Thank you so much for writing this. I was raised within an interfaith ashram with a highly unconventional charismatic guru. The humanitarian work of the larger community (including AIDS hospicing, local and international food aid, and LGBTQ+ rights activism) were incredibly magnetic and meaningful for many seekers who didn't see these values in any other spiritual community. But of course there were shadow dynamics within the community that many never saw.
She died over a decade ago, and three and a half years ago those of us who were raised there began a group therapy process that has revealed some deep patterns that led to neglect and harm. I am actively doing work within the community to help the first generation understand those patterns and see where they live within themselves, and I see the framing of Moral Injury as an important dimension of the work ahead of us.
This is, I think also why I tend to begin many things I facilitate with a process to help each participant give voice to their own values, to ground themselves in their own integrity. It also gives everyone an opportunity, I find, to see one another as sources of wisdom rather than attaching to me or anyone else in the room as the sole source of authority. I find that over-indexing one person's wisdom always leads to distortion and disempowerment.
What an interesting background and place to reflect on moral injury.
I grew up with Christian fundamentalism myself, and definitely observed destructiveness and power imbalances among what I experienced there.
I've actually been considering Ashram life, as a volunteer, potentially for a regular part of each year (I'd love to find a space to learn and share in open minded spiritual community).
Do you have any thoughts on exploring this with authenticity that might be helpful?
Sure, I’d be happy to connect, feel welcome to DM me. I think every community is different but there are definitely nuances to pay attention to. Liz’s list of red flags, yellow flags, and green flags for spiritual teachers is really spot on, but for ashrams without a living guru I think there are some things to be tuned in to that aren’t quite covered by that overview.
Thank you for this comment! Glad to hear moral injury might an a useful comment to your ongoing important work....it is something that has helped me make sense of harms I see in various spaces. I agree that articulating your own core values is a great place to start...and we often neglect this, don't we?
Far too often neglected. I am grateful to have an amazing mentor of Restorative Justice in Dr Mara Schiff who opens every circle this way (RJ circles, Womens' circles, community dialogue circles, all of it) and the tone it sets for the entire circle is palpable.
Very thought provoking. Yes, the energy behind the leader is important to discern because it infuses all they do. As a yoga teacher I have seen some of the most un-Yogic behavior by teachers and studio owners. Conniving, greedy, power seeking, controlling. It’s wild! The appearance versus the reality does pose risk and injury for practitioners. People must choose wisely and not allow themselves to be seduced by the veneer.
I would also extend this concept more broadly to corporate America … very ethically bankrupt leaders seducing people to execute missions that harm the earth, society, and human health and thriving.
totally, it is everywhere. Or rather, it can be! We align ourselves with the values of others all the time (spiritual practices, but also really any consumer choice) and then finding out their values don't align with our core values can be VERY harmful.
Not being a psychologist, I had no idea that moral injury had made it into the DSM. Thank you for that update! These articles are very helpful to my own work as a spiritual teacher in a tiny, dispersed community.
I had the chance to speak with one guy that allegedly took part in Argentina's dirty war of the 70s. He said, "we did stuff that we knew was wrong". But they were defending "Christian, western values" (As they used to say those days). Sounds familiar? We know how it ended
Thank you for this article, this is an important subject that's still being approached in the wrong way with regards to treatment. You point out some important things regarding how big a difference there is between moral injury and PTSD, and yet the system that is designed to support military members mental health is treating moral injury with the same "gold standard" treatments that they use to treat PTSD. So is the APA, for that matter, and they've only recently recognized moral injury and added it to the DSM5-TR because now it has a billing code and that's what it's all about- making $$. The vast majority of the mental healthcare system still has no clue what's going on and has no desire to treat moral injury the way it should be treated.
interesting...thank you for sharing. Therapeutic treatment is not my area of expertise, and the distinction between moral injury and PTSD is clear is psychology lit (and he Veterans Department website) so it is concerning that are not being treated as such.
