Moral Injury
What is Moral Injury?
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, “vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
-Helen Keller
As Helen Keller points out a person’s soul can only be strengthened by hard work and challenges. Through these challenges, one finds out that they have suffered a moral injury at a very young age. Most believe that moral injury is only caused when in a position where a person does something against their beliefs and values that happens in their career. However, the first time a moral injury occurs is in childhood, when a child is forced to do things against what he/she instinctively knows is morally wrong. What is moral injury? “Moral injury as defined by DAV is when one feels they have violated their conscience or moral compass when they take part in, witness or fail to prevent an act that disobeys their own moral values or personal principles. Moral injury is considered “a dimensional problem” with no definable threshold for its presence.” The following are symptoms that are concurrent with moral injury: persistent negative emotions, reliving the event, avoidance, trust issues, and substance use. These symptoms are quite similar to developmental trauma and PTSD. So often I have been in sessions with men and women who are suffering from all of these symptoms and have been crying and asking for help for years. However, they have either been told they have ADHD, depression, anxiety or a mood disorder. So instead of having someone understand and have compassion for the devastation that happened to them when they were young, they continue to live in the negativity of their life, mood-altering with food, sex, gaming, exercise or the use of a substance or drug.
Along with looking outside of themselves for relief they start to form negative beliefs and values about themselves and believe that God will not forgive them for what they have done. So they call themselves an “atheist, a non-believer, a loser, a failure, a misfit, or they just don’t care.” For instance, one of the clients I sat with was given a gun at the age of thirteen and told to shoot his father when his father came home. His father was an alcoholic and a very violent person. He would witness his father physically beating his mother and then his father would turn on him. This became an everyday occurrence and soon the family was living in extreme fear wondering if the next time their father came home he would kill one of them. So one night his mother gave him a handgun and said, “Shoot your father as soon as he walks up the stairs.” He laid in wait, waiting for his father to come home so he could shoot him and stop the violence that was keeping him, his siblings, and his mother living in fear, hypervigilance, and a state of terror.
Luckily for this client, his father did not come home that night. However, the police came and took him and his family to a transition home so that they would be safe. He never saw his father again and he and his family went from one transition home to the next walking on eggshells for fear that his father would find them and beat them to death. One of the most devastating things that happened to them was that they had to change their last names for a while to make sure they could circulate in the environment that they were living in and that he and his siblings could attend school. His father is now in jail and this client is unaware of where his father is and has not seen him in many years.
When he came to see me for help he was very dysregulated, and had no idea who he was, what his purpose was in life, or how to stop the mentally obsessing in his head other than using alcohol and his work to keep his mind busy allowing him to avoid any emotions that came up for him.
His moral injury was deep within the essence of who he was. This first responder had a difficult time forgiving himself, his family, and the circumstances that he grew up in. He had been living his life in darkness and despair.