauma “experts” and abuse advocates and therapist influencers are filling our social feeds - I find myself in more and more conversations related to misconduct, malfeasance, and misuse of power within the helping professions. While much of my abuse-consultancy work has been with pastors through the years, in just the last two years I’ve seen a major uptick in challenging situations involving educators, counselors, advocates, non-profit leaders, and social media self-help gurus.

Many of you know that I just submitted a book on character formation to my publisher - which I’ll be highlighting in my Substack in the months to come. Here’s a reflection from it:

Even self-awareness itself seems to have become a commodity – marketed, platformed, and repackaged, sometimes fueling the same narcissism we sought to escape. Caught up in the same attention-economy that is discipling our scattered minds, manifesting in performative ways of leading and caring that are just surface-deep.

As a longtime pastor, I feel a certain permission to name the harm of pastors - and I’ve done that in various ways over the years, not least in When Narcissism Comes to Church. As a veteran of 25+ years as a licensed therapist and a seminary educator, I feel the same permission with regard to a wider swath of helping professions. We are not immune - and with the power we hold, we have the capacity to steward great healing or cause great harm.

Can you imagine the compounded trauma of those harmed by folks who are supposed to be safe, supposed to be healers?

And the number of stories is growing.

A prominent therapist-influencer cited for boundary and ethical violations. The longtime leader of the American Association of Christian Counselors called to account for dozens of plagiarism violations. The leader of a progressive org developed to advocate for the marginalized found to have engaged in behavioral misconduct. A prominent abuse podcaster’s confessions of longtime pornography addiction, lies, and marital rupture undermining the trust of the very women he sought to advocate for. And so many more, most brewing behind-the-scenes, without public awareness or account. One of the few working in this space and highlighting these stories is Leah Denton, who I connected with for her podcast some time ago.

There are many reasons why harm perpetrated by helpers is particularly noxious. But what’s striking to me is just how many people get into this work without doing the work.

I’ve told the story often of my first PhD cohort in 2005, many who were therapists - and likely one of the most toxic groups I’ve ever been in. I watched people who were entrusted with the most vulnerable souls act out their own unresolved pain in real time. The envy, competitiveness, and passive-aggressive power plays in that room were staggering. Here were people trained to listen, to attune, to bear witness - and yet so many were caught up in their own internal storms, acting out of their unresolved pain.

It left me wondering: How can those who have never confronted their own shadow hold space for someone else’s?

This is why character formation matters so deeply.

Skills, training, presence – even theological brilliance or psychological expertise – are never enough. When the inner life is neglected, our leadership will be reactive rather than redemptive.

We see this everywhere today.

· Performative empathy on social media masking profound emptiness.

· Boundaryless advocacy devolving into savior complexes.

· Unprocessed grief and rage disguised as prophetic zeal.

And here’s the paradox: the very work of healing often attracts those who have been profoundly wounded. There’s nothing wrong with that - in fact, it can be redemptive. Many of the most gifted counselors, pastors, and advocates I know were drawn to this work because they know pain from the inside. I think of my clinical counseling students in our program at Western, challenged to do their own work in order to engage this work of soul care more faithfully.

It’s when the pain goes unnamed and unintegrated that helpers are prone to harm.

Unhealed wounds don’t just leak - they flood. And when they do, whole communities can drown.

This is why our work as helpers must always be twofold:

1. Doing the outer work of advocacy, therapy, teaching, preaching, and leading.

2. Doing the inner work of integration, wound-tending, shadow reckoning, and character formation.

When these two are held together, the work becomes sustainable, safe, and deeply transformational. When they are split apart, the results are catastrophic.

So my plea – to myself and to all of us – is this: slow down. Tend to your inner life with the same diligence you give to your outer work. Don’t mistake performative action for authentic transformation.

Because the world doesn’t just need more helpers. It needs whole helpers – people whose presence is healing because they’ve experienced it personally - at the depths.

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(Short pieces like this are almost always offered for free from me, but I am grateful to those of you who’ve become paid subscribers - because you know this work comes with a cost, in so many ways. Please consider supporting writers you appreciate. For many of us, this is a part of how we make a living - and your support inspires me, and others, to continue to write!)