I'm very late to this, but I'm a licensed clinical counselor who teaches other clinicians on moral injury. I'm a civilian but have also trained to work with service members and vets through the Shay Moral Injury Center and the Center for Deployment Psychology. These are military-adjacent institutions and there's a lot of built-in tension around how to work with MI because obviously, these discussions can lead in many directions that would not be favorable to the military or to a given "mission."
Yes, diagnostic codes are for billing, but moral injury does not (yet) have one. It's just a Z-code, and in my experience those are NEVER covered as "primary." So money is probably not at stake so far, but I wrote about some other serious implications in my post below:
Fascinating topic here Liz, as always. It brought to my mind many experiences of work places, in which norms are often pushed in ways that elicit silent agreement among co-workers - to go along with practices that entail 'minor' moral infractions and betrayals, creating disempowered husks of many people.
I've been inspired by Simone Weil who worked in factories to practice her moral compass shaped in part in academia - to discover workers resistant to deeper (spiritual/political) discourse because, she noted, they were psycho-physically spent of energy.
Spiritual fitness is presented as individual spiritual development, but the content is institutional.”
Ron Purser” McMindfulness makes the same point, “Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic. The neoliberal order has imposed itself by stealth in the past few decades, widening inequality in pursuit of corporate wealth. People are expected to adapt to what this model demands of them. Stress has been pathologized and privatized, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals. Hence the peddlers of mindfulness step in to save the day.”
Thank you! This really helps describe exactly how my religious experience hurt me. I was born and raised Mormon and being in a high demand religion meant turning over so much of my own decision making and moral authority to an organization that is corrupt, greedy, and hiding abuse rather than stopping it or helping. I've done so many things that I would not have done if I knew I had options. So many things I now find reprehensible.
Growing up Mormon sounds intense Sal. I've been watching people on YouTube discussing their experience of what this was like.
I'm struck by the similarities sometimes with Christian fundamentalism (which was my experience). There are clear differences in doctrine, but the experience of not being aware of other legitimate choices, or even a wider world, is very similar.
Anyway, i hope you're finding what is aligned for you now. X
Yes, I consider exvangelicals/ex-fundamentalists to be my "cult cousins". It was actually exvangelical content that got me started on my deconstruction path originally. Much of the same issues but it was easier to internalize it all when it wasn't my own religion.
I mean…this is the struggle we are in with climate change. The fossil fuel industry steered us away from institutional responsibility to make us all worry about “carbon offsets” and being “litterbugs.” As a result of looking toward individual responsibility, many faith communities refuse to ask power questions and drill down on reduce, reuse, recycle and green committees. We end up with individually shattered people because they can’t possibly do enough. And what we need is macro, institutional push. But in practicing individual spirituality, it becomes us (as you so well put it). We cannot imagine piecing things together. And so the real push ends up outside faith communities. Sorry if this is far afield but it just rhymes with the stone I am trying to roll up the hill.
It feels like your point is that when you feel a sense of deep betrayal from a spiritual teacher, you could be experiencing what's been labeled "moral injury", is that right?
It is hard to distinguish some post-traumatic stress symptoms from the ones of moral injury, as there is some overlap, but from my own experience, I'm seeing the difference like this: my own PTSymptoms arose from direct experience in or witness to large-level violence (with all its physiological/biological impacts), whereas the feelings of "moral injury" were not so visceral but involved meaning and justice (for me, this was the unfathomable sensations of betrayal when my elementary school, which I had revered, fought against claims of sexual abuse when I and friends were enrolled in the 1970s. I don't know how important these differences are, if except to assist clinicians in treatment and diagnosis. I also experienced a sense of moral injury that I truly carried for years - a feeling of not having done a good job, or enough, during my work in a Boston hospital the week of the Marathon bombing in 2013 - and which was addressed and healed with others about six years later.
It does seem important to remove any element of blame or gas-lighting, as you hint, when being assessed as having a moral injury or ptsd. The VA should *begin* its definition with its statement "A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviors that go against an individual's values and moral beliefs," and then move to the acts of omission/commission that are also included. Because if you're injured by something, there's nothing to blame.
