Guide to Emotional Health

The field of “emotional health” is broad, and while it’s impossible to reduce the topic to a quick “add-water-and-stir” formula, one component is fairly easy to understand: maintaining a strong “attachment field,” or in layman’s terms, a strong set of caring and involved relationships.   

To understand this paradigm, picture a large trampoline with four sides. 

Side One represents primary family (parents, siblings, children);

Side Two represents extended family (grandparents, uncles/aunts, cousins);

Side Three represents one’s lifetime collection of precious friends; and

Side Four represents all other friends.  Emotionally healthy people generally have a sum total of 15-25 meaningful relationships, somehow divided up with a few on each of the four sides.  Each relationship is like a spring on a trampoline: they help us “bounce” better.  That’s an analogy. 

The sum total of these relationships may vary between introverts and extroverts, with the latter having a few more.  What do these relationships look like?  Here are four common traits: 

A.    Meaningful contact – whenever contact occurs it is meaningful (not incidental) to both parties.  Contact may be regular or not, but each time you’re together, it’s meaningful to both sides.  

B.    Mutual investment – both parties are clearly invested in one another, even if there’s a cost. 

C.    Equality and symmetry – there is balance in the relationship. Neither party is rescuing nor being rescued by the other; neither is more-or-less powerful or significant in the relationship. 

D.    Consistently positive – the relationship is consistently positive and encouraging. You feel consistently supported and uplifted within this friendship, and you do the same for the other person. 

Both isolation and dependency issues tend to increase as the meaningful numbers around this “trampoline” dwindle. So also do addiction and related issues. Human beings were created by God, to function most healthily within healthy and meaningful relationships. These relationships are not “the crowd” that may surround a person in ministry. They are enduring, close-in, loving relationships; people who know you deeply and love you anyway. 

Ministry can be enormously isolating.  Pastors are often extremely isolated from those they serve.  It’s a self-protective thing since pew-sitters are notoriously gossipy.  And missionaries fight monumental giants of isolation from loved ones, plus the stress of learning new languages and cultures.  Into these lonely and painful spaces, Satan tends to offer hollow silos of power, to medicate the loss of the four-part relationship structure presented above. 

Maintaining one’s coterie of strong, supportive, prayerful, and encouraging relationships, helps those in ministry maintain optimum mental health. And spiritual health. When Christ said he came to serve, it meant shedding his power and grandeur (Phil. 2:5-7). It also meant making genuine attachments (friendships) with his disciples (Jn. 15:15), while maintaining his strong attachment to his Father (Lk. 6:12). Satan attempted to use power to derail Jesus’ mission (Mt. 4:1-11; Jn. 6:1-15). Power, in ministry, is almost always destructive to God’s calling and purposes. 

Summary: Maintaining a strong “attachment field” of meaningful, supportive relationships tends to strengthen spiritual and mental health, providing durability and maturity in life and especially in ministry.        

John Splinter is the Director of Staff Development with GlobalGrace