Emotional Atrophy – a problem for the Church?

I recently heard someone use this expression, emotional atrophy, when speaking about the political woes of the current British government.  They were, as the reader might be able to guess, describing the catastrophic failure of sensitivity on the part of those in power in the UK.  They were thinking of the tone-deaf and inappropriate behaviour of holding a social event in the middle of a pandemic and on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral.

 The word atrophy describes the fact that a part of an organism has never been allowed to develop or function properly.  A foot, arm, or here, the capacity for feeling respect for a grieving family, has withered through lack of use.  The organ that has atrophied still exists, but it might as well not exist since, in its withered state, it has ceased to work.  As I write these words, the political fall-out for this current example of what we might regard a grossly insensitive behaviour on the part of senior politicians, has not reached a climax.  It is clear that that the reputations of these same politicians is under serious threat for their terrible failures of sensitivity.

Moving from current matters, we have all experienced emotional atrophy in others.  As children we would have chosen other words to describe this phenomenon.  Words like snooty or stuck-up might convey the experience of a child trying to negotiate some of the grown-ups encountered beyond the family.  Some of the people about whom we used such adjectives, may well have been emotionally blunted.  Equally, many would be among those frightened of children and uncertain how to speak to them.  Society, particularly today, has made problematic the whole issue of young people and children interacting with adults outside the family.  We sadly now live in a highly polarised society where any kind of interaction with a child may be frowned upon or regarded as suspicious, even within a church setting.

Leaving to one side our memories as children and the way we then related to adults, we are acutely aware of the issues around meeting someone for the first time.  One fear we may have is of being blanked or ignored.  Fortunately, most first encounters take place in defined settings and the conventions that exist help us in knowing what to say to a complete stranger.  Formality is likely to dominate any initial interaction in a workplace environment.  This will be quite different in a party.  At a party we may allow ourselves the freedom to ask questions about a person’s background.  The same questions would normally be totally inappropriate in a work setting.  Sometimes we can work with someone for years and never discover a thing about their personal lives or their inner feelings.  The relationship is a purely contractual one.  They give the orders, and we obey (or vice-versa).  Most of us can find such a situation extremely trying, when we are engaged with another person in a working relationship and the person gives away nothing personal.  In the case of curate working with a non-communicating training incumbent, the reaction will often be simply to keep your nose clean until escape beckons.  We have on the blog discussed relationships among clergy in team situations.  Some reactions suggested that teams are always mutually affirming of all the members.  Sadly, my experience has been that if there is any trace of hierarchy in the team structure, it will be rigorously enforced.  Far more people seem to prefer the ‘safe’ environment of a defined structure than the uncertainties of open-ended relationships.  These risk exposing personal vulnerabilities.

When we look at a body of clergy in the Church of England, we might suggest that each of them, like everyone else, is to found somewhere along a spectrum between formal gravity and exuberant openness.  Each, in other words, can be described in terms of their tendency to keep all relationships carefully business-like or move in the direction of being spontaneously open, even chaotic.  It is no secret that the powers that be in the Church seem to prefer those who practise a high degree of emotional control and correctness.  They are the ones who achieve promotion.  The safe predictable types fit far better into an institutional system like the Church.  Predictability is always highly esteemed in any organisation.  Spontaneous creative personalities are less easy to control.  People who wear their heart on their sleeve must be kept safely under supervision.  The institution, here the Church of England, must always be kept safe from eccentrics and mavericks of every kind.  Alongside the word ‘sound’ so beloved by many evangelicals, we find a further word being required of candidates for high office.  That word is ‘safe’.  The connotations of these two words, whether used singly or together, imply an individual who is good at management, the avoidance of controversy, smooth administration and loyalty to the structure. 

One of the current problems in the Church of England is that many of the values esteemed by the hierarchical leadership cohort, are not well-equipped to deal with the safeguarding crisis.  Those good at management and administration, those who are ‘safe’, are probably not the best people to place in a situation where there is a lot of trauma and hurt.  The Church has taken a look at the terrible events of the past and has decided to set a variety of formal initiatives including new appointments.  To put it another way, the Church is using the value system articulated by the highly institutionalised ‘safe’ personality type to tackle a problem that would be better handed over to the emotionally literate, pastorally minded, even though, sometimes, less organised personalities.  One thing I have said many times on this blog is the fact that there appear to be no individuals with proper psychotherapeutic qualifications anywhere near the centre of the Church’s safeguarding structures.

When an individual, wounded by a traumatic episode caused by a member of the Church takes their plea for help to a senior person, they may expect certain things.  They expect to be heard; they expect the person they speak to to have emotional intelligence to understand something of what they are describing.  By telling deeply personal material to another person, they will be retraumatised if the human compassion element is absent in the other person.  If all that can be offered is the atrophied emotional response of someone honed within a managerial culture, then the possibility of further damage will be massive.  On present showing, the statistical chances of meeting a non-empathetic manager-type in the person of a bishop, archdeacon or safeguarding officer are high.  From the accounts that reach me, it appears that professional safeguarding officers, who do have psychological and empathetic skills, burn out very fast.   They find the context in which much of the top level of Church decision-making and administration is done, very hard to adjust to.  The reason for this emotionally atrophied culture existing at all is, sadly, to be laid at the door of those who have deliberately promoted the efficient managerial culture rather than one which is prophetic, pastoral, and passionate.  People who foster this latter form of culture do not fit the current models of what a leader should look like in the Church of England. 

