How to cope with Moral Injury

A “Moral Injury” trauma involves a struggle between how you believe the world works and the trauma that happened. In other words, the moral injury is an ethical dilemma where something happened to you or by you that was not congruent with your values. Moral injuries can be very difficult to deal with because they challenge our beliefs about ourselves, other people and the world.

What we tell ourselves after a trauma is extremely important to monitor and to evaluate for accuracy.

Many people were taught early on some form of the “Just World Belief.” The Just World Belief simple states that “good things happened to good people and bad things happen to bad people.” Another way to say it is, “you get what you deserve." When traumas occur our beliefs are often challenged.

SO, WHAT DO YOU DO?
Do you throw out your beliefs?
Do you pretend the trauma didn’t happen?

Treatment for Moral Injury involves developing an understanding your trauma, an understanding your beliefs and coming to a conclusion that incorporates both. For this you may want to enlist a professional mental health clinician, a religious clergy or a trusted loved one.

Dr. Harry McCleary is a licensed clinical psychologist and Navy Veteran. His channel is dedicated to educating Veterans, service members and their families about mental health.



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[MichaelSOlan]

Wonderful stuff. Though the literature focuses on veterans much of the time I feel moral injuries are far more common than we have realized as a scientific community. Thank you so much

[NewGameSyndrome]

Im not a veteran but this was very insightful. Thank you for your service and sharing your knowledge man

[shroomgyrl]

What books do you recommend for Veterans about Moral Injury?

[DavidMonierWilliams]

You haven't a clue about Moral Injury{MI} nor it's solution.

Moral Injury is about whether you've been a witness, participant or a victim of an event that goes against your deepest moral values.

Since it is about morals it's about spirituality/religious.

Psychology has nothing to say about it.

MI holds the greatest risk for suicide for Vets.

Instead of trying to change the feelings of the Vet to the trauma, re-structure the trauma.

The first thing to do is to re-connect the Vets with his perception of God and for non-believers, atheists/agnostics their highest positive intent.

There is a process, that I've used very successfully to do just that.

It includes giving the trauma to God/Higher Power etc, using hypnotic language, transform the trauma by God's mercy and power to something more supportive of the Vet.

Then re-integrate the transformed trauma back into the Vet.

This resolves the suicidal aspect of the trauma.

Now you can resolve the trauma.

First, you must elicit all the major traumas of the Vets life in chronological order.

This takes an hour or less, but only by those who know how to do it.

Mainstream therapists are clueless.

Again re-structure the trauma.

Run the trauma backward, so that everything and everyone moves and talks backward.

This not only de-sensitizes the trauma but by doing it to the worst of all the Vets traumas, all the other traumas fall like a deck of cards.

Now, you can replace all limiting beliefs with most useful ones and install more useful supportive behaviours.