Connecting Youth Ministry Leaders and Mental Health Professionals with Rev. Amanda Rigby and Dr. Elizabeth Watters | Youth & Campus Ministry Burnout

by Nov 28, 2023Transforming Engagement: the Podcast

In our country, the undeniable truth is that a mental health crisis is profoundly affecting youth and families.

What if there was a more robust connection between youth ministry leaders and mental health professionals?
Could this create a supportive environment for young people and those caring for them?

Today, we welcome Reverend Amanda Rigby, the pastor of Christian Education and Formation at Edenton Street United Methodist Church, and Dr. Elizabeth Watters, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Together, they co-founded The Well Mental and Spiritual Care.

They introduce a groundbreaking model that emphasizes collaboration between a youth ministry leader and a licensed family therapist.

Through their personal experiences, the guests candidly discuss their own seasons of burnout and the strategies they employed (and are still employing) to navigate these challenging seasons. 

The conversation extends beyond their individual journeys, addressing the broader societal context of the mental health crisis affecting youth and families. Amanda and Elizabeth stress the importance of collaboration between mental health professionals and youth leaders to establish a supportive environment.

They advocate for open conversations, the sharing of personal experiences, and breaking the stigma surrounding mental health in faith settings. Additionally, they underscore the need for safe spaces, proper training, and dedicated budgets for mental health support.

You’ll hear Amanda reference another episode she recorded with us in this conversation. Stay tuned to hear more from Amanda on an episode releasing in just a few weeks along with a panel of youth and campus ministry leaders. 

We hope this conversation sparks further dialogue and action, encouraging us all to contribute to a more supportive and compassionate environment for the well-being of our young people and those who guide them.

Listener Resources:

About our guests:

Rev. Amanda Rigby is the Pastor of Christian Education and Formation at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, NC. Amanda also co-directs The Well, a practice of spiritual direction and therapy.

 

Dr. Elizabeth Watters is the other co-director of The Well. Elizabeth is a licensed marriage and family therapist, researcher, and professor who specializes in exploring and working with the impact of systemic trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) across the lifespan.

 

Episode Transcript:

Rose: Today I’m happy to welcome back to the podcast Reverend Amanda Rigby, the pastor of Christian Education and Formation at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Amanda also co-directs The Well, a practice of spiritual direction of therapy. And a first time guest, Dr. Elizabeth Watters, the co-director of The Well. Elizabeth is a licensed marriage and family therapist, researcher and professor who specializes in exploring and working with the impact of systemic trauma and adverse childhood experiences across the lifespan. I am thrilled to have you both with us for this conversation today. Welcome.

Amanda: Thank you so much, Rose. 

Elizabeth: : Thank you.

Rose: Yeah. So I always start out and I’ll ask the two of you, can you just tell us a bit of your story, how you began your work and what you’re doing now? Why don’t we start with you, Dr. Watters?

Elizabeth: Great. So I graduated about two years ago with my PhD in family therapy from University of Iowa and since, and I’ve been working as a full-time Professor at Alliant International University, but also about the time of graduation, I moved out to North Carolina to begin this business and project and just dreaming big dreams with Amanda. And so she and I have been friends for 11 years now, and she had called me up one night and said, “Hey, what if we start this business together or this nonprofit together, which is a route we’re going to take this, focused on mental health and ministry and spiritual wellness”. And we didn’t really know what that looked like at the time, but I guess one of the few silver linings of COVID and working remotely, it gave me the ability to move and continue working as she and I started to develop and then launch these ideas and build community-based partnerships and find the individuals we’re hoping to share this dream with. And so that’s what brought me to where I’m today is really that formative friendship in my life.

Rose: That’s awesome. And we’re going to get into the work that you do in just a few minutes, but Amanda, how about you? Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how this all came about for you?

