Navigating the Depths of Moral Injury: Rita Brock on Healing, Resilience, and the Power of Community

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Welcome to today's episode of Enduring the Badge podcast.

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I'm your host, jerry Dean Lund, and if you haven't already done so, please take out your phone and hit that subscribe button.

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So if you would do that, I would appreciate that from the bottom of my heart.

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My very special guest today is Rita Brock.

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How you doing, rita?

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I'm doing great.

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How about you?

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I'm doing great as well.

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Thank you for joining me today.

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Rita, can you introduce yourself to the audience?

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Sure, I'm Rita Brock and I am Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Recovery Programs at Volunteers of America, which is a giant nonprofit.

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It does social services and affordable housing is a giant nonprofit social services and affordable housing yeah.

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It seems like a pretty big project that you're on.

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Yeah, yeah, I got interested in this in 2009 when I read an essay that was the first thing published in a long time about the suffering of military veterans.

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That's not PTSD, that's not a mental health problem, but is a kind of suffering that the VA was trying to figure out what to do about.

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And when I read that essay, one of the things that they said was helpful to people who had moral injury was having a conversation with a benevolent moral authority because their consciences were bothering them.

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And I thought to myself that's a great idea.

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And since I work in religion and with chaplains and ministers, I thought we should start educating that people that do that kind of counseling work about moral injury so they know what to do and how to handle it.

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And so that's what I've been doing for the last since 2010, is trying to educate the public various publics about what moral injury is and why it's important to pay attention to it.

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All right.

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Well, that's a great question, leading question for me, so you kind of touched on it.

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So let's kind of break down the moral injury.

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The moral injury piece yeah.

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Yeah.

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So it comes from the fact that human beings have consciences and so we operate automatically all day long being good people because we learn the right behaviors and as long as things work we're good.

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But when something goes wrong, we might hurt somebody, they hurt us, it bothers us.

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So then we have to, like figure out what to do about it and in the course of a normal day if you did something or something was done to you, an apology would be involved and it'd be okay.

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But sometimes things go wrong at a magnitude that they can't be fixed or it isn't clear what to do, and they start to bother you Like you might even lose sleep over it kind of mull it trying to sort it out.

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That's kind of a level beyond moral conflict.

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It's more like moral distress is a term for it.

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You're distressed about it, it won't let you go, and eventually you may shrug and say, well, nothing I can do, I need to move on.

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Or you try to do something indirect to fix it, or you apologize, knowing it can't be fixed, but the person says, well, okay, so there's a ways to resolve even moral distress sometimes.

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But you can have a lot of moral distress, like it can start to accumulate like it did during the pandemic.

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For so many people it was disaster after disaster and they couldn't really even adapt to the few things that happened because they just kept accumulating.

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You could have something like that happen.

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Or it could be so cataclysmic a thing that happened, like somebody dying, that you just feel devastated by it.

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Like you start to wonder who you are.

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You start to wonder how, if you're a good person, you may decide to give up on a career you loved.

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A lot of doctors did that during the pandemic.

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Or you might begin to cope with the negative feelings of shame or guilt or remorse or anger.

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Sometimes it's happened to you and you're toxically angry, but those are painful feelings.

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So people start to cope with that by drinking, using drugs, overworking, like so they don't have to think about it.

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Like working to exhaustion or giving up on a career, giving up on themselves, giving up on their family, giving up in some kind of way.

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That's a sort of a defeat.

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It feels like a defeat, a failure, a defeat or even think about dying by suicide, and so moral suffering, that kind of moral suffering is profound and it can be it's health endangering and it can be life-threatening, but it's not a disorder.

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You're not having a distorted relationship to reality.

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Reality really is that bad.

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That's the worst part about it is you can't go to a therapist and say, okay, fix me, so I don't have these feelings anymore because I'm not oriented to reality.

