Can We Ever Learn to Trust Again?

On moral injury.

Mindmo

There’s a question floating around. It’s been incubating for a while.

Even if we ended the pandemic for real, stopped the genocide, and came up with a miracle solution for the climate crisis, would we ever be the same? Would we ever look at people the way we used to?

Would we enjoy their company?

Would we trust them?

For many of us, the answer is no. We’ll never look at our friends and families the same way. We’ll never pass a stranger without tensing up. We’ll never relax over a cup of coffee with old acquaintances. They decided to put their own superficial wants over our health and safety, insisting they were justified every time. They didn’t just do it once. They did it to us over and over again.

For some of us, it’s always been like this.

There’s a name for that feeling.

The term moral injury emerged from studies on trauma, specifically in veterans. In 1994, Jonathan Shay originally defined it as the "betrayal of what's right, by a person who holds legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation." On a broader level, moral injury refers to the "psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one's own deeply held moral beliefs and values." Moral injury happens when you betray your own code out of necessity, or when someone else does it to you. We’ve all been there now.

The first studies focused on veterans. Now research is showing that moral injury goes beyond the battlefield. As Harold Koenig and Faten Al Zaben write, moral injury "has expanded...to include similar emotions experienced by healthcare professionals, first responders, and others experiencing moral emotions resulting from actions taken or observations made during traumatic events..."

Koenig and Al Zaben trace the concept of moral injury back to 416 BCE, when Euripides described his post-war trauma:

Where can I hide from all this and not be found? What wings would take me high enough? How deep a hole would I have to dig? My shame for the evil I have done consumes me. I am soaked in blood-guilt...

You see something similar in Shakespeare, when Lady Macbeth realizes she'll never wash the blood off her hands.

Over the last several years, psychologists have developed an inventory of moral injury with up to 45 statements that participants can rank on a scale of 1-10. A few years ago, a team led by bioethics experts at Duke adapted the inventory for healthcare workers. Here's a summary of the statements you can rank:

I feel betrayed by leaders who I once trusted.
I feel betrayed by those close to me.
I feel guilt over failing to save someone's life.
I feel ashamed about things I did or didn't do.
I'm troubled by things I've done or seen.
Most people are trustworthy.
I'm able to forgive myself.
I'm able to forgive others.
I'm inclined to feel that I am a failure.
I feel like God is punishing me.
I find no meaning in life.

These questions were designed for veterans and traumatized healthcare workers, but they speak to the emotions we’re feeling now.

Maybe there's no god to punish us, but we all know the feeling that maybe we're living through some kind of weird simulation, a program run by sadistic aliens who want to see what we'll do next.

That’s the feeling.

If we don't feel guilt over spreading disease, we see plenty of people who should but don't. We see leaders of a coup walking around free, even running for public office, while peaceful protestors get prison sentences for trying to save the planet. Our leaders won't ban assault weapons, but they'll ban mask mandates and even masks. They’ll condone and even fund genocide because they’re afraid to do the right thing. It's abundantly clear we live in an unjust world.

Just like Euripedes wrote thousands of years ago, it feels like there's no place high or low enough to escape this feeling. We're not soaked in blood guilt. We're soaked in a deep sense of betrayal and injury.

The evil we’ve witnessed overwhelms us.

It's with us all the time.

We carry it.

Research on moral injury so far promises recovery, suggesting that with enough therapy or counseling you can somehow readjust your moral compass and learn to live with the things you've seen and done. But they assume the trauma comes from discrete events, things that happened in the past.

What if it wasn’t just a handful of authority figures who inflicted moral injury on you, but practically every single person you know?

What if it never stops?

Just like complex PTSD describes the more severe, likely permanent impact of chronic trauma, what we're feeling looks more like chronic moral injury, an injury that never ends but simply accrues. It's like the difference between getting stabbed once, and getting stabbed every day for going on five years, and the people stabbing you pretend they don't have a knife.

After all, it's not just the injury. It's the gaslighting that goes along with it, and the insistence that somehow it's our fault.

Beneath moral injury lies a sense of helplessness. We often feel helpless to watch our leaders destroy public health, democracy, and the planet itself. The celebrities who once offered us a distraction from the carnage now gleefully participate in it, spreading disease and spewing carbon into the sky, while threatening legal action against anyone who tries to stop them. The progressive politicians we once supported have chosen a path of complicity.

Kent Drescher describes moral injury as the "disruption in an individual's confidence and expectations about one's own or others' motivation or capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner."

Yeah, that's taken a hit.

We can’t trust most of our friends and family to make ethical decisions. If we have children, we can’t leave them alone with anyone. We can’t trust teachers or neighbors. We can’t even talk about our feelings.

We get judged.

There’s often nobody to confide in and nowhere to go, except the small spaces we make for ourselves. It’s all we’ve got.

Can we ever trust them again?

Recently, I got my answer.

It’s a no.

It’s a good thing not to trust someone who hurt you in the way we’ve been hurt. We’re not talking about a forgotten birthday or a shitty date. We’re not talking about a lousy childhood or a few harsh words. We’re talking about life and death, matters where one selfish decision kills. The people in our lives have made these decisions 365 times a year. A miracle solution can’t undo that.

Love and friendship require trust to work. If someone violates that, it’s not your job to blaze a path to reconciliation. If they aren’t trying, it means they don’t want you. Maybe they never did. There’s two kinds of forgiveness. There’s the kind that lets someone back into your life. Then there’s the kind that allows you to let go and move on. I’m trying to focus on the second.

We might have to coexist with the ones who hurt us.

That doesn’t mean we have to trust them.

It’s never going to be the same. These problems aren’t going away. We don’t live in a fantasy world where a god or a miracle of science solves all of our problems. We’ll never forget the lessons we learned.

We shouldn’t.