Amanda: So I mentioned this in the other episode, but I grew up in the church and really sensed a call to ministry in the local church. And that looked like a lot of things, but initially it has looked like serving with youth and with children and young people as a youth pastor. And so that has been a huge part of my calling up until this point. And now I’m in this season of transition into this new role as a pastor of Christian Education and Formation. And as Elizabeth alluded to launching this nonprofit practice of spiritual direction and therapy. I’ve been in training the last two years as a spiritual director, which has really changed my life, my ministry, my calling, and I hope really prepared me well for this work that the two of us are going to get to do together. And so spiritual direction I think is traditionally an adult endeavor, but I don’t think it has to be. And I hope that things like therapy and things like spiritual direction continue to be normalized for young people, especially because it’s such an important, now I’m preaching, but it’s such an important part of overall health and wellness, both physically and mentally and spiritually too. So anyway, we’ll get more to that later, but I’m just excited to be able to collaborate with a therapist, with a trained therapist and a friend on this important work.

Rose: I could not agree more. I mean, I know that every generation has had to face whatever the current environment of the world is. In their own community and neighborhoods, but boy, post 2020 world, there’s a whole lot of just anxiety and despair. I mean, we could name it all, which is why I was really thrilled to have the two of you today to have this conversation. Why don’t we just start a little bit about, you know, have either one of you come close? I know Amanda, you told us on the panel discussion a little bit about you running upright against the burnout symptoms. Maybe just for the sake of our listeners, you could just tell us a little bit more. How close did you get? Were you in burnout? What were your symptoms?

Amanda: Yeah, so I would say that the time that I started to realize that I was in burnout, it had actually been happening for quite a while. I guess I wouldn’t say I was fully there, but I think I came very, very close and through very intentional moves, narrowly avoided landing there entirely. But the time that I noticed that was really about a year into the lockdown portion of the pandemic. And at that point, like many other pastors and youth pastors, we had made the shift at our church to fully online ministry. And nothing in my seminary education or other education had prepared me for that or any of us for that. And I found myself working overtime in part because there wasn’t anything else to do. And in part because I really wanted to keep alive this ministry that I had been pouring my work into for the last several years. And I remember when the pandemic started just thinking, oh my gosh, I’m going to have to watch this youth ministry in particular that I’ve been building just crumble and fall apart. And I think it was that realization really pushed me into kind of almost burnout was just that fear that everything that I had built was going to fall apart. And while that was pandemic specific and then later on social justice specific and mental health specific, those concerns were specific to that context in that time. I do think that fear is actually a big part of what maybe keeps us working so hard that we might begin approaching burnout. So for me, those symptoms were things like I stopped really being able to dream about the future very well. I felt like there was this brick wall where maybe there used to be sort of an open field where I just really couldn’t think past a couple of weeks at that point. And there was no sense of dreaming or wondering or planning even for the future. And kind of hand in hand with that was my creativity was just dead. I just felt like I couldn’t be creative.

I couldn’t think of solutions to problems. Every problem I faced made me want to stop, and that’s pretty abnormal for me. And then the other thing, which I mentioned the other day was that I took some time off having recognized these symptoms and it really didn’t help. The time away wasn’t the thing that sort of guided me back away. It was other things. It was things like spiritual direction. It was things like joining a group of other clergy people and talking to them. It was things like sharing this burden with other people, inviting other people to share the burden with me. That really kind of pulled me back from the edge of burnout. It actually wasn’t the time away that did it, and I think it would’ve taken almost like a sabbatical to cure that burnout and which I did not have, obviously the opportunity to take. Most people don’t have the chance to take three months off or whatever. So yeah, it was those things that I think I started to understand that I was very close to burnout and without my knowledge, it had been happening for a long time. I had been approaching that place for a long time.

Rose: Right. You said some really key things. I think that just for our listeners, part of the purpose of this podcast series is so that youth and campus ministry leaders that are experiencing really challenging and unique situations know that they’re not alone. And so when you said that you were meeting with a group of clergy and all of a sudden you realize, oh, I’m not alone in this. It can be so isolating when you hit all these challenges and you begin, it almost sounded like you were almost paralyzed to move forward. When you say, I quit dreaming, I didn’t have any creativity. It reminds me of the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann talks about in The Prophetic Imagination, if you’ve read that book, how when Israel would go into times of exile, they would lose their hope and they were not able to dream. And I think in many ways, when we’re all in shutdown, it’s a metaphor like in exile, we’re isolated, we’re alone. And for many leaders, I’ve heard it. And then all of the events of 2020, not just the pandemic, but all of the stuff caused so much sort of hopelessness and despair or fear, a lot of fear in the atmosphere. I mean, it’s kind of the air we breathe if you’re on any social media or watch any cable news. So I think that’s super helpful. Thank you. Dr. Watters, how about you? Have you come close and what was that like for you?

