Like many of you I've been watching what's happening in Minneapolis.
A few weeks ago, Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent during an immigration enforcement operation. I was shocked and angry—and then I felt something else. And now Alex Pretti too! That specific exhaustion that comes from watching preventable harm happen again.
Now protests have erupted across the country, and if you're feeling that same exhausted fury—especially if you were also paying attention five years ago when George Floyd was murdered—you might be experiencing something called moral injury.
Last Friday, a woman joined our every Friday Women's Circle Salon who lives in Minneapolis. Jacque told us about the ICE teams now patrolling outside schools. About her living room, currently wall-to-wall with diapers she's helping deliver to families who don't feel safe leaving their homes. About neighbors organizing supply chains and safety networks and showing up for each other in ways that feel both essential and heartbreaking—because they shouldn't have to.
Listening to her, I kept thinking about this term I'd only learned about six months ago: moral injury.
What Moral Injury Actually Is
Here's where it gets interesting. Moral injury is what happens when you witness, participate in, or fail to prevent something that violates your core values.
The folks who study this stuff—researchers at Journal of Traumatic Stress, it occurs when three conditions align: exposure to potentially morally injurious events, appraisals of those events as morally transgressive, and the experience of moral emotions like shame, guilt, or disgust.
Unlike PTSD, which stems from fear-based trauma, moral injury centers on betrayal—of values, of trust, of what we believed to be true about ourselves or others.
Dr. Brett Litz and his colleagues describe it as "lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations."
The research shows that moral injury can manifest as:
Persistent guilt, shame, or self-condemnation
Loss of trust in authority figures or institutions
Spiritual or existential crisis
Social withdrawal and isolation
Difficulty forgiving oneself or others
A fundamental questioning of previously held beliefs
For people in Minneapolis right now—especially those who marched in 2020, who testified at hearings, who believed something fundamental might change—watching another preventable death is more than grief. It's the soul-deep wound of realizing the promises feel empty. The reforms didn't hold. The outrage wasn't enough.
The Silence That Compounds the Wound
Here's the part that keeps me up at night: what makes moral injury particularly insidious is how silence amplifies it.
When I wrote Is This A Cult? about the organization I'd spent most of my adult life working within, I didn't anticipate what would follow. Over the past two years, hundreds of people have reached out to share their stories. Many had carried these experiences alone for years, even decades.
The pattern was consistent: people who witnessed or experienced harm but remained silent, trapped between their knowledge of what happened and their fear of destroying something they believed had value for others. Add to that the very real threats—legal, social, professional—that come with speaking up, and you have a perfect recipe for moral injury.
The silence itself becomes part of the injury. You're not just carrying what you witnessed or participated in; you're carrying the weight of your own complicity in maintaining a harmful system. You're holding the dissonance between your public face and your private knowledge. You're navigating the daily betrayal of your own values for the sake of... what, exactly? Safety? Belonging? The hope that maybe you're wrong?
When Action Becomes Medicine
But here's what I keep thinking about from that conversation with my friend Jacque in Minneapolis: she and her neighbors aren't staying silent. They're organizing. They're delivering diapers. They're creating safety networks. They're refusing to just watch harm happen in their community.
The researcher Shira Maguen found something that stopped me in my tracks: moral injury doesn't require direct perpetration of harm. Witnessing acts that violate our moral code, or failing to prevent harm when we believe we should have, can be equally damaging.
But what if the antidote to that "failing to prevent" piece is taking whatever action we can—even when it feels insufficient, even when it doesn't stop the larger harm?
What I'm seeing in Minneapolis isn't just mutual aid. It's people refusing to let moral injury have the final word. It's the recognition that we may not be able to change the systems that keep causing harm, but we can damn sure show up for each other in the midst of it.
That matters. Not just practically, but psychologically and spiritually.
What the Research Says About Healing
Here's the part that actually gives me hope. The research on healing from moral injury points to things we can actually do—not just understand, but practice.
