If you are the person everyone comes to for steadiness, for wisdom, for holding the room together, there is a question you almost certainly have not asked yourself in a long time: “Who is holding space for me?”
The answer, for most leaders I work with, is no one. Not because no one cares, but because the role itself trains you to stop asking, to be wary of sharing that you need someone. You become so fluent in other people’s interior lives that your own goes unexamined. Not abandoned, exactly. Just postponed, year after year, until the postponing becomes invisible.
As a spiritual director who has spent years sitting with leaders, pastors, executives, and helping professionals, I can tell you that this pattern is one of the most common and least acknowledged sources of spiritual depletion. The people who carry the most responsibility for others’ well-being are consistently the last to examine their own. And the cost is not dramatic. It is quiet. A slow dimming of something that used to be alive.
This blog is about what it looks like to reclaim your own spiritual life when you have spent years giving it away.
What Happens When You Care for Everyone but Yourself?
Deborah was a school counselor, forty-nine, who came to see me after her youngest left for college. For twenty-three years, she had been the emotional center of gravity for her family, her students, and her church small group. She was brilliant at it. She could name someone else’s interior experience with a precision that startled them.
“I realized last Tuesday,” she told me, rubbing the heel of her hand across her forehead, “that I have not sat with my own feelings about anything, not really sat with them, in probably a decade. I just route them into someone else’s problem and deal with theirs instead.”
I wondered what she noticed when she tried to sit with her own.
“Nothing at first,” she said. “Just silence. And then this wave of grief. I think I’ve been lonely for a very long time, and I didn’t hear it because I busied myself listening to everyone else.”
This is the pattern. The helper develops extraordinary attunement to other people's interior landscapes while their own goes untended. The skill becomes the hiding place. As long as you are attending to someone else's soul, you never have to sit still with your own.
Why Does Reclaiming Your Interior Life Feel So Selfish?
The word that comes up most often when I invite leaders to turn their attention inward is “selfish.” Patrick, a nonprofit director who managed a team of thirty, said it plainly: “I have people depending on me. Taking time to sit with my own spiritual life feels like an indulgence I haven’t earned.”
We wondered together where that belief came from. It did not take long. A theology of service that measured spiritual maturity by output. A professional culture that rewarded selflessness and punished self-attention. A family system where being needed was the primary source of belonging.
“What if examining your own interior life is not an indulgence,” I asked, “but the thing that deepens everything else you do?”
Patrick went quiet for a long time. His hands, which had been moving the whole session, went still. “I think I’ve been afraid of what I’d find,” he said. “If I actually looked at my own spiritual life honestly, I’d have to admit that most of it has been running on fumes for years.”
That admission was not the end of Patrick’s work. It was the beginning. And it did not require him to step back from his responsibilities. It required him to stop using those responsibilities as an excuse not to look at himself.
What Does Reclaiming Actually Look Like?
Reclaiming your spiritual life does not mean adding another commitment to an already full calendar. It means something simpler and harder: turning the same quality of attention you give others toward yourself.
Margaret had been a pastor for sixteen years when she came to see me. She had accompanied hundreds of people through grief, doubt, transition, and crisis. She had never once sought spiritual direction for herself.
“I thought being the one who gives direction meant I didn’t need it,” she said, almost laughing at herself. “That’s like a doctor refusing to get a physical.”
Our early sessions were disorienting for her. She kept trying to direct the conversation back to her congregation, her staff, the people she was worried about. Every time I gently redirected her attention to her own interior life, she looked startled, as if she had forgotten she had one.
The shift happened slowly. Margaret began to notice things she had been suppressing for years: a deep fatigue that was not physical, a growing sense that the theology she preached no longer matched what she experienced in prayer, a hunger for something she could not name but could feel in her chest when the sanctuary was empty and quiet.
“I think what I need,” she said one afternoon, her eyes closed, “is to stop being everyone’s pastor for a little while each week and paint… you know, to pay attention to my own interior movements in a creative way.”
That sentence changed the shape of her ministry. Not because she did anything wildly different on the outside. But because she finally had a place where her own questions and desires were not a problem to manage but an invitation to attend to.
One Practice: The Five-Minute Inward Turn
If you carry responsibility for others and suspect your own interior life has gone quiet, here is one practice I give the leaders I work with.
At the end of each day, before you review your tasks or plan tomorrow, take five minutes. Ask yourself two questions:
First: “What moved in me today that I did not stop to notice?” Not what happened to you. What moved within you. A feeling, an image, a tightness in your body, a moment of unexpected peace or unexpected sadness. Name it with as much precision as you can.
Second: “What was I avoiding by staying busy instead of attending that movement?” This one is harder. It requires honesty that most busy people have trained themselves out of. The answer might be grief, or doubt, or desire, or a question about God that your tradition has no room for. Let the answer arrive without judging it.
Write down what you notice. Do not fix it. Do not route it into someone else’s problem. Just let it be yours for five minutes.
This is not therapy. It is not self-help. It is the beginning of doing for yourself what you have been doing for everyone else: paying attention to your own interior life as if it matters. Because it does. And neglecting it has a cost that compounds silently over years.
Finding Your Way Back to Yourself
Your interior life has not disappeared. It has gone quiet, the way anything goes quiet when it stops being listened to. The good news is that it does not take much to reawaken it. It takes attention. It takes willingness. And, for most people, it takes a companion who can hold the space you have been holding for everyone else.
You do not need to earn the right to examine your own spiritual life. You do not need to wait until you are in crisis. You do not need to solve everyone else’s problems first. You just need one hour where the question on the table is not “How can I help?” but “What is happening inside me?”
Live and Lead with Soul,
Ben
AUTHOR BIO: Ben Shoup, M.Div., D.Min., is the founder of Essence House, a spiritual direction and discernment coaching practice in Northfield, MN. Learn more at essencehousesd.com.