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No, actually you are, and that's why the suffering can be pretty profound and to deal with it you have to actually those feelings that you're trying to avoid in every way possible, because they're really intensely painful and often very isolating, like if you're ashamed, you don't want to talk to anybody about it, so those feelings don't go away.

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It's like so you just bury them inside and they still live there.

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They don't die in there.

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And so if you can find a way to cough them up, as it were, to let yourself go through those feelings, and you can diffuse them so they don't run your life and threaten your health or your life and they just become something that you know about yourself, you might even become wiser from having considered all the things that happen.

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You might even be stronger because you now know what it's like to face those kind of devastating things.

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But that's hard, it's really hard to do, and what we've learned is that not all people who are therapists are trained to understand moral injury, because their job is to fix you, their job is to make you better, and so a moral injury isn't, isn't exactly fixable.

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It's.

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You have to come to terms with it and accept it, and that's different from fixing it.

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You can't make a goal.

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That is true.

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Yeah and so, but every this is a thing.

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You can't have moral injury unless you're a good person.

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I mean seems appropriate.

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So the suffering is the sign of your good person wanting back, wanting back out, and so if you keep running from the suffering, you keep running from that person.

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It's very, very interesting to me because I can see I feel like that I could see where PTSD and moral injury may be confused as being the same thing.

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They've been confused a lot because they share symptoms.

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Yeah, share symptoms, yeah, right, so um, with pts, pts.

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One of the issues of ptsd is it's it happens because you're terrified.

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It's very traumatic, it's a trauma-based disorder, um, and if you were terrified, it meant your memory processing system wasn't working, because fear shuts that down.

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So you remember things, but it's in pieces and fragments, and often there's holes in your memory or you can't even remember the incident well at all, and so part of the therapy is to get you a coherent memory, to take you back in a safe environment to relive some things and put the pieces together so you can have a cause-effect memory of what happened.

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And that's important to recovering from PTSD is to move those memory fragments that are sort of attacking you and pushing them over into the thinking part of your brain where the narrative gets constructed.

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But then when you move it over to that thinking part of your brain, that's also your conscience brain, so you may actually feel worse emotionally after you have a memory of something and the feelings of PTSD are fear-based, right so it's.

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Anger can be a fear, responsive aggression, um or um.

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You can um freeze, which is sometimes turns into depression, um.

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Or you can um, uh, run away.

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I mean, there's there's all these different fear responses and come with certain feelings and uh, and you may even feel some guilt because of something that happened.

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But with moral injury the emotions aren't fear-based.

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So you can be depressed because you're morally upset, and it can be confused with depression that's associated with PTSD.

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And you can be angry with moral injury because somebody did the wrong thing and you're upset about it.

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Or you were forced to do something that you knew was wrong but you didn't have a choice, or you were in a situation where there was no good choice and you're angry about that.

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In some way You're angry at yourself or someone else or the situation.

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So you can also have anger from moral injury, but it's different from fear anger, but the symptoms look alike.

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You can also have anger from moral injury, but it's different from fear anger, that's.

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You know, it's so there, but the symptoms look like.

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Yeah sometimes.

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But you can have moral injury without any trauma at all, with no PTSD.

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You can just have moral injury because you did some like I work with, spoke to a group called the Hyacinth Group, which is people who have killed people in accidents and they may not have had PTSD or anything, but they feel terrible.

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Right right.

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Right and they have moral injury, but they don't have PTSD symptoms necessarily.

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Yeah, that's just fascinating because, yeah, I could see I feel like they could be easily confused.

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Can you have?

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I'm assuming you can have both yeah, a lot of combat veterans have both, because they're they're like in a situation where people are shooting at them and they're shooting back and something may happen where they kill somebody and then they feel they may not.

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The thing with combat veterans or I would.

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I would say this is also sometimes true to first responders You're in a situation where someone does die and it may like, if you're in law enforcement or another in a situation where you actually actively had to kill somebody, you may get a medal for saving a bunch of lives.

