The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Pastoral Care: When Good Intentions Become Dangerous
As a missionary on the field or a pastor in a church, you are often on the front row when it comes to human suffering. You see it happening: a marriage is falling apart, a missionary becomes completely exhausted, or someone has sunk so deeply into trouble that they have become homeless. Your heart breaks and you want to help. Of course you want to help!
That is why many churches and mission organizations offer pastoral care training and courses. In a non-Christian setting, we might call it a course in coaching or counseling. Great! You learn a handy step-by-step approach, you learn conversation techniques, and you receive a certificate. Usually, it takes just a few Saturdays, part-time, perhaps one Saturday a month, and if you look around online, you can even earn a pastoral care certificate in five Saturdays or ten evenings spread out over one year.
We regularly meet people who, when they hear what we do every day, cheerfully say: “Oh, that’s so cool! I’ve done a pastoral care course too! You guys are doing such wonderful work.”
And that is the moment when all the alarm bells on our side immediately start ringing.
Because in our work, unfortunately, we also see the dark side of that well-intentioned pastoral care, coaching, and counseling. We get victims coming through our doors in droves. People who have sunk even deeper into trouble, not because the helper lacked love, but because he or she, often without even realizing it, has gone miles beyond their own limits. And that applies not only to the client, but also to the pastoral worker themselves…
How can things go so badly wrong?
1. Why Both the Course and the Worker Get Stuck
You can hardly blame the pastoral worker. Let’s be clear: it is not unwillingness, but a lack of knowledge. The courses and training programs that people so eagerly sign up for rarely explain honestly what the risks are; or, at best, they are mentioned briefly in passing. And in a way, that makes sense too: there simply isn’t enough time. A handy step-by-step approach is provided, one originally developed by a real psychologist or therapist, but the deeper “why did something go wrong?” question is missing. There simply isn’t time to really look under the hood of a human being.
That also means it is hard to blame the trainers. They only get a limited amount of time from the participants: a handful of days or evenings spread over a year. That is an almost impossible assignment when you consider the serious problems you immediately encounter in real life. Abuse, divorce, poverty, addiction, or profound questions about meaning and purpose are not exceptions in pastoral care; they are everyday reality. These are complicated issues, often with roots that run very deep. How much can you really teach about all of that in a course lasting just a few weeks? Very little, and compared with reality, virtually nothing.
The Difference in Training
- A typical course (“Contextual Pastoral Care” or “Pastoral Care and Counseling”):
- The time investment: often a number of Saturdays or evenings per year, a small-scale part-time commitment that can be completed alongside a demanding job in another field.
- The practical side: participants practice in small groups using role-plays, or discuss a few “safe” real-life cases from their own circle of acquaintances.
- An accredited college or university degree:
- The time investment: at least four years of full-time study, approximately 1,680 hours per academic year, or around 6,700 hours of in-depth theory, lectures, literature study, and examinations.
- The practical training and internship: more than a year of full-time practical experience in the harsh reality of, for example, mental health care, psychiatry, or addiction treatment, under strict supervision from experienced clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
And to be completely honest, the real learning only begins after those four years of full-time training, because in order to, for example, remain registered in the Quality Register for Creative Arts Therapies, you have to continuously meet requirements regarding work experience, at least 1,600 hours over five years, mandatory continuing education, and peer supervision/supervision, including collecting 200 points over five years.
Because a short course can never cover this kind of depth or adequately address these dangers, a well-intentioned pastoral worker can genuinely believe that after completing such a course, they are qualified to guide people professionally. And that is where a lot goes wrong. Unfortunately, we see the victims of this literally every single week on our side…
2. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger discovered a fascinating and dangerous pattern: “People with little knowledge or skill in a particular area tend to greatly overestimate their own expertise in that area.”
You don’t know enough to realize how much you don’t know.
Translated into real life, this means that the less you know about the enormous and complex depths of the human psyche, the greater your confidence that “you can just fix it.” It is only after years of studying and gaining practical experience that you truly discover just how enormous the territory is that you know nothing about. But someone who has just completed a course lacks the self-awareness to recognize how risky their own limited knowledge and experience can be. The Dunning-Kruger theory shows that this is a perfectly understandable human mechanism, but it is also a potentially life-threatening trap that we urgently need to learn from.
