When I started work as a chaplain, I was later described as looking like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Looking back, I remember feeling just that scared, but I didn’t know it was so apparent to others! One of the lessons I took away from Clinical Pastoral Education was that others are scared, too, and that there is relief from the anxieties of public service in the intimate sharing with those in the same boat.
Until I was able to tell others I trusted about my worries, I felt I was the only one who had ever been fearful doing the work I was doing. As time has passed, I don’t feel a whole lot less intimidated by the importance of the work I do, but I have discovered that sharing with a trusted friend is just as important as that work. The antidote for insecurity is intimacy!
I am finding as I talk with people—even folks like doctors, CEOs, supervisors, and other ministers—that insecurity, usually kept secret, runs rampant among us. I have decided it is part of the condition we call “being human.”
Honestly, how many times have you heard that little voice inside your head say, “I hope this isn’t the day they all find out I am really winging this”? Or how about this one: “I feel like such a fraud.”
Ask any old timer how familiar are the feelings and signs of insecurity: feelings of isolation, unmeetable expectations, quiet desperation, not asking questions, overconfident behavior, unclear boundaries, dependence upon an authority when maybe there isn’t one, and blaming. The old timer will probably respond that it is personally familiar and very common. Yet this is usually experienced as a private misery.
So where does this insecurity come from? Usually it arises from a disconnect between an idealized role or role model and our own estimation of how well we measure up to that ideal. When comparing oneself to some Heroic Other, even the most honorable performance can leave one feeling like a bungling incompetent.
Because I am involved deeply in challenging work, if my sense of stability is based upon mentors or heroic role images, however honorable, my foundations and work are going to be pretty shaky. However, if I understand my role of chaplain as a calling, respond out of skill and training, and know that who I am is more than what I do, I feel steady and my work shows it.
While doing my own work, which is sometimes rather boring and other times downright traumatic, I find myself thinking, “Is this what a chaplain does?” Then I wonder: what ideal chaplain I am comparing myself to? It surprises me to hear myself just as spontaneously respond with yet another noticing, “Well, I am the Chaplain, and this is what I am doing!”
Any dependency upon an externalized ideal of the 'Heroic Other' melts away when I recognize and claim my own work as calling and vocation.