In writing this blog post, I have found myself realising that the people in charge of safeguarding and Church leadership in this area will often fail to have the human qualities that are most needed for this type of work.  Safeguarding and Christian shepherding and leadership should require, from those who undertake such work, a high degree of skill, together with those qualities that we (and the public) recognise as Christian.  Words like kindness, empathy, compassion, and human understanding all crowd in and should all form part of the skill set for people who do this work.  By contrast the survivors seem to meet individuals who singularly lack such skills/qualities.  The skills they do have seem to centre around efficiency, administrative competence, and the ability to organise well.  These latter qualities are commendable but, if they are combined with emotional atrophy, they can be highly destructive and dangerous to the whole organisation.  One (among many) of the scandals revealed recently in the Church of England is the one where a range of leaders have allowed the pain of Smyth victims to be buried in the cause of trying to save the wider organisation embarrassment.  Reputation against pastoral need?  The repeated choice by many Church leaders to place institutional reputation above the needs of suffering individuals can only be described as an outworking of emotional atrophy.  Sadly, it still goes on, which suggests that this is an affliction which may take the Church some time to recover from, if it ever does.    

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

14 thoughts on “Emotional Atrophy – a problem for the Church?

  1. Yes. There is also a tendency to forget that there is also psychopathy, where people know social, moral and emotional norms perfectly well and don’t care, and may even assume that everyone else is also pretending. No church has yet dealt with the reality that people like that are irresistibly drawn to ministry and other similar roles, and will be very convincing.
    My own take (from a better knowledge of RC mishandling of abuse) is that I personally don’t expect bishops to understand safeguarding, be good at management, accounts or even necessarily emotionally competent to speak to abusers, in comparison to what I think is the most glaring failure. No church has come up with a convincing theology of why they can say the church is what it is, yet it leaves a trail of destruction everywhere. No church has come up with a convincing theology of why its leadership mess it up at every turn.
    Yes there a number of emotional, psychological and managerial problems but the fact that this hasn’t been integrated into the church’s theological understanding suggests it’s trying to have a go at other people’s jobs while not doing its own.

  2. There is also class interest. The ‘purple circle’ (and those who consider themselves ‘papabile’) are a class interest within the Church, and what class interests tend to do is to protect themselves. By ‘class interest’ I do not so much mean money as an economy of mutual self esteem.

    I was recently reading a new CUP monograph about the fate of the ‘Dalit’ movement in Bengal during the twentieth century: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decline-of-the-caste-question/A68EBD0C3CE7CA71CEC204415256DC08. There was probably no ‘community’ more anxious to break away from British tutelage than the high caste Bengali ‘bhadralok’ class. Yet this was a class which also wished to retain its cultural and economic privileges (above all, perhaps, its cultural privileges) against those of other castes, and most notably the dalit, ‘scheduled caste’ or ‘untouchable’ community led by B. R. Ambedkar, and latterly by the tragic figure of Jogendranath Mandal. The bhadralok (who were not just Hindu but Muslim) saw the dalits as an electoral threat, and the bhadralok didn’t just dominate the Hindi Mahasabha but also the INC and the CPI. For that reason they first pressed for the elimination of separate dalit electoral rolls in 1932 (Gandhi, who actively supported his fellow bhadralok ‘fasted unto death’ in pursuit of this objective), leaving the dalits with only reserved seats in the legislature. They also promoted partition, not merely because of Hindu-Muslim communal antagonism but more especially to make it more difficult for dalits to exert electoral influence. Mandal saw the Muslim League as the least worst option, so threw in his lot with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), but when dalits rose up in 1950 against Muslim bhadralok oppression, they were treated with great brutality, and many were deported to India where they were effective dispersed. Mandal himself resigned as law minister under Liaquat ali-Khan (perhaps under duress) and went into exile in West Bengal where he died ‘in mysterious circumstances’ in 1968.

    Above all, the bhadralok ‘blanked’ the dalits. As Chinnaiah Jangam has remarked of Sen’s book: “By building an exclusivist identity, they constructed a superior moral ecosystem around it which they defined as castelessness, and refused to take cognizance of Dalits who suffered under its weight. By using the tactic of misrecognition, upper-caste Hindus suppressed Dalit aspiration for economic amelioration and liberation from caste oppression. From early on, they refused to allow any educational or employment avenues to improve the lives of Dalits on the grounds that such positive discrimination would be inegalitarian.”