Elizabeth: Yes. Yeah. There was one period of time when I was finishing my doctoral work where I was actively in burnout. And then I would say I’m actually very close to it right now in the here and now. I think also during the period of the pandemic, along with all of the other systemic and social stressors and injustices that we’ve been facing that have just been layered on top of each other, those were all really major contributing factors moving to school online. But I also think, thinking systemically, bringing in, I think at the time, if I look at myself through the ecological model of those immediate family systems, we’re a part of moving to the community systems, moving to these broader social systems and societal systems and government systems. I think at the time of 2020, all the way until pretty recently and continue to be in different ways, had these traumatic stressors happening at every layer of those systems and they were intersecting with each other. And then for me personally, it was also a time in life when I was trying to find my own identity and coming out. So if I look at the intersection of my own identity, which is embedded in all of these immediate and larger systems, I don’t think I had the tools and equipment as many of didn’t to know how to navigate that while also being in a helping profession. I think that’s what many therapists, first responders, doctors, ministers, pastors face is how do you continue to support other people when we don’t even know in this time of crisis that every system from our biological systems to our social spiritual systems, how to support others when we don’t know how to support ourselves. So because of that, I experience a lot of physical symptoms of the chronic stress and burnout. So chronic headaches, migraines, weight gain, fatigue, some depression, anxiety, all of these kind of classic symptoms we see alongside chronic stress because I think chronic stress leads to burnout. And so I think that’s definitely what I personally was experiencing at that time.

Rose: Wow. I mean, just what you named all of the different levels and layers of what we all have collectively experienced from starting with family of origin to societal structures, all of those different layers. And it’s almost like, so many people just want to get back to normal, just want to get back to normal. I mean, especially post pandemic. I don’t even remember the number of how many people we lost, but I mean, it was almost like there was this collective trauma happening. And then it just seems like people, even right now with people have short fuses…We’re still experiencing the results of it, the effects of it, of what you just talked about. But not many people I know are really, I think facts are our friends. And so when we just want to move past it and skip that, that all just happened. Maybe you could even weigh in on that. Dr. Watters, what are we bringing with us when we just skip over it?

Elizabeth: Yeah. I think what trauma-informed care tells us is that there isn’t any skipping over. It’s about learning to move through our trauma in a way where we’ve gained access to resources both internally and externally in order to be equipped to move through those experiences to redefine what our new normal and our new baseline is going to look like. Because I don’t think both societally and at a very individual level, it’ll ever look the same for any of us. I think that’s the key theme across all these different types of traumatic stressors that to burnout that we experience both in the workplace, the home life, and socially outside of home and work. 

Rose: And can you give us, for our listeners, okay, we’re hoping that we have youth pastors, lay youth leaders, campus ministry workers, people who supervise them, lead pastors, parachurch organizations. For our listeners, what do you recommend? How do people move through it?

Elizabeth: Amanda, I’m happy to start, but did you have a thought first?

Amanda: You go ahead.

Rose: You go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth: So I think the first thing is to talk about it. A lot of times I think we’ll have conversations around it without ever talking about the origins, these traumatic stressors, and sometimes we even lack the language to describe how these factors that contributed to our current burnout came to be. And so I think just going back to the pandemic, because I think that’s such a tangible recent event that happened globally, a lot of us didn’t have the language to name it in the moment as a global traumatic stress that impacted every aspect of our lives, every aspect. And so I think a lot of times having conversations, asking questions, being curious is the very first step of starting to move through anything, because I think through that connection and community, we can learn to define our shared experiences and find collaborative language to say, what are we going through? Because I think it ties back to what you said earlier, Rose, of remembering that we’re not alone in this, but chronic stress and burnout makes us feel so isolated because we’re so depleted that we’re just trying to survive moment to moment.

Rose: Right. Amanda, how did you find ways of moving through? And as you’re with peers and those that are doing the ministry that you did for so long, if they come to you and they’re like, “I feel numb”, for instance, I recently talked to a young leader that said this to me after that last meeting, “Rose, I feel like it broke me”. And as to what you just said, Dr. Watters, she did not have language to even tell me. All she said is, “It broke me, and I don’t even know. I’m so numb.” Amanda, what would you say to a colleague or someone that said that to you?