3. From a Technique to a False Sense of Security
As long as you are dealing with a mild, straightforward issue, pastoral care (or coaching, counseling) can work reasonably well. It gives people something to hold on to. But the major risk is that the worker learns the how (the technique for the moment), but never the why. If you do not understand how the human mind works, how a dysregulated nervous system responds, or what deep-rooted trauma and attachment issues may be hiding underneath someone’s behavior, you completely miss the core of the problem. You apply a model to someone’s behavior, but very quickly you have no idea what you are actually doing to the other person on the inside. And the dangerous part is that the client has absolutely no idea either. After all, they are the client, not the professional; they blindly trust the helper’s good intentions and expertise. A Pandora’s box is opened while neither party realizes that it is being opened, let alone knows how to close it again.
Two real-life examples from the mission field and the church:
- The missionary with severe burnout: Imagine a missionary who collapses after years of hard work in a remote field. The pressure has become too much, and unresolved childhood trauma suddenly comes crashing to the surface. A fellow missionary with a pastoral care certificate jumps in to help. They apply a conversation model they have learned and, with the best of intentions, say: “You need to focus more on Jesus, don’t abandon your calling, and push through the pain.” Because the helper does not understand that this missionary’s nervous system is in full emergency mode, essentially frozen, they bulldoze straight through the boundaries of the person’s soul. The result? The missionary feels guilty, feels like they are failing in their faith, and ends up in a deep psychological crisis. The “technique” has only made the wound bigger.
- The couple who are constantly fighting: In a church, a married couple has been walking on eggshells for years. There is deep insecurity and mistrust. A well-intentioned elder tries to help using a Christian communication model from some purchased training material: “You just need to use ‘I statements’ and really look at each other when you talk.” But underneath the arguments is deep attachment anxiety and unresolved pain from the past. By pushing harder at the behavioral level, there is no connection; instead, the sense of insecurity increases. Behind closed doors, things escalate because the pastoral worker has no idea that they are dealing with a complex psychological pattern.
To put it bluntly: think about the difference between a barber and a brain surgeon. Both work on your head, but you would not let someone operate on your brain because they watched a one-hour YouTube video about brain surgery. You would immediately recognize that as potentially life-threatening. Barbers are very much needed too (I really need to get to one again myself), and so are brain surgeons. No disrespect to either profession, but if we start mixing the two… things can go very, very wrong very quickly. Both are needed, but within their own boundaries. Yet in pastoral care, this kind of mixing happens all too often.
4. Why the Client Often Prefers Pastoral Care Too
The situation cuts both ways. It is not only the pastoral worker who overestimates themselves; the client is often more than happy to choose a pastoral route instead of a serious professional treatment process. Who voluntarily chooses mental health care or a long-term therapeutic process if the problem can supposedly be solved with “a good conversation and a prayer” at church? The threshold for seeking professional care is high for all kinds of reasons:
- The pain of digging deeper: Real therapy takes courage. You have to work through old pain, face trauma, and examine your own patterns. That hurts and costs huge amounts of emotional energy. Pastoral care often feels gentler and less threatening.
- Time and energy: People often do not give themselves permission to take the time they need. A therapeutic process requires stamina and patience, while a pastoral “quick fix” seems to get things moving much faster.
- Shame and stigma: Admitting that you need professional or psychiatric help feels like failure or a lack of faith to many people, especially in Christian circles or on the mission field. Pastoral help feels “spiritually safe,” while professional care can bring the fear that you are “crazy.”
And so the helper and the client keep each other trapped in a comfortable illusion: “We solved it together with the Lord.”
The client walks away with a band-aid on an open fracture, believing they have been healed. Until the next time things go wrong, only much harder.
5. Knowing Where the Line Is: Why Martin and Esther Work Together
For pastors and missionaries, stopping or referring someone elsewhere often feels like failure. There is enormous pressure: “If we as a church or mission organization cannot solve this, where can this person go?” As a result, people keep pushing on and going far beyond their own limits.
