who chaplains the chaplain?

"who chaplains the chaplain?"  that is a question that i have been asked multiple times by people, and i usually just smile and give some half-hearted answer about other chaplains or God, or, depending on the day, i might respond with, "that's a good question."  it is one that every chaplain wrestles with, whether they will readily admit it or not.  when i first started this blog, it was a very personal endeavor, and helped me navigate through some very difficult waters during a very dark time in my life.  while it has remained personal, it has evolved into more of a place for me to challenge others on what it really means to be a CHRIST-follower.  this post, however, is far from that.  it is intensely personal, and a view on what goes on behind the scenes in this twisted brain of mine, and is a challenge meant strictly for me, but through it, i hope others might identify with the struggles that caregivers deal with, and can recognize those traits within themselves.

i'm messed up.  there, i said it.  but i don't know of any caregiver, specifically chaplains and pastors, that aren't messed up to some extent (ever noticed how psychiatrists are always a little "off"?).  of course, most never admit it, because we are the ones who are supposed to have it all together, right?  i have struggled with insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and an acute inability to focus for some time now.  i sought out Scriptures, and read articles from various resources, on how to address the problems i wrestled with, but at the time, i was not aware of what specifically they were.  we are told in our counseling classes that we are unable to counsel ourselves, or our families, because we are too personally involved, and i am the poster child for that.  i sought out a counselor a while back, but she was inept and told me that i was "normal" (i know, right?  if only she knew!) and that i would be okay.  this gave me a prescription to continue on as i had been, because everything was "okay."  however, as soon as i left for deployment, and i no longer had life to preoccupy myself with, the problems became magnified.  add to that the dramatic uptick in my counseling load (before i left, it was maybe 5-10 cases a week, which increased to 30-40 cases a week) and my tormentors came back with a vengeance, to the point where i could no longer ignore them.  i talked to the "doc" on the ship, which was a corpsman, and there was little they could do, so i was left to fend for myself.  i decided to draw upon some of my martial arts training of quieting the spirit through quiet meditation to try and gain some sort of clarity.  i know, sounds "new agey," but there is actually value in it, which is why Scripture tells us numerous times to be quiet or still. 

it's amazing how clear things can be when we quiet our minds.  society is the antithesis of peace and quiet, as we always have something going on to keep us occupied.  nirvana brutally captured the attitude of generation x, and subsequently the millenial generation, in their song, "smells like teen spirit," when they said, "here we are now, entertain us."  i recently read an article that said that one of the greatest fears of today's americans is mental silence.  just ask somebody to turn their phone off, their tv off, and sit in a quiet place and do nothing, and very few people can stand it for long.  we have to be engaged.  we have to know what's going on.  being mentally quiet is unnerving for us, because then we might have to deal with our own thoughts.  well, i dealt with my own thoughts, and what i came up with surprised me, not in so much of what it was, but how i was able to ignore it and remain in blissful ignorance, despite warnings from those i love.

take for instance my insomnia.  as a counselor, it is my job to "fix" people.  i listen to their problems, and then i attempt to give them a road map to help lead them out of their situation.  whether they follow it or not, is entirely on them.  however, when you deal with everyone's "emotional vomit" all day, some of it tends to stick to you, especially the cases where there is victimization.  the numbers of sexual assault victims alone in the military are staggering, and many of them happened before they joined.  a lot of people join the military to get away from their past, or to try and regain a sense of power that they lost through abuse from others, so it's natural that those past hurts are going to resurface.  then there is the problem of "moral injury," the term used for a person who was forced to violate some sense of morals or ethics by what they do in the military.  as chaplains, we have a front row seat for the results of mankind's evil in the world.  we spend so much time dealing with everyone else's problems, that there is very little time to process and deal with our own life stressors.  i have found pt to help, which is why i always come home from deployment to find my jeans are now too big in the waist from fat loss, and my shirts are too small in the chest and shoulders from muscle gain.  however, that only gets out the physical effects of stress.  the mental effects are still there.  so i find myself at night laying in my rack staring at the ceiling or the rack above me unable to go to sleep.  when i close my eyes, my thoughts fire in rapid succession, akin to somebody with a remote control changing the channel two times per second.  you see, chaplains and pastors don't do this work for the money.  we do it because we care.  my heart hurts for the person who sits in my office crying as they recall to me in vivid detail a sexual assault that happened to them.  my anger burns towards the piece of filth that would perpetrate such an act.  i tear up with the person who just found out that their grandmother died, and they are unable to go home to the funeral because it doesn't meet the criteria of immediate family.  i empathize with the person that is homesick, as i am very familiar with that pain myself.  i wrestle with the concept of serving in an organization that exists to kill the enemy, all the while trying to hold on to the "love your enemy' concept, as well as helping others struggle with that same thing.  and trying to just shut that off when a person walks out of the room either means you don't really care, or you didn't really listen.  so at night, scene after scene flashes in front of your eyes when you close them, and you open them back up, hoping to doze off to sleep.