Amanda: I would first of all acknowledge that that is a very valid way to feel or not feel in response to trauma, just in general. I think often I, trauma does overwhelm us such that we shut down emotionally and mentally and physically and sometimes even spiritually too. And I think that numbness comes when all of those things converge. And at our core, there’s just this hollow feeling. And so I would normalize that and say it is very, it makes sense. I think I would say to that person that you’re feeling this way and it shouldn’t be this way. This isn’t the way that God intends for you to live. This isn’t the way that it looks to live a whole and healed life. And so while trying to normalize, I would also try to help someone figure out the path forward out of that. And I think especially when it comes to trauma in faith settings, or I guess I should say specifically Christian settings, there’s a lot of shame surrounding the conversations about trauma just in general, but especially when we talk about specific kinds of trauma and that shame inspires for whatever reason, in my experience, a lot of secrecy. And so people will carry around this trauma, whether it’s something that’s happened in society or something that’s happened personally or professionally. There’s all these different layers of trauma or all three, unfortunately, that’s sometimes the reality. Sometimes people will just carry them around and like Elizabeth said, never say anything about it and never find the language for it. And then you do start to sort of believe this lie that you are alone and that this is something you have to carry. You have to figure it out internal to yourself and to share it would be a burden. It would be even sinful. I think sometimes people will have that narrative. And so I think overcoming that desire to keep things secret by sharing with appropriate people. And so for me, that was my spiritual director and a clergy group. For some people that might need to be a therapist, it wasn’t what I needed at the moment, but it’s something that I have availed myself of at different points throughout my ministry and I think is such an essential resource. But I think our instinct might be to turn inward when what’s required for healing a lot of times is to turn outward, even just with one other person, just one other person that we can be completely honest about, someone that we can say, “that broke me and I don’t even know what that means”. And then explore that to its full extent with someone is really essential in helping us, as Elizabeth said, not move past, but move through these traumatic experiences that might lead to something like burnout.

Rose: What else? I mean, this is so important right now. The Surgeon General has made a report on the mental health crisis that is happening among youth. And just recently I read another article, I’m not going to be able to pull it up right now in my brain that says, youth are experiencing a mental health crisis because their parents are, when they’re getting into it, they’re realizing, oh, and again, it’s coming back to the amount of anxiety, the amount of fear, the amount of polarization that we have in our country right now. And that is in our church, in our families. So can you two both just sort of speak to that as well? Yeah, what are you seeing?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. I think first going off what you were saying, Rose, our youth are having mental health crisis because their families, so what youth need through development, they need that secure base where they can turn towards their parents and not just have their basic needs met, food, water, shelter, but also those emotional social needs where they’re able to turn towards their parents and say, “Hey, I’m really struggling with this, or I’m lost, or I’m scared, or I’m confused”. And to be warmly received, at least the majority of the time by those parents and what’s happening as parents rightfully are in their own survival, trying to work, trying to keep their heads above water, trying to pay bills to ensure that their children’s basic needs are met, that their own basic needs are met. They don’t have the capacity always in those moments to turn towards their children and think about those secondary needs. And that’s okay. Right? So I say this with no, I want to just very clearly preface that this isn’t parents falling short. This is parents navigating individual and social stressors and sometimes not having access to time, external resources, financial resources, medical resources, mental health resources, especially when we start to look at the intersection of who are those that are most disadvantaged, oppressed, or suppressed in our society, and they’re the members of our church and local communities that are being most harmed by the systemic stressors we’re facing. And so it makes sense that parents, in trying to stay afloat, trying to keep their kids just going and alive, can’t always meet these social emotional needs. And that kids thereby are carrying a lot of these symptoms because they’re also facing these traumatic stressors. They’re not equipped to help support their parents. And then they’re feeling lost within themselves because they’re often navigating key points of individual development as they move through school or church or spiritual development. So I think it’s very nuanced.