I (Martin) am also involved in pastoral care and coaching. But I am absolutely(!) not a therapist. If someone comes to me in a crisis, I can be there for that person in the here and now. I listen, I provide a safe place, and we pray. But as soon as the problem becomes more complex, I stop immediately. I do not start digging into the past to figure out why things went wrong, and I certainly do not design a plan for preventing future problems. That is a completely different profession: it is the work of a trained therapist (such as Esther).
If you are a pastor or coach and try to dig into someone’s deep trauma and past without the professional knowledge to do so, you can do more damage than you ever intended. You open Pandora’s box and then have no idea how to safely close it again.
6. Where Does Pastoral Care Stop?
Pastoral care is beautiful. Looking out for one another, putting an arm around someone, praying for each other, encouraging one another, and pointing people toward God’s love: that is at the heart of the church. But pastoral care is not therapy.
As soon as a problem goes deeper than a temporary low point, as soon as trauma is involved, or as soon as someone’s capacity to cope is completely overwhelmed, that is where pastoral care stops. A good shepherd does not save a sheep by trying to operate on it themselves when it has an open wound. A good shepherd takes the sheep to the specialist.
Let’s be honest with one another. Dare to recognize where your limits are. Not because you love less, but because you love the other person enough not to create more victims, and instead want to give them real, safe help.
6. Advice for the Pastoral Worker: Stay in the Here and Now
If you are a pastoral worker, elder, or mission worker, do not feel guilty about guarding your boundaries. In fact, it is the most loving choice you can make for the person sitting across from you. So hold on to this simple but potentially life-saving guideline:
- Stay in the here and now: Listen with a genuine heart, provide a safe place where someone can tell their story, and pray together. That is the pure, beautiful strength of pastoral care.
- Stop when things become complex: As soon as you notice that the problem goes deeper than a temporary low point, or involves trauma, nervous system regulation, or serious attachment issues: stop. Do not start digging into the past yourself.
- Refer sooner: Recognize that referring someone elsewhere is not failure, but the only proper way to shepherd them. Take the sheep to the specialist.
Why this saves your own neck (and the client’s): the quicksand.
If you sit in the therapist’s chair without the right knowledge and training, you step into quicksand. You drag the client into that same quicksand, with all the disastrous consequences that can follow. You give the other person a dangerous false sense of security (“Come to me, I’ll fix it”), while you yourself become deeply troubled in conscience. You become entangled in someone else’s problems, you no longer know what on earth you are supposed to do, and you lie awake at night because you know you are working far beyond your level of competence.
Prevent that. Know your boundaries, know what you cannot do and what you do not understand, and keep pastoral care within its own beautiful and appropriate boundaries.
(And to complete the circle: in our own practice, we regularly have pastoral workers themselves come in for therapy because they have become completely stuck in their own role and ended up overloaded. Something worth thinking deeply about.)
P.S. It becomes even more painful when you look at the double standards that exist in some circles. On the one hand, between the two of us we now have 23 different pastoral care courses under our belts, no joke, simply because one organization does not recognize the training provided by another. In fact, officially, you are not allowed to provide pastoral care if you do not have their specific stamp of approval. Not even if you have been working in the field for years.
Someone with years of professional practical experience first having to obtain a “piece of paper” from an organization that itself has hardly any practical experience… explain that one to me. Bizarre. And we won’t even get into the depth of those 23 certificates: some of them are genuinely so basic it is almost embarrassing. But without that specific stamp of approval, you do not get in, or you are not allowed to stay.
But the situation in reverse is at least as frightening. Someone earns certificate X, is suddenly “officially” allowed onto the pastoral care team, and is then, sometimes without any in-depth knowledge, empathy, or practical experience, let loose on vulnerable clients. Why are they allowed to do that? Because they have that coveted piece of paper. It is genuinely frightening.
Maybe you do not enjoy reading all of this… but what we enjoy even less is being confronted with the victims again and again and again. Before we can even begin working on the actual problem, we first have to work through the damage caused by well-intentioned pastoral workers. That takes a lot of time and is difficult work: because how do you regain someone’s trust after that? That is why we decided to put this online anyway: as a warning, so that hopefully there will be fewer victims. Sometimes it leaves us completely exhausted, and for that reason too, our practice is far, far too busy.
Proverbs 3:5-7: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and turn away from evil.”
Know your limits. Know what you cannot do, and what you do not understand.