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Right, you may have been the right in that moment, the thing you really needed to do.

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Sure.

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And you could even be, like everybody, grateful to you for saving their lives or whatever, and so it may not hit you for a long time, like you, may go years without thinking much about it, and then suddenly you start to wonder what human being celebrates killing another human being, or, like you, just don't.

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You start to like, puzzle it out.

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Or like you just don't you start to like puzzle it out and you may actually have moral injury much later because your conscience is now mulling it in a different way.

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Yeah, yeah, I talked to an Air Force veteran that his moral injury didn't really hit him for 40 years.

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Wow, At 40 years out.

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What happened was he got sick enough in the hospital that he thought he was going to die and I think all those memories from 40 years before just flooded back and he was really super, super upset.

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He was really struggling with.

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How could I have been capable of that?

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And he didn't actually ever do anything, so he didn't have PTSD trauma to go with it.

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He was just in a situation where, if asked, he would have started a nuclear war.

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Yeah, that would be stressful.

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Yeah, during the Cuban Missile Crisis he was a B-52 bomber pilot.

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Okay.

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His target was Russia.

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He said I could tell a story.

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His target was Russia.

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I'm not sharing secrets.

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His target was Russia.

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So 40 years later, he's like I don't know who I was as a 23-year-old married father of two, that I was willing to start a war that would end in 15 minutes and I wouldn't know if I had a country or a family to go home to.

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How could I?

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I could see maybe, like in that at that age, probably just being in the air force or you know, and being around those different things being very proud of his service.

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His.

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His crew made crew of the year three of the four years he served, so he was really good and yeah, he's really good and I'm sure he took great pride in that and he had an enormous responsibility and you know um, but he was only in for four years yeah um I'm assuming life, big life events maybe bring up these thoughts to bring about these facing death does.

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There's something about looking at the end of your life and feeling anything unresolved needs to get fixed.

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So hospice workers talk about lots of people who want to confess something on their deathbed that they've been carrying a long time yeah, and you can function.

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You know people who are high-functioning and talented and just able to hold it together can function a long time with a moral injury.

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But it weighs them down in some sort of invisible ways, like they're not fully emotionally present to people or they maybe drink a little too much or they're doing four jobs to try to stay busy, so, but it's like you can't run from it forever.

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Right.

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They don't die when you bury them.

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No, they just, they just reappear at another, at another, another time.

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It's also going to be inconvenient, yeah yeah, yeah, and your and your thinking brain can be quite powerful in terms of repressing those things and not not going there, but, um, they just don't disappear and you don't have to carry them.

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That's the thing you don't, yeah I want I've said this before on the podcast a lot like carrying things like that is like it, disease, right it's.

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It's dis-ease which causes disease yeah, yeah.

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No, it can cause um high blood pressure and heart.

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I mean it's bad for your health, especially if it interferes with good sleep.

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You you might have nightmares about things, they might haunt you.

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I remember talking to a veteran in San Quentin Prison.

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I worked with a group of vets in San Quentin Prison and he told this story of when he heard me talk about moral injury.

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He said you know?

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He said I've had this dream.

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It comes to me sometimes.

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I don't have it all the time.

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But he said but, but it's a.

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I see this child, this Vietnamese child, and he has a giant hole in the top of his head and he's staring at me with these big eyes.

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And he and I said, said, and he said and it wakes me up.

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I see him staring and I said do you know what that's about?

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And he said yeah, yeah, I do.

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He said we were sent into a village to find the Viet Cong.

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We were told the VC were hiding there and we had to go and, you know, clean out every hut and we couldn't find any VC.

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And so there was this one long building.

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They said they're hiding in there.

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Shoot that building up.

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So he said, so we machine-gunned it.

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Good, we just tore it up.

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And then he said and we went in there and it was a school and we killed all these little kids.

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And I said, you think that's what he said?

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Yeah, that's what the dream was about.

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And that's when he realized he had been carrying this horror this sense of awfulness of having killed little kids.

