2.1 Despair inside
Back in the 1980s, I knew next to nothing about nonprofits when my dear friend Kate and I started one of our own.
As I settled into this new life, I met many nonprofit leaders who I admired, but I was surprised to see how exhausted they were so much of the time. And how hard they had to struggle to keep their organizations alive.
I found this distressing, so I jumped in to try to help. And I did help them. I helped a lot of leaders solve a lot of problems. But there was an underlying something that I was not able to assist them with at all…
Because I couldn’t see it.
And it was the most important thing.
I guess the universe decided to mess with me, because by the end of my first three years, I found myself swallowed up by that same something. I got to know quite personally the fundamental exhaustion of the nonprofit life.
And I found myself doing crazy stuff, which in those days made sense to me. For example…
I once worked twelve years straight through without taking a whole week of vacation at one time.
That gave me a rush. It made me feel noble to be giving so much, and giving up so much. But it was such a mistake. I could have done way better work if I had taken care of myself.
I loved our mission. It meant the world to me. We went into the schools and to teach kids, from kindergarten through senior high, how to defend themselves against bullies, kidnappers, and anyone, including people they trusted, who might decide to hurt them.
We met kids who had gotten away from molesters and kidnappers, or who got help for their families because of our program. It was such a great feeling to know we were making that kind of difference.
But I didn’t just love our mission…
I was obsessed with it.
So I put in very long hours, working late most evenings and taking work home on weekends. Which meant I had a meager personal life for a very long time. I now regret that I ever did that to myself. I really, really wish I could have those years back.
Finally, there came a day when I just couldn’t drive myself like that anymore. So I quit and felt lost for a couple years.
Then one day when I was busy ruminating on my frustrations, a friend told me about the coaching school she was going to and recommended it to me. Having nothing better to do, I went to the introductory weekend. By the end of the first morning, I fell in love with coaching, and signed up for the full year of training.
I did that because…
More than anything, I wanted to be an advocate for activists.
And a coach is first and foremost an advocate for his clients.
I was devoted to my new mission, and in response, the nonprofit leaders I started working with let me in behind the scenes and told me the truth about how badly they were hurting…
Lisa said, “I got so busy and had so little time for my friends that they wandered off. They stopped calling because I could never get together. So now when I really need them, they’re gone.”
Sara’s partner Steve moved out. He told her, “You always come home stressed. All you do is complain. I get how terrible work is for you, but this isn’t a relationship anymore.”
Martin said, “I’m a relationship person. I really want a partner. I hate living alone. But I’m here in the office so many hours, even on weekends, that I have no time to meet someone. Or on those rare days when I do have the time, I don’t have the energy. I just want to sleep.”
Jeremy loved the organization he started. It was his baby. But it took everything he had. Then on a fall morning toward the end of his tenth year, he hit the wall. He couldn’t make himself get out of bed and go in to work. The office called again and again and he knew it was them but he didn’t answer. It was stone cold over for him. He said, “I feel crazy loving so much something that hurt me so badly.”
And it gets worse. On a visit to an old friend back East, I met Dana…
She had taken over a dying community center, brought it back to life, and turned it into the heart and soul of her small town. Everyone there loved it and told me stories of how much it meant to them, except for two people—Dana’s daughters.
When I asked them what they thought about the Center, there was fire in their eyes. It took their mother from them not just five days a week, but especially on weekends and holidays. Their babysitter, a depressed elderly woman, was raising them.
I talked with my friend about Dana that night after dinner. He said he had asked her once if she wished she had more time to spend with her kids. She changed the subject and a minute later walked away.
I imagined Dana’s daughters in their twenties, both in therapy, confronting her. I could see her sitting there in shock as they poured out their bitterness.
What could she say in response? What would it take to make amends? Would that even be possible?
I felt so sad for her daughters, but for Dana, too. She was missing their childhoods. If she ever did wake up and realize what she and her daughters had lost, all three of them, she’d have to carry that failure in her heart for the rest of her life.
I could see the trap she was in, it was so obvious, the seduction of it. Her whole community adored her and made her their hero, rewarding her again and again—for turning her back on her family.
At the heart of her activism was this perverse irony…
In the course of doing so much good she was doing so much harm.
And it gets worse still. I debated whether to include this story, but it’s true, so here it is…
Gregg’s doctor sat him down and warned him about his heart, telling him to slow down by at least 50%. But Gregg was the leader of a national coalition. People all across the country counted on him, so he couldn’t stop himself.
And even though they knew about his heart problem, his close-in colleagues couldn’t stop themselves, either. They kept asking Gregg to do just this one thing more. Again and again, just one more thing.
And you know what’s coming. Gregg had his heart attack and didn’t survive.
He was so inspiring that working at 50% time, or 25%, or even 10%, he would have been a godsend to his movement.
And he left behind a wife and a child who loved him. At his funeral his wife was bitter. Silently she looked around at the 200 people gathered there, then said, “You knew he was in danger and still you kept asking for more.”
Thinking back over these stories, and many others, it’s so clear to me that more than anything I want us activists to be…
Fierce advocates for ourselves.
And…
For each other.
The fiercest possible.
