The following is an excerpt from Mbird friend Erin Jean Warde’s recently published book, Sober Spirituality:
Moral injury is a “strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person’s moral or ethical code,” and these events can include acts of commission or omission. In short, it is an experience in which a person feels as though they, through no fault of their own or because of difficult circumstances, acted in a way outside their values or didn’t act when they should have. Moral injury happens when we don’t intend to cause harm but we do nonetheless.
My friend David Peters was in a car wreck when he was a freshman in college; he lived and others died, which is a burden he still carries even though he did not intend harm. Peters, who is a priest, veteran, and military chaplain, has written about his experience. He helps us understand the difference between moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): “If PTSD results from being the prey — re-experiencing the feeling that something is hunting you, hurting you, trying to kill you — then moral injury results from being the predator — where you have done things to hurt people.” Moral injury is an experience of events that can “cause profound feelings of shame and guilt, and alterations in cognitions and beliefs,” often accompanied by challenges with coping, such as social difficulty, struggling with substances, and self-harm.
I believe that many of us reckon with some sort of moral injury. One step in spiritual healing regarding alcohol is to recognize how we might be in a state of moral injury because of alcohol. When we look at our relationship with alcohol, both how we have behaved personally and how we have communally ignored its harm, we might experience a sense that we have violated our morals or ethics. We might struggle with things we did while drinking that felt disconnected from our morals. We might feel that we have acted outside our values in some way, whether intentionally or not, or we might feel ashamed of not being better advocates for those who suffer. In our individual drinking, maybe we did things we don’t even remember, but later we found out they caused harm. As communities, we have known that addiction is around us, but we often focus on other concerns instead. These are not intentional acts of harm, but they harm just the same, leading us into moral injury.
There is hope in healing from moral injury through “self-forgiveness, acceptance, self-compassion, and (if possible) making amends,” which are practices already found in spiritual communities and recovery communities alike. Our spirituality — though our transgressions against it might have given us the moral injury in the first place — becomes the way of healing. Right now, there is no validated treatment for moral injury, but moral injury, challenging relationships with substances, and the ever-unfolding nature of trauma are spiritual wounds, and spiritual communities are the ideal place for this healing to find a home. If we wish to build the home, we can’t house anyone else’s treatment if we don’t first admit we need a hospital bed. If we confess to spiritual harm caused by mindless relationships with alcohol, both as individuals and as communities, this act of repentance could create strong bonds between healing from trauma, recovery from substance use, and spirituality.
Imagine a world in which we laid claim to the universality of our pain, our coping, our trauma, our injury, our addiction, and in which we became one spiritual community built on self-forgiveness, acceptance, and self-compassion. The path into this healing from alcohol ultimately would serve as a reunification with the Spirit, as we are invited into harmony with God, ourselves, and our neighbors. Let us go down a path of healing that honors our trauma, loves us in our challenges with coping, and speaks belovedness over our moral injury and absolution over all our mistakes. What an honor it would be if we, spiritual people and communities, could unite past stigma and silence to create a home for souls to heal in the sacred middle place: healing for bodies that hate how they drink but don’t know whether they want to quit, healing for hearts reliving the trauma they now call their first moment of death, healing for minds remembering an event they’d give anything to forget. Our joy is made complete when we take our place on the sacred ground that is not just a middle place but a thin place, a holy mixture of remaining within the reality of death and remaining within the profundity of resurrection.
Content taken from Sober Spirituality by Erin Jean Warde, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