So many spiritual teachers have betrayed their sanghas/congregations/groups. Students fall in love with teachers, in a way, and don't want to see signs of error (or humanity). It's hard for students to predict in advance how or when a teacher will fail, but it's good to enter these relartionships with eyes wide open. I guess we get better at this as we age...
Hi Don. I've read a couple of the books that came out of those conferences you mention - and found them really inspiring.
With the red pill - if you mean we might need to more deeply accept - and embrace - the everyday necessity of seeing with our own eyes.... I think that's true.
I've found that both an enticing and quite a frightening prospect at times - as you point out . Especially when alone on issues or even whole cultural dimensions in which it is easy to feel (and actually be) outgunned and out numbered.
So I hear you. I suspect if it was easy to always stand for what we see, think, suspect, believe, - the world would be entirely different.
Never 'fun' per se, and never ending. But also rewarding when we learn to trust we'll be okay once we abandoned what we felt we needed to do to tolerate what is beyond our control, or what we otherwise thought we needed to keep us safe.
Here is cheering for our growth of our capacity for courage!:>
Thanks for sharing Don. I don’t use the word God myself (as I grew up with a fundamentalism that left me a bit reticent to use the word :) - but I have always felt an intimate psycho-poetic connection between things that I’ve variously perceived as life. and where the various elements of darkness and light touch all things.
It’s always been remarkably how a sense of such connection translates across traditions, languages and forms - often even before the means by which they all fit together is apparent.
Thank you so much for writing this. I was raised within an interfaith ashram with a highly unconventional charismatic guru. The humanitarian work of the larger community (including AIDS hospicing, local and international food aid, and LGBTQ+ rights activism) were incredibly magnetic and meaningful for many seekers who didn't see these values in any other spiritual community. But of course there were shadow dynamics within the community that many never saw.
She died over a decade ago, and three and a half years ago those of us who were raised there began a group therapy process that has revealed some deep patterns that led to neglect and harm. I am actively doing work within the community to help the first generation understand those patterns and see where they live within themselves, and I see the framing of Moral Injury as an important dimension of the work ahead of us.
This is, I think also why I tend to begin many things I facilitate with a process to help each participant give voice to their own values, to ground themselves in their own integrity. It also gives everyone an opportunity, I find, to see one another as sources of wisdom rather than attaching to me or anyone else in the room as the sole source of authority. I find that over-indexing one person's wisdom always leads to distortion and disempowerment.
What an interesting background and place to reflect on moral injury.
I grew up with Christian fundamentalism myself, and definitely observed destructiveness and power imbalances among what I experienced there.
I've actually been considering Ashram life, as a volunteer, potentially for a regular part of each year (I'd love to find a space to learn and share in open minded spiritual community).
Do you have any thoughts on exploring this with authenticity that might be helpful?
Sure, I’d be happy to connect, feel welcome to DM me. I think every community is different but there are definitely nuances to pay attention to. Liz’s list of red flags, yellow flags, and green flags for spiritual teachers is really spot on, but for ashrams without a living guru I think there are some things to be tuned in to that aren’t quite covered by that overview.
Thanks Ganga - I appreciate that very much.
I'll be in touch.
And I hope this festive season has been a peaceful one for you.
Thank you for this comment! Glad to hear moral injury might an a useful comment to your ongoing important work....it is something that has helped me make sense of harms I see in various spaces. I agree that articulating your own core values is a great place to start...and we often neglect this, don't we?
Far too often neglected. I am grateful to have an amazing mentor of Restorative Justice in Dr Mara Schiff who opens every circle this way (RJ circles, Womens' circles, community dialogue circles, all of it) and the tone it sets for the entire circle is palpable.