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That would be awful.

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It would.

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But he didn't know, he didn't actually ever think about, he just knew he had this dream but he hadn't actually connected it to something that had actually happened in Vietnam until he heard the term moral injury.

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And then he kind of like the dots got connected for him and he did so well in that group that he went, he was paroled.

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That's good.

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Yeah, he went out on parole.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Is there a way to I don't know if this is the right terminology for this diagnose people with more energy, or how does it?

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I mean, how's this work?

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There are symptoms.

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How would I put it?

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With more energy?

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Or how does this work?

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There are symptoms, how would I put it?

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There's actually a debate going on with some people who want to create a diagnosis so that moral injury can be treated by therapists, because they can't treat for a thing that doesn't exist as a diagnosis because diagnosis means protocols for how to treat.

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But the VA clinicians, the psychiatrists and psychologists that originally did the major research on moral injury and got the conversation started.

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Most of them and I know quite a few of them most of them don't think it's a disorder and they don't think it belongs in the manual because it's too complicated a thing you know it's like.

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Well a person you could, because you can confuse PTSD and moral injury.

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There's going to be overlap in symptomology to diagnose it.

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But the things that work for PTSD don't necessarily work for moral injury.

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Yeah, it seems like there would be a little bit different path.

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There would be moral injury.

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Yeah, it seems like there would be a little bit different path.

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There would be, and in fact, one of those people who worked on the original research is a woman at the San Francisco VA and she's been studying the impact of killing.

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She has a team that works on the impact of killing on veterans, because they have a double suicide rate from other veterans.

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That's how seriously it affects people, and so she actually they published an essay for clinical people who do therapy.

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That said, if you think you have a veteran who's experiencing the impact of killing, you need to do a different process for them because you cannot fix what they have.

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And so they actually did a 10-step protocol that you could drop into PTSD therapy to deal with the killing part, which is about learning to accept it, and it involves things like writing a letter of unfinished business or an apology, things like that, rather than feeling okay with it.

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So even the therapists in the VA who work on both she's an expert on PTSD, but she's also an expert on moral injury understand that they're different, and if you don't understand that very well, you can miss the moral injury piece and not address it.

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So I've talked to so many veterans who went to therapy.

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A friend that is now a professor of anthropology was an Iraq vet and he said I got good help from the VA for my PTSD and I had PTSD and I did have those flashbacks and symptoms, he said.

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So I learned to manage my symptoms.

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But he said after a couple of years of therapy he said I still felt miserable and I couldn't figure out why.

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And he actually went and tried this thing another vet recommended, which was to go to a Lakota sweat lodge ceremonial process, which isn't exactly therapy, it's a spiritual reorientation process and that's what made him feel better.

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So his PhD dissertation was research on non-Native American veterans like him who use Native American rituals to get better.

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That's what he studied as an anthropologist.

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I mean that sounds fascinating in a lot of ways yeah, he said the guy that started that they, they, they had a, a native american leader, a spiritual leader, do the sweat lodge ceremony and that leader was willing to have non-native american veterans in the group and he started out by saying what we have to fix in you is the need to kill people.

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And so they went through intense stuff praying, crying.

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I've done sweat lodge.

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Yeah, me too.

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Me too, A few of them.

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Yeah, yeah, and so that's how he got better.

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And we did a Volunteers in America had a pilot study that was funded, that we did with military veterans 100 of them in small groups that were peer facilitated by other veterans.

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That had really good results.

00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:53.576
We had to stop it because of COVID, because it was 50 hours in person at a retreat center, so it was pretty intense too, but we're trying to restart it now.

00:22:54.505 --> 00:22:56.413
Yeah, I can see where that would be extremely helpful.

00:22:57.025 --> 00:23:07.789
Yeah, we actually did a one-day adaptation of it for first responders and we did it for Miami Rescue and Fire, miami Dade.