Make the hurting stop
One evening, I went to a meeting of consultants at a forward–thinking foundation. In a break–out group, six of us sitting in a circle, the leader kicked off the discussion by saying, “Of course we want the EDs to do well, but the organization and the work have to come first.” There were nods of agreement from everyone else and a quick flood of confirmatory comments.
My stomach flipped over. So I jumped in: “I see it differently. I think the people have to come first because without the people there would be no organization and there would be no work.”
The conversation swept on by me as if I hadn’t said a word. I kept listening with half attention while part of me slipped into a reverie. I realized how far I had come from the days when I was so willing to sacrifice myself for the sake of the cause.
What I can tell you now is that…
I hate seeing good people with good hearts get ground up by the dark side of nonprofits.
I really hate it.
And I hate half measures. I want the hurting to stop. Every bit of it that’s under our control.
And if we can’t fix the way the nonprofit sector hurts the people in it, then I’d say…
Let’s shut the whole thing down.
I’d even go so far as to say that if the relentless destruction of our best, most dedicated activists is what it takes to save humankind…
Then screw salvation.
It’s not worth it at that price.
The fatal flaw
If you listen to a dozen nonprofit leaders tell their stories, one after the other, you notice they share…
A common pattern of problems.
This means we’re not dealing with individual failings, we’re dealing with a system.
And once I could see it for what it is, I began calling it the…
Sacrificial-Savior Operating System.
And it sounds like this…
I’m sacrificing myself to save you.
Or to save my community. Or to save the world.
This way of working is…
The default in the nonprofit sector.
Despite years of complaints about it, it still dominates.
And since this sector is where so much activism takes place, that means a whole lot of activists are suffering from it.
How do we get caught up in this mess in the first place? It’s not that we’re stupid…
It’s that we care too much.
Here’s how I remember getting sucked in. I looked at the state of the world and it frightened me because we as a species are in such terrible trouble. Then I looked at the number of activists out there trying to make things better, and there weren’t nearly enough of us.
So I decided…
I have to do the work of two, three, four or more people.
I decided I had to do everything I could and then more than everything I could. I told myself…
The cause is so important, I should sacrifice whatever I have to: friendship, family, health.
Can you hear the desperation in that decision? And desperation is the door through which despair enters. And there’s the clue we need.
Sacrificial-savior activism looks like hope and feels like hope, but in fact…
It’s driven by despair.
This is why it causes exhaustion, burnout, and diminished personal lives, not just in a few scattered individual activists, but routinely, in legions of us.
The day I finally saw how despair had been in charge of my activism for a couple decades…
I realized some part of me had known it from the start.
I believe that deep in my heart, all along, there was this…
Spirit of fight in me that wanted to rebel.
It didn’t, but it wanted to.
And no wonder. The sacrificial way of working is the exact opposite of self–care. In fact…
Sacrificial-savior activism is aggressive, consuming self-exploitation.
And in our time…
Raw despair is taking over the lives more and more people
And we’ll only make things worse if we try to cure it with…
Disguised despair.
A fighting spirit
Here’s my wish—that all of us activists would pull together and…
Declare a state of emergency.
We know how to stop to sacrificial–savior activism. We actually do know how to do that, so…
Let’s stop it.
I want us to do more than practice random acts of rebellion. I want us to take everything we know about fighting for ourselves and turn it into a system. A system that can match the sacrificial–savior system. And then more than match it, replace it.
I want us to develop a system of activism that instead of exhausting us…
Nurtures us and makes us stronger day by day.
What kind of fight?
Of course, when I say “fighting spirit,” I’m not talking about fisticuffs. Instead I mean a special kind of fight. Fight that is rooted in nurturance. Fight of the kind that infuses the…
Deep-Nurturance Operating System.
I’m talking about taking…
A moral stand.
I’m talking about caring about ourselves enough to take serious action on our own behalf.
But immediately I have to screech to a halt and say something about that word “moral” because it’s an embattled word, a treacherous word.
I used to avoid it like the plague because the loudest shouters about morality are people who use it as a weapon. They attack and judge and condemn. They’re ugly in their righteousness.
But we can take back this word which is so essential to the life of human community, and make it our own. We can put moral ambitions at the very heart of our activism and that can make us much more effective fighters.
I’ll have lots more to say about the moral dimension of upgraded activism in the coming pages.
But for now let me say this. When people don’t trust their own hearts, they turn morality into moralistic moralism, which is a rigid set of rules to be obeyed like a criminal code.
But we activists, with our fighting spirit, can do so much better than that….
We can source our morality from nurturance.
We can make it…
Relational instead of categorical.
Nuanced instead of simpleminded.
Responsive instead of intransigent.
And this means…
We can use it to make compassionate decisions.
And we can use it to sustain ourselves, our relationships, our teams, and our movements in the face of the rigors of activism as we try to heal a harsh and dying world.
Hooray for hate!?
Next we’re going to go behind the scenes of the operating system that powers sacrificial–savior activism.
It’s an unhappy system, but I really like showing if off. Weird? Not really. I like taking people on the tour because the more deeply people understand this system, the more they come to hate it.
And the more they hate it…
The easier it is for them to break free.
