Some people say — though never publicly — that the elephant in the room of the nonprofit sector is that people work in the sector because they can’t cut it in business. That’s not what this post is about.

Allow me to introduce a brand new elephant to the room: Maybe people get into the compassion business full-time not because they’re more compassionate than others but because they’re codependent. Maybe the driving force is really inverted narcissism — an unhealthy and unexamined addiction to care-taking or to self-neglect…

If the work becomes more about satisfying a pathology than actually making progress, that’s going to affect our progress. Thomas Merton, the Christian Mystic, wrote,

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork.”

Merton was right, and not just about nonviolent protests. His thinking applies to every idealistic cause. He concludes by saying,

“to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone with everything, is to succumb to violence…The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace.”

 

http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2012/04/nonprofit-pathology.html