Tags: Moral Injury
Description:
Moral injury may develop from exposure to events (acts of commission or omission) that transgress an individual’s deeply held values and beliefs, leading to negative psychological, spiritual, and social consequences. Morally injurious events can erode core beliefs about what is right and wrong in oneself or others—about goodness, trustworthiness, and benevolence. While it is an ancient concept that battlefield transgressions may inflict emotional harm on the warfighter, there has been growing interest in moral injury in the mental health field and other circles. Some experts suggest that the extended operations in Iraq and Afghanistan may have increased service members’ risk for developing moral injury, given the ambiguous nature of the operations, including unconventional guerrilla warfare and changing rules of engagement. More recently, researchers have reported on moral injury experienced by first responders and health care providers from COVID-19-related moral and ethical stressors.
This training will explore where morality comes from, define moral injury and describe how it develops, identify incidents that may contribute to it, and examine various assessment and treatment methods. The focus will be on moral injury in the military population, while recognizing that it also occurs in the civilian population. The presenter will encourage participants to consider challenges they face in identifying and treating moral injury, including how to create a nonjudgmental, safe space for clients to talk about it, and how to distinguish moral injury from common co-occurring problems such as PTSD. Military cases will be introduced to demonstrate approaches for assessing and addressing moral injury. This training is aimed at behavioral health providers and trainees working with service members and veterans as well as clinicians interested in trauma (Litz et al., 2022; Richardson et al., 2020; Rozek & Bryan, 2021).
Training Agenda:
Total Training Time: 3 hours 30 minutes (includes a 10-minute break plus 20 minutes for the introduction period and CE wrap-up)
Instructional Level: Introductory
Paula Domenici, Ph.D., is a licensed counseling psychologist working as the director of Civilian Training Programs at the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. She oversees all civilian courses and training programs, and develops and presents workshops on deployment-related topics for military and civilian clinicians across the country.
Dr. Domenici specializes in war-related trauma and the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. She also worked at the National Naval Medical Center, treating Navy personnel and Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan in the outpatient behavioral health clinic and inpatient casualty care unit.
Earlier in her career, she was an American Psychological Association Congressional Fellow at the Office of Senator Hillary Clinton, as well as a staff psychologist at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center. She is a co-author of two books, Courage after Fire: Coping Strategies for Troops Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and Their Families; and Courage after Fire for Parents of Service Members: Strategies for Coping When Your Son or Daughter Returns from Deployment.