00:23:07.789 --> 00:23:25.457
We did a day with them and we did it in Houston with a collection of folks not Houston, but Arlington, texas, and yeah, Is this something you want to get started like all over the country again?

00:23:25.565 --> 00:23:26.326
We would like to.

00:23:26.326 --> 00:23:27.769
Yeah, and we attended.

00:23:27.769 --> 00:23:32.038
We learned some things too about how to how to improve it.

00:23:32.038 --> 00:23:41.875
We went to the Kentucky Academy for Critical Incident Processing and they do three days, I think it is.

00:23:41.875 --> 00:23:43.056
It's a lot.

00:23:43.056 --> 00:23:49.781
They do a lot of information delivery, but they also offer EMDR therapy during the process.

00:23:49.781 --> 00:23:57.939
During the process and there are about 30 or 35 of them that were at it and they all told the stories of what was really bothering them.

00:23:57.939 --> 00:24:01.269
And as they told their stories, I thought, yeah, moral injury, moral injury, moral injury.

00:24:01.269 --> 00:24:05.357
And they only had like 10 minutes on moral injury.

00:24:05.357 --> 00:24:15.269
So one of our suggestions then was that they do a more robust discussion about moral injury and give people a chance to process, because they already use peer support groups anyway.

00:24:15.449 --> 00:24:38.788
Yeah right, and so we think we are on the right track with our one-day processing, and it's a program that we took to Miami-Dade, where in one day, we did the day-long processing with people, and so some of them wanted to become peer facilitators for it.

00:24:38.788 --> 00:24:46.512
So the next day we trained a group of facilitators and a staff person to give the support, so they had their own program when we left.

00:24:48.565 --> 00:25:03.637
That's fascinating to me because there's peer support right that they use throughout probably their department and stuff like that, and this is just a different model of that kind of peer support for moral injury.

00:25:04.670 --> 00:25:06.365
Yeah, specifically for moral injury.

00:25:06.365 --> 00:25:08.971
Peer support is you know you can talk to.

00:25:08.971 --> 00:25:10.336
They're there to talk to people.

00:25:10.336 --> 00:25:15.416
They're there to offer how to get them the right services if they don't know and stuff like that.

00:25:15.416 --> 00:25:28.800
But this is a more formal, almost scripted process for doing the things that need to happen to help people come to terms with morally challenging things that have happened to them.

00:25:28.800 --> 00:25:31.778
So, it's very directive.

00:25:31.778 --> 00:25:36.267
Yeah, but it's peers and it's totally confidential, and then nobody knows what happens.

00:25:36.267 --> 00:25:38.551
It's all, it's you know, it's.

00:25:38.852 --> 00:25:41.237
It's a sacred space.

00:25:41.237 --> 00:25:44.048
We don't right right nothing gets reported out.

00:25:44.048 --> 00:25:47.338
It's not therapy um, it's training.

00:25:47.500 --> 00:25:52.871
We call it resilient strength training I would be fascinated to sit in on that.

00:25:53.412 --> 00:25:56.458
Okay, next time we do that, I'll let you know yeah.

00:25:56.458 --> 00:25:57.298
Yeah.

00:25:59.825 --> 00:26:12.335
I would just like to tie all the different worlds that I kind of know about therapy and PTSD and all these different things and peer support to like okay, what's this piece and how can this piece be added in to help first responders?

00:26:13.065 --> 00:26:31.108
Yeah, we started those one day things for our own staff volunteers of america has you know um mental health facilities and low-income housing and transitional housing for unhoused people and all those sorts of things and our staff were pretty fried from the pandemic um sure it was rough on.

00:26:31.630 --> 00:26:39.576
So we put it together just to help our own staff process and um, and that's when we got the idea.

00:26:39.576 --> 00:26:48.285
You know, we could do this for a lot of other groups too, Um, and we could even tailor it for specific kinds of groups, because every group has its own culture.

00:26:48.424 --> 00:26:49.570
Yeah, right True.

