Moral Injury

If you had asked me what my values were, I would have given you a bit of a blank look. It was that I didn’t have values, it was that I hadn’t identified and articulated them. In fact, I hadn’t really thought much about them at all.

And yet I knew when they were in conflict with what I was being asked to.

I knew because it made me feel uncomfortable, physically. I knew because it made me pause and question what I was being asked to do. I knew because if I did whatever it was, I felt a bit shitty afterwards. It would bother me, I’d think about it in the middle of the night.

Often the conflict was subtle. Telling a little white lie to a colleague to buy a little time, slightly misrepresenting the facts to create a better impression, weighing the process in favour of the company over the customer.

On a few occasions, it was clear. Then I would push back, or even disobey, in the full knowledge that there would be consequences. But also knowing there would be personal consequences if I complied. I was happy to choose being able to sleep at night over my career progress.

However, I understand that not everyone can exercise that choice. They may not be as aware of the conflict, or they may not have the latitude to act. They may have to go along with it and suffer those personal consequences. These can be severe, such as deep feelings of guilt, shame and self-disgust. This is know as moral injury.

But the little transgressions have an effect also. If we are constantly faced with little moral dilemmas, we have to spend energy resolving them. We find ways to explain them away, to excuse ourselves of blame for the ones we are unable to avoid. We get used to bending our moral boundaries, to retelling events in a way that leave our beliefs untouched. We develop language that obfuscates what we are really doing.

Overtime, our moral boundaries blur, our beliefs get weakened. We routinely do things that we feel bad about because we do them without thinking, a pre-packaged justification ready to absolve of choice. “It’s the way the system works”. “It’s standard practice”. “It’s better if I do it, I’m kinder”. And the biggest one of all, “It’s what you have to do to get on. It’s just part of the job.”

And so we become someone we don’t recognise, doing things we said we would never do. We put on armour to protect ourselves from the moral consequences, numbing ourselves so we can’t feel the pain, to stop the shame and guilt getting through.

Or we stick to our moral guns and suffer moral distress on a regular basis, each occasion adding to the hurt of the previous times, until it accumulates into something we can’t bear anymore. We hold onto our moral compass but we have to let go of the job.

There’s also a chance the job will let go of us, as we get painted as awkward, disruptive and ‘not a team player’ because our own moral code become inconvenient to the organisation. Once our morals stop us doing as we are bid, we become a problem to be solved.

As organisations increasingly see business ethics as optional, at best, or a hindrance, at worst, more and more people experience increasing levels of moral distress. For many, it causes feelings of guilt, shame, remorse, and a sense of moral disorientation or loss of integrity.

Much like PTSD, to which it is closely related and overlaps, the focus of psychological study has been on people in the military, healthcare, first responders and prison guards. Because of this, we associate it with experiencing major traumatic events, not the daily grind of corporate life. However, it’s there, experienced as a chronic condition, a daily drip of moral distress eroding our moral core. The cumulative effect can be just as serious and equally damaging.

I’ve done a lot of work on defining my values since I’ve left corporate. I can now identify and describe them but I’ve also found out they are slippery buggers. In truth, we have many values that often compete with each other, and their relative rankings are not fixed but dependent on context. It’s been useful to develop my awareness but it’s not something that is set in stone. Our values shift, change and develop over time. They are not fixed or definitive.

What is definite is the feeling I get when I am challenged by my values. It’s the same feeling in my gut, the dissonance and edginess, the moment of pause whilst the question forms “What’s wrong here?”. That’s what we need to have awareness of, that’s actually what guides our moral choices.

So I think it is important to know about the danger of moral injury and to be aware of your own feelings when your morals are challenged. Then you can make your choice about what to do.

Sometimes we have to choose the lesser evil. Your morals around protecting your family and caring for those you love may trump your disquiet about having to tell a few lies, or carry our a round of redundancies that are hard to justify. It’s a judgement call, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good here. Just be aware that there’s a cost to each decision, and they add up over time, and one day your body might decide to call in the debt.

And if you find yourself wondering who you’ve become and asking yourself if you stand for anything anymore, track back and see when you experience moral injury and you’ll understand how you got to where you are. Then you can start to recover and rebuild.

I was reasonably robust in defending my morals, even at a cost to my career, but there were times when I wavered, when I felt under pressure. It would have been easier in someways to acquiesce than commit a ‘CLA’ (career limiting act), but I knew it would be short-term gain for long-term pain.

I couldn’t do much about the environment I was, though, and was constantly affronted by the bullying, the favouritism, the lying and deceit that were common place. That jarred my sensibilities, as did my own treatment, which was grossly unfair and unwarranted in my view. If your environment is offensive to your values, then it wages a cost every day. No matter how well you protect your own patch, that toxicity seeps in and east away at you constantly. The only solution is to leave.

Otherwise, it’s yet another harm that’s wearing you down, sapping your resources, and degrading your health. And it will continue to do so as long as you remain there.

Image by Stas Knop

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I am planning to facilitate some zoom conversations to explore the issues discussed here, share experiences and work on some possible answers. If you are interested in taking part, you can register your interest on this form.

As always, I’d love to hear your views and your stories, so please get in touch.