Rose: What you just said is, okay, so that whole picture you drew, it makes it even more important for families to have support. So because we’re focusing in on youth and campus ministers, I am thinking, okay, youth leaders, campus ministers, they’re normally, those are the people that can bring support to the family. But as to both of you pointed out what happens when those people are experiencing the collective stressors and traumas, and they’re just trying to stay afloat. So, which again, I think brings back the importance of, I hope if there’s board members, lead pastors, nonprofit leaders, whoever’s listening that controls budgets, and I mean, I will just advocate forever and ever for clergy to have a budget line for help, whether if it’s a therapist that they need at the moment, or it’s a spiritual director who is that safe person they can literally tell the truth to. Because Amanda, as to your point, especially in the church, I’ll speak for me, even years of ministry, if I got to the point where I felt like I was failing, I felt ashamed, I should be able to juggle all these balls, I should be able to have the answers. We just do not live in that world anymore, which all of our work at the Center around streams of resilience, it’s all about who are the people you need people, what are the practices? Even if it meant, I mean, a practice is drinking a glass of water, one more glass of water a day and purpose. What is my identity about what am I called to serve to make this world a better place? And that might just mean I smile at the barista rather than not acknowledge, you know what I’m saying? What are the little things that we can begin to put into our lives to help prevent the burnout and the mental health crisis that so many are experiencing right now? So I’d love for both of you just to even speak more to that.

Amanda: One of the things that I’ll say is finding ways to, as a youth pastor or a campus minister, especially, finding ways to create a culture where seeking help, asking for help, talking about mental health, where all of those things are very normalized. And I think that will in itself yield a lot of fruit when it comes to wellness in a community. So for example, as a youth pastor, I often would teach about or talk about self-care. I would often teach about or talk about ways to seek out help from other people in the context of youth ministry, both with youth leaders and with youth themselves. And what that did was create, first of all, I think a very, I don’t want to overstate it, but I think a very safe space in that community, that small community of people, adults and children, to talk about things that they might not otherwise talk about in other spaces. So these are students who go to school and might never feel comfortable talking about their mental health at school or their sexual or gender identity at school. And those are things, as Elizabeth said, that are core to who you are, that especially when you’re a teenager, when you’re a youth, and even when you’re a college student as well, are developing within you and things that you’re having to understand about yourself for the first time or a new during that phase of life. And so I think creating that culture of understanding, of asking for help, or, even if you’re not asking for help, just being honest and being, having that truly safe space to share those kinds of things can go such a long way to sort of engendering this culture of health. So we would often normalize as youth leaders therapy by talking about our experience with our therapists and what a gift to those young people, not to toot our own horn or anything, but what a gift to those young people to see these adults that they look up to, that they respect, that they want to, in some ways emulate saying things like, well, I was talking to my therapist the other day and this is what they said. And just little moments like that can really go a long way in creating a culture of mutual support, but also a culture of acceptance and understanding and safety for those conversations to happen so that young people who don’t have a lot of places where they can talk about these core pieces of themselves have that space to do so. And I just can’t think of a more beautiful place for that safe space to happen than in the church. I think that’s a huge part of the church’s calling and responsibility to young people in the community. That being said, it takes a lot of work to create safe space, not the least of which is to create a system of safety in terms of who’s allowed access to that space. And so I feel really strongly about, in the United Methodist Church, we call it safe sanctuaries, but in other denominations, there are other names for that, but adults need to be background checked. They need to be trained, they need to be vetted so that those spaces really can be safe. And I mean vetted in the sense that I would never invite a leader who I didn’t know to be accepting and affirming of all people to be on my team. I would never invite a youth leader to be a part of it, a part of what we were doing without being certain that they were committed to anti-racism and racial equity. Those kinds of things are, some people might view as extra, but I view as essential. And those go such a long way as well to creating that safe space.

