Eight Signs You Need to Talk to Someone and Are Not Going To

You have helped a lot of people get the help they needed. You have made the referral, offered the resource, asked the right question at the right time. You are genuinely good at recognizing when someone else needs support.

Just not yourself.

Here are eight signs you need to talk to someone. Written for the pastor who is almost certainly not going to.

Sign One: You Are Using Ministry Activity to Avoid Your Own Feelings

There is always another task. Another visit, another message, another need to meet. Staying busy is one of the most effective ways to never have to sit with what is going on inside you. If the thought of an empty afternoon genuinely unsettles you, that is information worth paying attention to.

Sign Two: You Have Stopped Enjoying Things You Used to Love

Not just ministry. Hobbies. Time with your kids. A conversation with your spouse. Things that used to refill you have gone flat. This is one of the quieter signs of depletion, and it often goes unnoticed for years. When the joy drains out of everything, something is trying to get your attention.

Sign Three: The Thought of Quitting Comes Around More Than Once a Week

Occasional thoughts of a different life are normal. When those thoughts are regular companions, when they have become part of your background noise, something underneath them needs to be heard. The frequency matters. Pay attention to it.

Sign Four: Your Spouse Has Said Something and You Dismissed It

Your spouse sees you when the audience is gone. If the person who knows you best has said something, even once, about how you seem, how you are carrying yourself, whether you are okay, and your response was to defend or deflect or minimize, that conversation deserves a second look.

Sign Five: You Have Not Had a Real Conversation About Yourself in Months

Not about the church. Not about your kids or your schedule or your plans. About you. Your actual interior life. If that conversation has not happened in longer than you can remember, that gap is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of something missing.

Sign Six: You Are Getting Angry in Ways You Do Not Recognize

Anger that surprises you, that comes from nowhere, that is disproportionate to what happened, is often grief or fear wearing a mask. The pastor who is snapping at staff in ways he never used to, or getting sharp at home in ways he does not understand, is usually carrying something that has not found a healthy exit.

Sign Seven: You Are Preaching About Joy and Feeling Nothing

This one is hard to say out loud. The number of pastors who are preaching content they no longer feel, not because they have lost faith but because they have lost access to their own experience of it, is significant. You still know the truth. You cannot feel it right now. That matters, and it is more common than you think.

Sign Eight: You Are Reading This and Know It Is About You

You have gotten to this point in the post and something in you has been nodding along. You already knew. You did not need eight signs to tell you. You just needed someone to say it plainly enough that you could not talk yourself out of it.

James 5:16 says to confess your struggles to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. That verse was not written for your congregation only. It was written for you too.

If any of this landed, When a Pastor’s Soul Goes Unattended and Who Pastors the Pastor? are both worth reading next. Not because they have all the answers. Because they will help you feel less alone in the question.

Galatians 6:2 says to carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. You have been someone else’s burden carrier for a long time. It is not weakness to let someone carry yours. It is the thing the verse is asking for.

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If sign eight hit home and you know you need to talk to someone but have not made the call, let this be the push. Your first conversation with me is free. Nothing required of you except showing up honest. Book that call here.

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—Matt