Very thought provoking. Yes, the energy behind the leader is important to discern because it infuses all they do. As a yoga teacher I have seen some of the most un-Yogic behavior by teachers and studio owners. Conniving, greedy, power seeking, controlling. It’s wild! The appearance versus the reality does pose risk and injury for practitioners. People must choose wisely and not allow themselves to be seduced by the veneer.
I would also extend this concept more broadly to corporate America … very ethically bankrupt leaders seducing people to execute missions that harm the earth, society, and human health and thriving.
totally, it is everywhere. Or rather, it can be! We align ourselves with the values of others all the time (spiritual practices, but also really any consumer choice) and then finding out their values don't align with our core values can be VERY harmful.
Not being a psychologist, I had no idea that moral injury had made it into the DSM. Thank you for that update! These articles are very helpful to my own work as a spiritual teacher in a tiny, dispersed community.
I had the chance to speak with one guy that allegedly took part in Argentina's dirty war of the 70s. He said, "we did stuff that we knew was wrong". But they were defending "Christian, western values" (As they used to say those days). Sounds familiar? We know how it ended
Thank you for this article, this is an important subject that's still being approached in the wrong way with regards to treatment. You point out some important things regarding how big a difference there is between moral injury and PTSD, and yet the system that is designed to support military members mental health is treating moral injury with the same "gold standard" treatments that they use to treat PTSD. So is the APA, for that matter, and they've only recently recognized moral injury and added it to the DSM5-TR because now it has a billing code and that's what it's all about- making $$. The vast majority of the mental healthcare system still has no clue what's going on and has no desire to treat moral injury the way it should be treated.
interesting...thank you for sharing. Therapeutic treatment is not my area of expertise, and the distinction between moral injury and PTSD is clear is psychology lit (and he Veterans Department website) so it is concerning that are not being treated as such.
I'm very late to this, but I'm a licensed clinical counselor who teaches other clinicians on moral injury. I'm a civilian but have also trained to work with service members and vets through the Shay Moral Injury Center and the Center for Deployment Psychology. These are military-adjacent institutions and there's a lot of built-in tension around how to work with MI because obviously, these discussions can lead in many directions that would not be favorable to the military or to a given "mission."
Yes, diagnostic codes are for billing, but moral injury does not (yet) have one. It's just a Z-code, and in my experience those are NEVER covered as "primary." So money is probably not at stake so far, but I wrote about some other serious implications in my post below:
https://www.acureforaddiction.com/moral-injury-now-technically-in-the-dsm-reader-survey/
Fascinating topic here Liz, as always. It brought to my mind many experiences of work places, in which norms are often pushed in ways that elicit silent agreement among co-workers - to go along with practices that entail 'minor' moral infractions and betrayals, creating disempowered husks of many people.
I've been inspired by Simone Weil who worked in factories to practice her moral compass shaped in part in academia - to discover workers resistant to deeper (spiritual/political) discourse because, she noted, they were psycho-physically spent of energy.
Thanks for comment Lucy! and for this Simone Weil connection—it’s terrific
Thanks Liz. And I'm glad you enjoyed the Simone Weil reference.
I always get a lot out of your posts.
Thank you for showing moral injury in military and spiritual instances, and the interconnection of individual and corporate value systems.
Glad if it was heplful.
Spiritual fitness is presented as individual spiritual development, but the content is institutional.”
Ron Purser” McMindfulness makes the same point, “Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic. The neoliberal order has imposed itself by stealth in the past few decades, widening inequality in pursuit of corporate wealth. People are expected to adapt to what this model demands of them. Stress has been pathologized and privatized, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals. Hence the peddlers of mindfulness step in to save the day.”
Ron is on substack...I wonder if he would to weight in? @ronpurser2 (I think this is his handle)
Thank you! This really helps describe exactly how my religious experience hurt me. I was born and raised Mormon and being in a high demand religion meant turning over so much of my own decision making and moral authority to an organization that is corrupt, greedy, and hiding abuse rather than stopping it or helping. I've done so many things that I would not have done if I knew I had options. So many things I now find reprehensible.
Growing up Mormon sounds intense Sal. I've been watching people on YouTube discussing their experience of what this was like.
