Moral Injury

It’s fair to say that many people are experiencing burnout after the last 2.5 years (and longer than that, truthfully.) We’ve dealt with so much collective distress, grief, trauma, and pain - while the systems that should address the many crises we’ve experienced have repeatedly failed us. 

I don’t think that burnout adequately describes the feeling many people are experiencing. Instead, I prefer the term ‘moral injury.’ According to the article ‘Moral injury: the effect on mental health and implications for treatment,’ moral injury “is understood to be the strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person’s moral or ethical code.” Does it violate your moral code to know that 1 million people have died of covid and that the government’s poor handling of this situation like added to this death toll? What about the fact that teachers and young children can be murdered in their school and nothing is done to address the problem? I could name numerous examples of the overwhelmingly painful, morally injurious experience of living in our current times. It’s too much to hold.

You are normal and okay if you are feeling the traumas of the last 2.5 years. Moral injury can cause low mood, periods of existential dread and anxiety, and feelings of low self-worth and helplessness. If you need to tune out the news for a bit, it’s okay. Healing moral injury requires developing a self-compassion practice, which can start by making a three bullet point gratitude list every day. Moral injury is also healed by being in community with other people. We need more collective approaches to address the grief of our experiences. Nothing is wrong with you if you are a human being who is impacted by the painful events of the world.