00:26:50.204 --> 00:27:03.329
Yeah, so we've got I think it's three affiliates that have their own programs now because we went and did it for them Very good.

00:27:03.329 --> 00:27:08.394
Hopefully that keeps spreading across the country and the globe as well.

00:27:08.433 --> 00:27:13.657
It's not a moral injury, but if you have some moral distress or something that bothers you that you need to process.

00:27:13.657 --> 00:27:25.876
You can just go into this voaorg slash rest and you can go there and you'll see the first responder section.

00:27:25.876 --> 00:27:32.167
There's a whole section that's for first responders and you sign up by putting in your name and email.

00:27:32.167 --> 00:27:37.192
You know so they can send you a reminder of when your time is and you can see the schedule when groups are meeting.

00:27:37.792 --> 00:27:39.273
And it's small groups.

00:27:39.273 --> 00:27:54.171
It's only one hour, so it's not a huge amount of time and there are different times because we know there's shift work going on and it's completely peer facilitated by other people who've been first responders completely peer facilitated by other people who've been first responders.

00:27:54.191 --> 00:27:56.917
Very interesting, very cool yeah yeah, it is so, yeah.

00:27:56.958 --> 00:28:01.849
So if you just wonder what it might look, you could go in there for an hour.

00:28:02.471 --> 00:28:04.997
Yeah, I have this burning question.

00:28:05.076 --> 00:28:08.849
Let me like this, like like oh, this I feel terrible.

00:28:08.849 --> 00:28:11.255
Maybe, maybe this will help me.

00:28:11.255 --> 00:28:13.740
It's pretty simple too.

00:28:13.740 --> 00:28:39.155
It's just some mindful breathing to help you calm down, and then a guided meditation to help you remember something you want to share, and then each person gets time to share and there's no crosstalk, it's not a conversation, there's just silence to receive everybody's testimony and there's something really validating, I think, about people believing you and listening in silence.

00:28:39.744 --> 00:28:40.943
Oh, yeah, definitely, Definitely.

00:28:41.766 --> 00:28:53.093
And then also people can connect around similar experiences or after everybody is shared that wants to share, then there's a chance to say something and people often say, wow, I got that.

00:28:53.093 --> 00:28:57.380
You know it's like, and somehow that lessens the pain of it.

00:28:58.904 --> 00:28:59.326
It really does lessen.

00:28:59.326 --> 00:29:26.255
Well, I think, because we often feel like we're alone in our what we're going through and our suffering, that we're the only people that maybe have gone through this, and I mean and that may be true to the fact that it's just your own thing that you went through, but like there's the similarities are so close to things that many people have gone through that you know you're almost the same.

00:29:26.275 --> 00:29:30.584
Find out that this horrible thing that happened to you might be valuable to somebody else.

00:29:31.025 --> 00:29:31.886
Right, right.

00:29:32.188 --> 00:29:42.686
Right, that is not so bad, then it's it's like oh okay, there's, there's some value to be had, that somebody was helped by my, my honesty here in sharing this.

00:29:42.887 --> 00:29:47.945
Yeah, that's how we got the podcast started.

00:29:47.945 --> 00:30:07.608
Through my trials and tribulations, I thought you know people together on the podcast to share different experiences or resources or just information.

00:30:07.608 --> 00:30:27.776
The more you know, you know, the better off you are, and I think a lot of people listening are probably like I thought I had ptsd, but maybe I, maybe I had this, this moral injury thing instead, and like that probably sounds a lot better to me than having PTSD because like this can be worked through a little bit better or faster or something I don't know.

00:30:28.636 --> 00:30:38.300
Yeah, I don't know exactly, but but it's also um when people and they can legitimately have PTSD and moral injuries.

00:30:38.300 --> 00:30:41.047
So I don't want to disparage the therapy piece.

