Mrs. Minister's Troubles

"Every meeting of preachers brings word of another minister's wife who is on the brink of a mental and emotional collapse," reports an article in the Texas religious weekly, The Baptist Standard. Among the reasons: "The stresses and strains are enough to stagger an Amazon . . . Most ministers' wives have never heard a divine call, they have simply married men who have." They lead an "inexorable fishbowl existence," in which they are expected to be leaders and models in all fields. "Summarily stated, being a preacher's wife is the hardest of Kingdom positions."

Not all psychiatrists agree that breakdowns among ministers' wives are unusually frequent; many argue that the rate probably is just as high among the wives of business executives. But there is widespread agreement that ministers' wives are exposed to special strains and problems (TIME, April 25). At the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, a licensed psychiatric clinic sponsored by Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church, Director Arthur Tingue is convinced that ministers' wives can cope with the physical aspects of their jobs, but not the psychological. "Ministers are underpaid," he says, "but wives are expected to maintain middle-class homes." Sexual difficulties produce a high toll. "Ministers seem to attract women who are not very responsive. Then the women find their husbands as active sexually as other men, and they are subject to pressure and accusations of frigidity."

Abashed & Abandoned. Another problem, says Dr. Tingue, is that "ministers' wives set up their husbands as father figures, then discover that they have normal weaknesses, and disillusionment sets in." One of the clinic's current cases involves a Mrs. A. who comes to the clinic three times a week. "Her 'should' system is too strong," says Tingue. "She continuously does what she feels others would expect of her, not what she would like to do, and as a result feels depressed. In teaching Sunday school, for example, she voices the moral and ethical viewpoints she does not really believe."

To the Rev. George Anderson, director of Manhattan's Academy of Religion and Mental Health, the breakdown of a minister's wife is most often caused by pressure to conform. "This is compounded by her own guilts and anxieties--guilt over her own shortcomings and her earlier history. Marrying a minister doesn't wipe out either her past or her thoughts." In the view of a Boston psychiatrist, ministers' wives suffer most from a feeling of "abandonment." Several of his patients are up to their ears in church work, using it as a substitute for a personal need that is not fulfilled by busy, distant husbands.

Fears & Frustrations. "Most troubles come from poorly educated or extreme-fundamentalist preachers," says an Atlanta psychiatrist. But fear of the consequences of divorce keeps the couple together. One of his recent cases involved a minister's wife who complained that to her husband "it was a sin to smoke, a sin to go to a moving picture, a sin to drink a Coca-Cola. She just couldn't take it any more." Says Dr. Emanuel Honig, a Los Angeles rabbi turned psychiatrist: "The more fundamental or rigid the religion, the greater the chance of breakdown. A woman who is brought up in a strict and rigid manner, who can never permit herself any release, is unable to contend with temptation."

Such was the experience, for example, of Mrs. Jane K., 31, a trim, pretty minister's wife who found life lonely yet demanding. Her husband was either with his congregation or buried preparing sermons. And when she could collar him for a moment of privacy, the phone always rang --"Just let me speak to the preacher a minute." Finally she met a man who showed her sympathy and understanding, had an affair with him. But guilt was then added to her other anxieties, and Mrs. K., contemplating suicide, broke down completely; both the wife and her husband are now under treatment.

Is there a solution? To Bill West, 30, minister of the First Baptist Church in Okmulgee, Okla. and author of the Standard article, the solution rests with the wives. "Retaining some semblance of sanity will require a whole rethinking and rearrangement of life," he writes. "The preacher's wife must be herself. She must nurture and express the distinctive personality that God has given her." But to Psychiatrist Honig there is only one solution, and "some people are not going to be happy with it: teach that God is Love, not that God is Fear."

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