Moral Injury: When Trauma Becomes a Betrayal of the Soul

What is moral injury?

Moral injury is a betrayal. A betrayal of something our personal belief system finds profound. It could be an action, or an inaction. It could be something that happens to us, something we see happen to someone else, or something we do ourselves. It is a line that we believed shouldn’t be crossed.

I’ve heard the following verdicts from men and women I’ve tried to help:

“I am a monster. If anyone really knew, they wouldn’t want to help me. I deserve what I’m getting.”

“If you had seen what happened to that family, you wouldn’t believe in anything—not God, not people, not anything.”

“What I did was murder. How do I ask for help dealing with the man I murdered?”

“He was my grandfather. It went on for years. Where was God?”

“After what I’ve been through, what does it all mean? It’s a cold, dark universe, and then nothing.”

And I could go on and on. Sometimes I wonder what just hearing words and stories like this has done to me.

Moral injury is often talked about alongside PTSD, and the two can certainly exist together, but they are not exactly the same thing. Trauma can leave us feeling unsafe. The nervous system stays on alert and we can’t seem to turn it off. A sound, smell, place, or memory can suddenly make something that happened years ago feel like it is happening right now, in full living color.

Moral injury is less reactive. It’s more like a cancer that seeps into every area of our soul. We don’t feel threatened, we feel numb, completely worn out and worthless. That is why telling someone, “You did the best you could,” or “It wasn’t your fault,” can miss the mark. Maybe they did the best they could, and maybe it wasn’t their fault. They may very well understand that intellectually. But somewhere much deeper, a verdict has been rendered.

You are Guilty. You were not worthy. Yeah, you did your best, a fool’s best. A fool, and a coward. I only looked heroic. Truly, I’m a monster and here I am alone with the shame and the guilt.

These verdicts begin to infect everything else. Relationships become difficult because being vulnerable seems dangerous. Love becomes difficult because we don’t feel worthy of it. Faith becomes difficult because the God we thought we understood seems absent, or worse, non-existent. Achievement doesn’t fix it. Money doesn’t fix it. Alcohol and drugs might quiet it for a while, but the silence never lasts. And worse for the ones we love, sometimes anger becomes easier than grief, isolation easier than explanation, and numbness easier than feeling.

A moral injury is a tear in the soul. It leaves us with questions that we thought we had neat, nice answers to: “I’m here for a reason. I have a purpose. The world rewards hard work and good people. It punishes the evil.”

And then nothing seems to make sense. Our purpose has led to destruction, and good people seem to lose, a lot, and evil people seem to win, a lot. This is one reason I think moral injury can be especially difficult for people who have devoted themselves to service. Soldiers, police officers, firefighters, medical professionals, clergy, parents, caregivers, people who carry around an idea of what they are supposed to do when the moment comes. Protect and serve. Do the right thing.

Then the moment comes, and maybe there was no right thing. Maybe every choice we had was terrible. In the moment, maybe we froze or didn’t react as we were trained. It might have been an order we followed and now regret. We might have done everything to the limits of our abilities and someone still died. Sadly, I’ve heard much of the following over the years, the institution you trusted betrays you. You watched someone you served with do something terrible and couldn’t stop it. And maybe, you were the one who needed protecting and nobody came.

What then? Sinking into an abyss, where do we find answers?

I don’t know if what I found can help you, but I can tell you it helped me, and I’ve seen it help others. One is found down on our knees; the other is found crawling out of our hole like we were going through hell week and when we didn’t think we could make it another step, our hand reached out for that of another and it took hold. We made it out together.

I don’t think healing from moral injury means convincing ourselves that what happened was somehow okay or there was some cosmic purpose to it. Some things aren’t okay, and are part of no grand plan of good. Evil and many other things shouldn’t just be explained away. Forgiveness is not pretending evil wasn’t evil, and acceptance is not calling something good that was terrible.

Healing can begin with telling a simple truth. This happened, and I did it. Or, it was done to me. Maybe I couldn’t stop it, or I wish I had done something differently.

Regardless, I am angry, maybe I feel ashamed, and I definitely don’t understand. These words can be terrifying because shame thrives in secrecy. We convince ourselves that if another person could see inside us, they would confirm the verdict we have already reached about ourselves.

On my knees, I stared in the dark and looked up. Finally, worn out enough to listen, I heard the words I’d remembered from the Bible long ago: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In that moment, in what seemed a peculiar way, I realized: I am not alone.

Whether God is real, or a myth, that story was my story. That was a sign my despair was understood, and if it was understood, maybe there was hope. And hope was enough to keep trying, and not give up.

I have come to believe there is something profound in the fact that those words are even in the Bible. They are not easy words, and they should be taken at face value. They are not triumphant. They are the words of someone suffering, asking where God went.

“You are not alone” gave me the courage to not just reach out for help, but to do so understanding there were others like me who felt the same way. Others who had given up and were just waiting for the pain to make the eventual exit easier.

And something else peculiar happened: in reaching out to others like me, it felt like that was what I was put here to do all along. This was who I was, someone who helped and connected with others, not someone who reached for accolades and achievements, yet never seemed to reach high enough to be satisfied, and then when I hit the lows, what meaning has someone with nothing?

Liar! It was a lie. Value ultimately lies in one thing, and one thing only, LOVE! And the eyes of another like me led to this truth, which led me to freedom.

Maybe that is the cruelest trick of moral injury. It tells us to hide from the very people who might help us. It tells us we are uniquely damaged when we are surrounded by people carrying their own wounds. It tells us our suffering has separated us from humanity, when sometimes that suffering becomes the very thing that allows us to finally see another person clearly.

You see, when you are down on your knees with nothing the world would consider of value, you have nothing to lose. And when you reach out with pure, unselfish love, the return cannot be broken; it cannot be taken away. No threat has any impact on you.

You are truly free.

Moral injury is a betrayal. Humility and love are freedom. I hope you needn’t be broken to discover this, but if you do, while I would never consider all my pain a gift, it was definitely a doorway to a better life I could not have imagined otherwise.