00:30:41.207 --> 00:31:00.565
but but the therapy piece is more about something that's actually wrong with you, um, and moral injury is more like you're a good person and that what the world you're in is is messed up, and that's a different nuance there.

00:31:00.565 --> 00:31:01.667
It's different.

00:31:01.667 --> 00:31:08.923
The other is also that with moral injury, other people, just ordinary people, can help you.

00:31:08.923 --> 00:31:11.489
Right, your own peers can help you.

00:31:11.489 --> 00:31:26.089
In fact, it's better when that happens, because then this person knows this truth about you and you know this truth about them and it deepens your friendship, right, it deepens your relationship right whereas in therapy you are the person with the problem.

00:31:26.675 --> 00:31:40.278
You're seeing somebody that knows how to fix the problem, perhaps, and so they work with you, but really it's on you to fix yourself yeah and then when you're done, if you do, actually, if they're good and you're done, you never see them.

00:31:40.278 --> 00:31:42.383
Actually, if they're good and you're done, you never see them again.

00:31:42.403 --> 00:31:46.375
That's a very different kind of transactional relationship, right, yes, yes.

00:31:46.395 --> 00:31:49.325
And it can be really important if you do have a mental health disorder.

00:31:49.325 --> 00:32:06.709
So you know, I'm not saying don't have therapy, sure, but it's a different relationship for a problem you're having, and moral injury is really more of an anguish and struggle that you're in, that other people might be able to understand and that alone can make you feel a lot better.

00:32:08.536 --> 00:32:13.907
I'm like in my mind, I'm like is there anybody out there that doesn't have a moral injury?

00:32:15.035 --> 00:32:16.478
That is a good question.

00:32:16.478 --> 00:32:20.084
There may be people I don't.

00:32:20.084 --> 00:32:23.670
Probably there's no one out there that hasn't felt moral distress.

00:32:23.829 --> 00:32:24.009
Yeah.

00:32:24.855 --> 00:32:30.165
But not everybody has had an identity crisis, meltdown and thought about killing themselves.

00:32:30.987 --> 00:32:31.248
Right.

00:32:31.929 --> 00:32:33.115
Right so.

00:32:33.115 --> 00:32:56.719
So not everybody gets to that level of intensity with moral distress, but plenty of people do right, I could, I could see that for sure if you do high stakes work, you're you're at risk for it, because high stakes work means a lot of harm can happen.

00:32:56.719 --> 00:33:32.509
Even death can happen, and that never feels good right you know, one of the one of the places that nobody I think it's not often thought of as as potentially morally injurious work, is being the mother of a newborn I can see that yeah very high stakes, totally vulnerable infant, totally dependent on you and're exhausted, and you may be the only one doing the care, and you can be so exhausted that you could resent your baby.

00:33:32.769 --> 00:33:35.291
I mean there's just that's such high stakes work.

00:33:35.291 --> 00:33:39.142
Yeah yeah, and there's not a lot of social support for it.

00:33:40.125 --> 00:33:40.424
Right.

00:33:41.086 --> 00:33:43.653
Yeah, yeah, and there's not a lot of social support for it, right?

00:33:43.653 --> 00:33:57.454
I remember the story of a mother with a 10-month-old colicky baby that had always been colicky and her husband worked and she was alone in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment taking care of this baby and she never got enough sleep because it was colicky and cried a lot.

00:33:57.454 --> 00:34:33.248
It was colicky and cried a lot and in one really bad week she finally got the baby to sleep and she crashed on her bedroom bed and then within a half hour the baby was screaming again and she was in such a state that she went to the nursery and saw herself throwing the baby out the window to the nursery and saw herself throwing the baby out the window, and then she was freaked out by her vision and she wrapped the baby up and put on her coat in the middle of the night and went down to the street and rode the bus all night so she wouldn't kill her baby.

00:34:33.268 --> 00:34:33.588
Oh, wow yeah.

00:34:34.588 --> 00:34:37.931
Yeah, she wrote the article about it after it was a child.

