That Sadness You Feel? Maybe It's Moral Injury.
There's this feeling you can't describe. It's not trauma. It's not fatigue. It's not anger or sadness. It's not depression. It might lead to those other feelings, but it's deeper. It sits there, underneath it all. It's a feeling of loss. It's a feeling about how you'll spend the rest of your life.
You feel like you're waiting for an apology that's never going to come. You're waiting for some sense of vindication that won't arrive until it's too late. Maybe it already did, and it didn't help.
The feeling doesn't go away. It just gets quieter.
There's a name for that feeling.
It's called moral injury.
A psychiatrist named Jonathan Shay introduced this term in the 1990s. He was treating war veterans who'd seen or done things they had a hard time living with. Since then, psychologists have applied the idea of moral injury to doctors and nurses. They've used it to understand burnout and demoralization in teachers, social workers, and refugees.
All of us have been through hell over the last…