Elizabeth: Wow. Yeah. I was just going to say, to piggyback off of what Amanda was saying, there’s a good amount of research being done within school systems, examining burnout within instructors in elementary high school, all of grade school, and even professors at higher education higher. And what helps them create this environment. Amanda’s talking about where we normalize talking about self-care, mindfulness, mental health symptoms, how to recognize them, how to recognize if a friend is feeling suicidal, when to talk to teachers or school counselors about that. And I think this is a really practical way that we could approach helping support the church. So I’m going to say, please collaborate with your local couple and family therapists or other mental health providers who carry expertise, who can actually come in. So one of my favorite models is the ARC model of resilience, which is what I study, which is all about how do we help not just mental health professionals, but parents and school teachers. And I think we could easily adapt this to ministers and youth leaders, these hand-on skills for how to teach, spend five minutes doing mindfulness, which directly overlaps with spiritual practices. How do you be aware of your thoughts, your emotions, and most importantly your body? And so by collaborating with mental health professionals, bringing them in and saying, train our staff on how to recognize these symptoms, how to ask questions, and how to just do some really basic mental health based interventions that anyone could do. Mindful breathing, mindful sitting in a space, asking curious, open questions, knowing when to call a mental health provider to say this is beyond maybe spiritual work and getting into mental health care. And like you said, Rose, to have the people who do the budgets to have that built in so that there is an immediate line of access. But I think really training up staff to be aware of these things also does what Amanda was saying, which is help change the systemic conversations happening within the church and within the larger church as well.

Rose: I think for so long, at least in many streams of the church, we have been so gnostic. We’ve so been disembodied. We teach our doctrine and our dogma and all the stuff, but we forget about our bodies, and they’re kind of on the first line of defense to even know what’s going on with us if we learn how to be in tune with our bodies. So Dr. Watters, I love what you just said, that ARC model, will you have a link we can put in the show notes to that? Okay, great. For our listeners, a lot of what we’re talking about today, we will put links in the show notes so that you can go and find resources for help. But yeah, as we kind of come to an end of this conversation, is there anything that more that either one of you want to say on this topic that we need to hear while we have you?

Elizabeth: : Yeah, I think the only thing branching straight off of our awareness of our body that I would add a lot of my work as an EMDR trained therapist, which is just a trauma model. And my research focus on the biopsychosocial outcomes really focuses on the body. The reason why is because some of the earliest ways we can be in tune with the fact we are experiencing burnout as ministers, leaders, mental health providers is to be aware of what’s going on physically. If we notice it’s hard to wake up, it’s hard to feel motivated, we have a lack of, or, we sometimes even have a physical response to driving up to our workplace sense of anxiety or dread or uncertainty that we can physically fill in our hearts, our gut, our bodies. Sometimes we start to have more headaches, migraines a lot of different, and I can link a couple different studies that examine these physical outcomes of burnout as well to share. But I think that mindful awareness of what our bodies are going through can help us recognize burnout a lot sooner, and we can really help kids be aware of their bodies at these young ages, just teaching a child to breathe and to notice what they’re feeling is life changing.

Rose: Yes, I absolutely agree. I have 25 grandchildren and some of the parents, I mean, I’m watching my little five-year-old get all worked up and his mom is helping him breathe. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this is going to be a different world in 20 years for some of these kids that are learning this at such an early age. So I think what you said, Dr. Watters too,I think again, we’re conditioned in the church to feel shame if we’re not at our optimum place of performance. And so I think a lot of times we ignore those very things you were just saying to notice, notice, notice. Instead, our thought processes are like, I just need to push through. I just need to push through. And I’m a heart patient. And one time years ago, my cardiologist said to me, whenever you have that thought, that is when you have to stop. And I think that might be universal, that there’s times where as Americans in our Western culture, we are on that treadmill where it says, I just have to push through. And what you’re saying is no. That’s why we need to stop and examine what is going on and how do I get help. And instead of being ashamed and pushing, both of you have said this in a number of ways. I need to stop and be curious and ask the questions and seek out help. Thank you both so much. I was so looking forward to hearing from both of you. And so as we bring this to a close, we’re so grateful for the time you’re spending with us, and we want to end by giving you a space to shout out to an organization that you see doing good work, and we’ll make a donation to them and encourage our listeners to donate as well. We’ll put a link in the show notes. So do you have an organization,

Amanda: Elizabeth? Let’s go ahead and do the Trevor Project. Do you want to speak to what the work that they do is?

Elizabeth: Oh, sure. So I have long loved The Trevor Project. They really focus on helping LGBTQIA2S+ youth have access to a hotline for mental health support. They also link a lot of different resources for mental health, for queer youth in particular. But we know in our society today are some of the most at risk youth that we provide safe support for. And so I really love the Trevor Project and the work that they do.

Rose: Okay. Thank you. Thank you both so much.