if you do get to sleep, then there's the nightmares.  when you've done as many casualty calls as i have, those take a prominent place in your emotions and fears, and you find yourself choking back tears in a memorial day ceremony, only to rush back to your room and cry in private as the memories of all the lives you witnessed shattered in an instant crash into you like a tsunami.  which leads to the fear, especially when you are in a very volatile area.  while we can never truly communicate the fears and the dangers that we feel when deployed in areas of the world where there are people that have the means and would love to kill us, and we try to reassure ourselves that we are safe due to our defenses we have spent millions developing, we still feel them.  i am not afraid of dying in the eternal sense, as i know my eternal destiny.  however, in the temporal sense, it is a very real fear.  it's not so much the dying, but the method.  i had a patient when i worked at the hospital who was quickly losing his battle with cancer tell me, "i don't know how to die."  it is a very real struggle with everyone, because death is a foreign concept to us.  however, my greatest fear is for my family.  one recurring nightmare is me showing up at a casualty call at my own house.  the face of every family member from every casualty call and every funeral and every memorial service is permanently etched on my brain, and i never want my family to have to go through that.  some might say, "well, then you shouldn't be in the military," to which i respond, "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."  the question for everyone is not if, but how and when.  civilians have the luxury of not thinking about it on a daily basis, as death is something that only visits them infrequently when someone they love dies.  for those in the military, however, it is a daily thought.  whenever we see turmoil in some area of the world, our thought is automatically, "will i be called to go there and fight and possibly die?"  every single person in the military, after they have been in for a year or two, will have to face death.

another recurring nightmare is losing my bride.  a frequent counseling case for chaplains is the one of the military member returning home to find their spouse gone, or finding out that their spouse has been having an affair.  while i do not think that my bride will ever do anything like that, and she has never given me a reason to think that, and constantly reassures me of her devotion and love for me, when you hear of infidelity and abandonment multiple times a month or even a week from service members, it makes its way into your nightmares.  that's why chaplains tend to be more fiercely protective of our marriages than most.  this is not unique to me, as i have talked with other chaplains who struggle with the same thing.  we also know our tendency to internalize things, and when we come home, our spouses feel it, and there's always that worry that one day they will not be able to deal with it anymore and throw in the towel.  so we do what we can to dote on our spouses and go overboard in telling them how much we love them.  or, conversely, in the case of some chaplains that i have met, they turn to abuse, exerting their power over their spouse to compensate for their felt powerlessness in their job.  it's a strange paradox, but one that is all too real.  i had one barber tell me that he knew a chaplain that was a senior officer, and was the best chaplain he had ever met, but the guy was beating the daylights out of his family and had numerous police visits to his house.  when you deal with the darkest depravity of men's souls on a daily basis, you must be careful to not let the darkness overtake you.  as i quoted before, "he who fights monsters should take care that in the process he does not become a monster himself."  there's also the nightmare of some tragedy happening to my family (car wreck, house fire, tornado, etc.) that everyone experiences, but that is simply due to a lack of knowledge of what's going on back home due to limited communication.