00:34:37.931 --> 00:34:57.262
Her daughter was graduating from college interesting right, so so she managed to to not kill her baby yeah but you can imagine that how high risk that kind of work is um does emotional intelligence play a factor in any of this?

00:34:57.282 --> 00:34:57.844
it?

00:34:57.903 --> 00:34:59.246
It can, it can.

00:34:59.246 --> 00:35:12.121
If you know your feelings better that's what emotional intelligence is You're more aware of your own inner feeling world, then you can pretty fast figure out you feel terrible and address it.

00:35:12.121 --> 00:35:16.597
But if you're running from them, you're not addressing it.

00:35:17.259 --> 00:35:17.579
Right.

00:35:18.202 --> 00:35:18.463
Right.

00:35:19.123 --> 00:35:20.367
Yeah, yeah.

00:35:20.695 --> 00:35:22.661
Emotional intelligence takes courage.

00:35:22.661 --> 00:35:23.324
I'm telling you.

00:35:25.396 --> 00:35:27.143
All of this sounds like it takes courage to me.

00:35:27.914 --> 00:35:29.318
Life takes courage, you know.

00:35:29.780 --> 00:35:31.083
It does, it does.

00:35:31.224 --> 00:35:32.407
It really does yeah.

00:35:32.855 --> 00:35:33.916
Some days more than others.

00:35:34.557 --> 00:35:34.657
Yeah.

00:35:34.677 --> 00:35:35.458
Takes more courage.

00:35:35.938 --> 00:35:36.780
Yeah, yeah.

00:35:36.780 --> 00:35:43.409
But so there's lots of high risk situations we find ourselves driving a car is high risk.

00:35:44.530 --> 00:35:44.750
Yeah.

00:35:47.594 --> 00:35:51.184
You know, they're just situations and some people actually go into high risk work.

00:35:51.385 --> 00:35:52.186
Yeah, yeah.

00:35:53.117 --> 00:35:58.286
The law enforcement or firefighting or EMT work, where it's always an emergency.

00:35:58.286 --> 00:36:14.387
Right, right, the adrenaline rush there are people that want to do that work because we need it done, right, yeah, but it is high stakes and um I and I think that has to be respected definitely, definitely okay, rita.

00:36:14.407 --> 00:36:23.456
Where can people go to learn more about this, you know, and maybe like do a little deeper dive than what we've done on the podcast.

00:36:23.757 --> 00:36:24.197
There is.

00:36:24.197 --> 00:36:38.985
We have a website that is voaorg slash moral injury and that's where the Shay Moral Injury Center site is and you will find videos, movie lists, books, all kinds of resources.

00:36:38.985 --> 00:36:52.880
There's videos posted also and if you go to voaorg slash rest R-E-S-T you'll find those one hour meetings and some information about moral injury there in first responders also.

00:36:53.762 --> 00:36:54.083
Awesome.

00:36:54.083 --> 00:36:57.215
Well, thank you so much for being on today.

00:36:57.215 --> 00:37:14.423
This is very intriguing to me because it's an area that I don't know a lot about and I'm like I'm pretty sure I got some mortal injury to deal with I certainly do, though possibly I have these groups yeah, yeah, you're lucky.

00:37:14.423 --> 00:37:16.288
Yeah.

00:37:16.288 --> 00:37:19.443
Well, thanks again for being on today it was my pleasure.

00:37:19.396 --> 00:37:19.980
Thank you for having me.

00:37:19.980 --> 00:37:20.907
Yeah, thanks again for being on today.

00:37:20.907 --> 00:37:21.108
It was my pleasure.

00:37:21.063 --> 00:37:21.364
Thank you for having me.

00:37:21.364 --> 00:37:22.900
Yeah, thanks again for listening.

00:37:22.900 --> 00:37:27.806
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00:37:27.806 --> 00:37:54.922
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00:37:54.922 --> 00:38:04.690
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