I'm struck by the similarities sometimes with Christian fundamentalism (which was my experience). There are clear differences in doctrine, but the experience of not being aware of other legitimate choices, or even a wider world, is very similar.
Anyway, i hope you're finding what is aligned for you now. X
Yes, I consider exvangelicals/ex-fundamentalists to be my "cult cousins". It was actually exvangelical content that got me started on my deconstruction path originally. Much of the same issues but it was easier to internalize it all when it wasn't my own religion.
I mean…this is the struggle we are in with climate change. The fossil fuel industry steered us away from institutional responsibility to make us all worry about “carbon offsets” and being “litterbugs.” As a result of looking toward individual responsibility, many faith communities refuse to ask power questions and drill down on reduce, reuse, recycle and green committees. We end up with individually shattered people because they can’t possibly do enough. And what we need is macro, institutional push. But in practicing individual spirituality, it becomes us (as you so well put it). We cannot imagine piecing things together. And so the real push ends up outside faith communities. Sorry if this is far afield but it just rhymes with the stone I am trying to roll up the hill.
It feels like your point is that when you feel a sense of deep betrayal from a spiritual teacher, you could be experiencing what's been labeled "moral injury", is that right?
It is hard to distinguish some post-traumatic stress symptoms from the ones of moral injury, as there is some overlap, but from my own experience, I'm seeing the difference like this: my own PTSymptoms arose from direct experience in or witness to large-level violence (with all its physiological/biological impacts), whereas the feelings of "moral injury" were not so visceral but involved meaning and justice (for me, this was the unfathomable sensations of betrayal when my elementary school, which I had revered, fought against claims of sexual abuse when I and friends were enrolled in the 1970s. I don't know how important these differences are, if except to assist clinicians in treatment and diagnosis. I also experienced a sense of moral injury that I truly carried for years - a feeling of not having done a good job, or enough, during my work in a Boston hospital the week of the Marathon bombing in 2013 - and which was addressed and healed with others about six years later.
It does seem important to remove any element of blame or gas-lighting, as you hint, when being assessed as having a moral injury or ptsd. The VA should *begin* its definition with its statement "A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviors that go against an individual's values and moral beliefs," and then move to the acts of omission/commission that are also included. Because if you're injured by something, there's nothing to blame.
So many spiritual teachers have betrayed their sanghas/congregations/groups. Students fall in love with teachers, in a way, and don't want to see signs of error (or humanity). It's hard for students to predict in advance how or when a teacher will fail, but it's good to enter these relartionships with eyes wide open. I guess we get better at this as we age...
Hi Don. I've read a couple of the books that came out of those conferences you mention - and found them really inspiring.
With the red pill - if you mean we might need to more deeply accept - and embrace - the everyday necessity of seeing with our own eyes.... I think that's true.
I've found that both an enticing and quite a frightening prospect at times - as you point out . Especially when alone on issues or even whole cultural dimensions in which it is easy to feel (and actually be) outgunned and out numbered.
So I hear you. I suspect if it was easy to always stand for what we see, think, suspect, believe, - the world would be entirely different.
Thanks for your clarification here Don.
Waking up to our delusions:>
Phew. Right.
Never 'fun' per se, and never ending. But also rewarding when we learn to trust we'll be okay once we abandoned what we felt we needed to do to tolerate what is beyond our control, or what we otherwise thought we needed to keep us safe.
Here is cheering for our growth of our capacity for courage!:>
(And hope your new year is going well for you.)
Thanks for sharing Don. I don’t use the word God myself (as I grew up with a fundamentalism that left me a bit reticent to use the word :) - but I have always felt an intimate psycho-poetic connection between things that I’ve variously perceived as life. and where the various elements of darkness and light touch all things.
It’s always been remarkably how a sense of such connection translates across traditions, languages and forms - often even before the means by which they all fit together is apparent.
Thanks for stopping by my posts too, Don! And yes, it has been quite an adventure:)