Breaking the silence. Studies consistently show that one of the most damaging aspects of moral injury is isolation. And I've seen this play out in real time over the past two years. Speaking our truth—even when it's painful, even when it costs us—is often the first step toward healing. This doesn't mean you have to write a book or confront institutions directly (though you can). Sometimes it just means finding one safe person who can hear you say: this happened, and it mattered, and I'm not okay with it.
Self-compassion over self-condemnation. Research by Kristin Neff and others has demonstrated that self-compassion is protective against the shame and guilt that characterize moral injury. This is the hardest one for me, honestly. It means treating ourselves with the same kindness we'd offer a friend who was struggling, recognizing that moral injury often occurs in contexts where no good options existed. You were doing the best you could with what you knew at the time. That doesn't erase the harm, but it also doesn't make you irredeemable.
- Reconnecting with values. Instead of being paralyzed by the gap between our values and our actions (or inactions), we can use that dissonance as information. What do we need to do differently going forward? How can we align our current choices with what we believe to be right? This isn't about beating ourselves up for past choices—it's about letting those choices inform better ones now.
- Finding community. The veterans who've taught us most about moral injury have also shown us that healing happens in connection. Finding others who share our values, who understand the particular betrayals we've experienced, who can witness our pain without judgment—this is medicine.
- Taking action—any action. This is where my thinking has shifted lately. Maybe healing from moral injury isn't just about processing what happened. Maybe it's also about refusing to be paralyzed by it. About choosing to act in alignment with our values now, even when past actions (or inactions) haunt us.
The diapers piling up in my Jacque's living room won't stop ICE raids. But they're keeping families fed and safe in the immediate crisis. And maybe—just maybe—that kind of concrete, grounded action is part of how we metabolize moral injury instead of just carrying it.
Hope as Resistance to Moral Injury
Last week Robyn wrote about hope as an act of resistance. This connects directly to healing from moral injury. When we've been betrayed by institutions we trusted, when we've witnessed the gap between stated values and actual behavior, when we've been complicit in systems that caused harm—hope can feel naive or even dangerous.
But hope, in this context, isn't about optimism or positive thinking. It's about the refusal to let moral injury have the final word. It's about choosing to believe that awareness can lead to change, that speaking truth can crack open new possibilities, that our values still matter even when they've been violated.
Hope is what allows us to transform moral injury from a wound that defines us into a catalyst for more aligned action. It's what lets us say: yes, I was silent when I should have spoken. Yes, I participated in something harmful. Yes, I'm watching terrible things unfold and feeling powerless. And I can choose differently now. And I can use this pain to fuel more ethical engagement going forward.
The Work of iLumn8
This is part of why iLumn8 exists. The personal development and wellness industry is rife with opportunities for moral injury—for practitioners pressured to overpromise or manipulate to make sales, for participants who witness or experience harm but feel unable to speak up, for all of us who've seen the gap between what these spaces claim to offer and what they actually deliver.
We're building a marketplace grounded in the belief that growth shouldn't require the betrayal of our values. That learning environments should minimize, not compound, moral injury. That transparency and informed consent aren't obstacles to transformation—they're what make transformation sustainable and genuine.
If you're carrying moral injury—from an organization you were part of, from witnessing harm you couldn't prevent, from the collective betrayals we're living through right now—I want you to know: your wound is real, your silence made sense, and your choice to speak or act differently now matters.
The research is clear: moral injury heals not through forgetting or minimizing,
but through acknowledgment, meaning-making, and re-alignment with our deepest values. That can be hard work. It's also incredibly rewarding.
And it's work none of us should have to do alone.
So here's what I'm wondering: What's your relationship with moral injury? Have you felt it without having a name for it? Where are you seeing it in your own life or community?
Drop a note in the comments and tell me—I actually read these, and this is a conversation, not a just a blog!
Your partner in growth,
Anne L. Peterson