the insomnia and nightmares leads to sleep deprivation.  this then causes the a.d.d. to be amplified.  there was one day when i seriously could not counsel anyone because while i was talking to them my eyes would not focus, and my thoughts would jump randomly like a golf ball teed off in a tile bathroom.  every little thing would catch my attention, such as the peeling paint on the door facing, the crookedness of the rank device on their collar, the fact that i was out of underwear and needed to do laundry, the noise of the needle-gunner outside, and on and on and on.  this was one of the worst cases i had ever experienced, and is not a regular occurrence, but it is always there to some extent.  i have resorted to using a rosary when i pray and have devised my own road map for each of the beads to develop a systematic approach to prayer, otherwise i cannot focus long enough to construct a prayer sentence.  i write so frequently because writing is one thing i can do without my thoughts wandering too much, but sometimes that is even a chore (as you probably have seen from some of my blog posts when i chase a lot of "rabbit trails.")

when i get home, it will take weeks for me to drop the hyper-vigilance and to let my guard down and get out of the "work and fix everything" mode.  i am thankful every day that i have a bride who understands this, and is patient with me as i get home and want to go back to work immediately because i feel guilty over not being there.  she is insistent that i take time off, and she helps to save me from myself.  i have to constantly remind myself that my first ministry is to my family, and to focus on them.  i am looking forward to this upcoming billet, where i won't have to deploy for three years, and i can actually get reintegrated back into my home and not feel like i am a short-term visitor there, and i can give them the attention they so richly deserve.

so why did i lay all this out there?  one, is because this is a way for me to figure myself out.  "to thine own self be true," right?  two, is so that other chaplains and caregivers out there know that they are not alone in their feelings.  too often, i see chaplains and pastors develop a superhero complex, acting like they are invincible, when inside they are struggling as well.  only by admitting these struggles, can we ever hope to move forward.  it is said that when you point the finger, you have three pointing back at you.  i preach to others to take care of yourself so you can take care of others, but i know plenty of chaplains who don't do that, me being one of them.  devoting your life to helping others is a noble cause, but even our Saviour took time away from the crowds to take care of Himself.  if He can do it, we can as well, and should.  three, it is a matter of accountability.  i am putting myself out there so those that i love in my life can hold me accountable.  so when i am being stubborn and burning out, you can say, "chris, i know what you're doing, and you need to stop.  you need to take care of yourself."  and fourth, is because i know a large number of people who read this blog, and many of them are prayer warriors.  i would not be where i am today were it not for the large numbers of people who are praying for me.  i would be in a padded cell somewhere with a straight jacket (although some of you may argue that i still belong there!)  i would be another statistic of a pastor who fell to the wayside.  i was told in seminary by one of my professors, that two out of three pastors that enter the ministry would not last in that ministry to retirement.  as an over-zealous student ready to charge hell with a water pistol, i thought that would never be me, but now i know that it very well could be.  so i covet your prayers.  many times we as chaplains are hesitant to ask for prayers for ourselves, out of some misguided form of righteousness, and will say when people ask us for prayer requests, "just pray that God uses me to reach people."  well, yes.  i do want that.  but i also need prayer for my own strength, in the same manner that gideon had helpers to hold his arms up during the battle.  the strength of men fades, but the strength of God doesn't.  and that's what i need.  the strength to continue when i don't feel like going on (and i feel like yelling at that sailor, "stop being an idiot, moron!")  the strength to recognize when i'm bleeding out and need help.  the strength to care for my family after i'm fatigued from caring for all the service members i just spent months with.  the strength to hold on to my faith when i have witnessed the depravity of mankind at its worst.  i have resolved to not keep this to myself, and this post is the first step in getting it out there.  i am maintaining, as i always do, and i am practicing good self-care techniques from out here, until i can get home and address my care more directly.  so no need to worry about me.  most of us go through this (at least most of the ones i've talked to,) i just chose to be honest about it in hopes that others will, too.

so the question remains, "who chaplains the chaplain?"  my answer:  we all do.  you chaplain the chaplain by praying for them, by caring for them when they're down and out, by loving them when they're distant, by encouraging them when they feel defeated because there's always one more they could have helped, by showing them tough love when they're being stubborn, by asking them how they are really doing and not accepting a "fine" answer, and by never giving up on them even when they've given up on themselves.  but all we do all day is "talk to people," right?