ABSTRACT

Starting from the similarities between moral injury and trauma, this chapter poses the question of why the predominant trauma discourse today tends to focus exclusively on its negative effects when its etymological roots, but also the very clinical realities of trauma, testify to it having both negative and positive consequences. The reasons identified as responsible for this skewing include the priority to eliminate the “trauma pain”, our “preference” for “trauma pain” instead of the more disturbing “existential pain”, and organisational structures of help systems in society. Examining the core processes of onto-ecological unsettledness reveals that they are comparable to those involved in all forms of learning and development. Moral injury is finely balanced between injury and morality, psychiatry and ethics, and yet its pathology is accentuated instead of its existential implications. Moral injury is part of a wider condition of moral crisis which also includes renewing and revitalising effects (Adversity-Activated Development). This chapter advances the argument that the very discourses that are intended to heal trauma are themselves traumatising because they pathologise human suffering. The process of metanoia as a transformation of a person’s totality of being is introduced as the potential outcome of moral crisis.