When the Messiah Became a Coach

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

The psychiatrist and existential therapist Irvin D. Yalom tells a story about a therapist who was drawn to his profession not primarily out of curiosity about the human condition, but out of a need to be needed. He was, in Yalom's phrase, a messiah figure – someone whose sense of self depended on being the one who saves.

The problem with messiahs is that they require victims. And victims, in turn, often find messiahs irresistible. The dynamic is elegant, self-sustaining, and quietly destructive to both parties.

When the Helper Needs Help

I have met this dynamic many times in the coaching room – and not only in clients. Some coaches, some managers, some leaders are drawn to helping roles because something in their own history makes being needed feel like belonging. The role of rescuer provides identity, significance, and purpose. It feels like love. It may even be love, of a kind. But it is not the same as genuinely serving another person's growth.

When a coach enters the room carrying unexamined needs of their own – the need to be admired, to be indispensable, to be confirmed in their own brilliance – the coaching relationship becomes subtly distorted. The client feels the pull but cannot name it. The coach believes they are helping. And yet the client remains, somehow, dependent.

The Work Before the Work

This is why I believe deeply that the most important work any coach or therapist can do is their own inner work – before entering the room with another person. Not to achieve perfection, but to develop enough self-knowledge to recognize when one's own needs are present in the space.

When a coach has examined and metabolised their own history – including the chapters that drew them to helping – something fundamentally different becomes possible. The client is no longer a canvas for the coach's projections. The relationship becomes genuinely free. The client is neither rescued nor dependent. They simply grow.

Transformation Through Self-Work

I have seen coaches who entered training carrying the messiah dynamic leave it as something quite different: grounded, curious, boundaried, and genuinely service-oriented. The shift does not happen through intellectual insight alone. It happens through sustained self-examination – through discovering that one's own wholeness does not depend on being needed.

The moment a helper no longer needs to save anyone, they become far more capable of genuinely helping.

From Stresscoaching – coaching i grænselandet (Børsens Forlag 2009)

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