Moral Injury: An Extremely Damaging Phenomenon

When you experience continuous moral injury, your brain changes. You start to interpret the experience as a threat similar to physical aggression.

Failing at work, making a serious mistake with someone, doing something that goes against your values because of outside pressure, or being in an abusive relationship breaks you. They’re assaults on your morality that you experience in the same way as a physical attack.

• Emotions such as guilt, self-disgust, shame, anger, rage, sadness, and anxiety appear
• You experience feelings of deep disillusionment with institutions, people, and yourself
• You suffer an existential crisis that often leads to depression
• Psychosomatic effects occur. For instance, insomnia, muscle pain, headaches, gastrointestinal disturbances, weakness, exhaustion, etc.

Moral injury is often translated into an ‘acute stress response’, an effect similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.

When our morals suffer long-term bombardment, we tend to become blocked. Our emotions are so intense and painful that we become numb.

Moral injury distorts who you are and what you believe in.

For this reason, it’s good to start with somatic therapy. Aimed at ensuring that emotions attached to the body and that cause pain and illness end up being externalized and verbalized. Breathing and relaxation techniques and movements or stretching achieve that connection and, ultimately, a catharsis.

Later, conversational therapy begins, in which the lived experiences, the thoughts that accompany them.