    Although the English episcopate and its functionaries do not employ lathis to oppress rank and file clergy and laity, they do have a highly hypocritical ‘superior moral ecosystem’ and they do blank anyone who does not conform or pay due obeisance to it.

    In this way the Church negates itself.

  3. Apologies for the intervention here. Breaking news. The ongoing disputes and outstanding claims at Christ Church, Oxford have been resolved on agreed terms. The Dean will step down voluntarily. Full details have just appeared on ‘Thinking Anglicans’ which include statements from Christ Church and the Bishop of Oxford.

    1. Does this settlement constitute a precedent in standing up to a bullying narcissistic institution? Perhaps the subject of Stephen’s next blog post…

      1. The present impasse has been resolved, but many other outstanding questions remain. Unsurprisingly discussion now centres on the possible separation of the role of Cathedral Dean, who must be an ordained Anglican priest, and the head of the College who could be a lay person, and how they respectively are to be appointed. Christ Church is commissioning an independent Governance Review to which the Bishop of Oxford has said the C of E will contribute. As you say, these matters might be the subject of a new post, but I suspect there is quite some way to go before we will know anything definitively.

        1. I suppose I was wondering if the Charities Commission has in fact used its teeth and tipped the process to settlement, to avoid further egregious abuse of charity funds. If so I’m delighted to be wrong.

      2. Sorry, I see that my earlier reply missed the point you raised. I’m not at all certain that the outcome results from standing up to bullying. Effectively the dons have succeeded, at very great cost, in achieving what they set out to do. There remains a large pile of other outstanding issues for them, not least whether the Charity Commission continues to have concerns about the expenditure of charitable funds.

  4. Stephen, with this blog you’ve really hit the nail on the head. Emotional atrophy in the upper echelons is a huge and growing problem. And that’s tragic, because of the damage emotionally stunted senior clergy and administrators do to so many people, both lay and clergy.

    It doesn’t serve the avowed dedication to mission either, because the population as a whole is emotionally literate and isn’t fooled or attracted by the heartless brand of Christianity that is being peddled.

    But what’s the root cause of this emotional atrophy? Is it, as I suspect, because so many people at the top of the C of E are products of public schools and learned as homesick children to conceal their emotions? Or are their other factors in play?

  5. Emotional atrophy, in my experience, arises from emotional negation. This is a deliberate, forced foreclosure of emotional expression.

    Evident , but not limited to public schools, it probably has its origins in world wars. Witnessing mass atrocities be it in the trenches or on the streets of London during the blitz, people crumpling with tears and grief were not much use to anyone else. In theory this might have given a group survival advantage. In practice it lead to generations of psycho-pathology.

    The prizing of supposedly rational intellectual intelligence over any other (emotional, physical, spiritual for example) has actually gone into decline in some areas of public life, because it doesn’t work very well. As Janet says, people are much savvier now.

    But in the established Church, which tends to lag several decades behind, old attitudes still reign. And leaders are still being picked from the emotionally illiterate, by the emotionally illiterate.

    They’ll never really “get” this, and as such the condition is self limiting. Expect more decline.

  6. I try to be tough when I’m speaking to my, very savvy, Bishop. I know from experience that you are simply ignored if you get upset. People just think you’re incapable of dealing with the normal exigencies of life!

  7. Emotions carry data. It’s difficult but not impossible to receive that data without getting caught up in the emotion. Acting out the emotion may not help you, but acting on the information it contains about you (or the other person by projection) can enable a response that benefits one or both of you.

    The predominant emotion on show with, for example the C of E responses to abuse scandals, is fear. They act out behaviours which make their situation worse for them. Pick a leader and I’ll show you a man who is afraid. And yet they would probably pride themselves on being “unemotional”, misunderstanding the signals that could be utilised for good.

  8. It is perhaps worth pointing out the other side of the coin. Some believe their full expression of emotion entitles them to do exactly as they please.

    I cite the examples of anger and of limerence (falling in love).

    With anger, the instant energy to right a wrong, often escalates into an unstoppable rage consuming all in its path. Much has been said about the wrongs of physical blows, but the destructive blows of anger can be far worse, particularly in a previously intimate relationship. And yet people believe the feeling they get gives them the right, almost the obligation to act anger out.

    Similarly with “falling in love”. That powerful dopamine hit compels people who succumb to its siren, to destroy their families, children, other people’s families, children. Society often condones this. The “love” is given a special status that trumps other responsibilities and promises, a “divine” right to stray.

    The expression of emotion can be highly destructive. On an an anatomical level we find connections between different parts of the brain responsible for the origination and override of emotions. Thus emotions can be controlled although I concede with great difficulty, particularly if habituated. By design emotions are triggered very quickly, but decisions to modify them are much slower to take effect. Which makes the task difficult to persist with.

    Historically emotions were seen as a distraction, to be avoided at all costs. However that’s not the answer either. It takes a lifetime of study to decode and utilise the information they contain about us. But I believe it to be worthwhile.

Comments are closed.