Lately I’ve had a lot of people, both colleagues and clients, share that they are increasingly withdrawing from careers that they used to be passionate about. One of my friends who is an incredibly accomplished VP, said, “Catherine it’s just not fun anymore, ... yes, I’m doing my job, but I don’t feel that passion anymore …. I’m just numb to it all.” Our conversation turned to moral injury, how the systems have betrayed us, values once held so dear are now under threat, or non-existent.
It got me wondering if the phenomenon of “Quiet Quitting” and the “Great Resignation” we talked about during and post Covid was actually a manifestation of moral injury for many professionals. The mass disengagement was often attributed to workplace toxicity and burnout, but in retrospect for many it was likely more fully accounted for by moral injury.
To understand how moral injury works it can be helpful to consider the role that values play in our life. Our values and beliefs provide a foundation for how we think and feel and relate to others.
Throughout the course of our life, including our professional life, we develop a set of values, morals, beliefs of right and wrong. Certainly, there are nuances, but at core there are certain lines that for each of us are either consistent or inconsistent with our values.
When you are either forced to personally violate these values, or you repeatedly bear witness to them being violated by someone or an organization that you believed in, then your values are under assault.
Remember, moral injury doesn’t just happen as a result of big incidents, it can be the insidious accumulation of hundreds of violations of what you know to be right.
When you have devoted your life and career to an organization and come to discover you have been betrayed, it is an assault on your values When moral injury happens, that foundation on which you have built your life and career, the way you think, feel, relate and experience your physical body –all of it has been shaken. It’s like a rupture or crack in the existential foundation of your being. Withdrawal, that makes sense.
It’s deep. That’s why you can’t just cover it up. That solid foundation, those values and beliefs that have guided your life, they have been cracked. You need to figure out how to do the deep repair and rebuild the foundation.
First step–understanding and seeing the cracks. They aren’t imaginary. And, it’s possible to heal. More to follow.
