The world can be a disheartening, disappointing, uncomfortable, or incomprehensible place to be in. Some things which hold precious value for us seem to be a mere after-thought for others. Because we care about those precious things, we are left wounded by the indifference towards our core values. We feel challenged in our core moral identity, and we cope the best we can: we either experience anger (initial defence) which may not or cannot be rightfully expressed, thereby turning into existential frustration, a deep sense of injustice, sadness, then despair. Or we experience fear (initial response) which may be concealed or misunderstood, thereby turning into guilt and/or shame, self-rejection, then despair.
Our moral values inform how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and give us a general sense of direction as we engage in the world, a world that is not always predictable and controllable. They are important landmarks that assist in a healthy process of discriminating what we value and what do not value as much, enabling us to make more informed, more thoughtful choices in life which we can stand by and for which we can accept responsibility. They are the foundations upon which we can claim we have integrity – integrity implying here a cohesive wholeness, a complex yet coherent way of being.
Moral values underpin how I define myself and how others perceive me – whether the two overlap or not, which is another story. Importantly, the degree to which we define ourselves primarily (rather than partly or secondarily) through our moral values is critical to understand the impact of moral wounds and injuries onto the overall sense of self and psycho-emotional state of an individual. For some of us, moral values are so intrinsically connected to our sense of self that even the slight bruising of one of our core values is experienced as a deep, painfully personal attack on our integrity, that is, as a terrible threat against what makes us complex-yet-whole human beings. The hurt is so intense we feel compelled to do something – anything – to rectify the situation – angrily, tearfully, desperately. But most times, there is not a lot that we can actually do, but feel the wound and its echo in our psyche and in our body. As we stare at the moral wound, stunned, helpless, time stretching in improbable ways, we perceive no healing occurring – just the pain lingering, and our mind caught in a loop re-living the moment over and over again, without gaining any fresh understanding as to why it happened. We watch our fellow human beings carrying on with their lives, as if nothing happened, shrugging off the bruises and re-joining the ebb and flow of existence in a seamless, effortless way. Meanwhile, within us, despair nestles.
What are examples of such bruises and wounds, that are a minor bother for some and a moral devastation for others? It can be a warm “Hello!” met with silence or grumpiness, or an offer of practical help met with annoyance or disdain. It can be the witnessing of a violent argument or a violent situation which breaks our heart in million pieces while the common response is a pseudo-philosophical acceptance that “life is tough and these things happen, sadly”. It can be a genuine need and openness to connect met with ambivalence, inconsistency, or hidden demands. It can be the careful crafting of a sentence expressing deeply felt emotions met with seemingly careless, contradictory words put together in a rush. It can be the brave step taken to reveal our vulnerability to a trusted other, only for that other to nod mindlessly, too busy or too distracted to notice, stop and engage. It is anything that hurts us in our core, that shocks our psycho-somatic system in its integrity, that makes us question our normalcy as a human being (“Am I truly faulty to be like this?” or “Is something so fundamentally wrong with me to experience this amount of pain?”) while also making us question our faith in life and in the world as is (“Why are people so cruel, so careless, so focused on themselves alone?” or “What is the point of (my) life if the world is so unbearably, endlessly painful?”). Despair nestles some more.
Moral wounds often underlie psycho-emotional distress. They can be spotted in depressive tendencies, general anxiety, compulsive tendencies (with things, with food, with thoughts), and in the manifestations of most traumatic events – which are usually a threat to the integrity of the individual (physical, psycho-emotional, spiritual, or all of the above). The moral nature of the wound is important in so far as a purely psychological response will not do – there has to be some moral healing as well. What does this consist in? Essentially, moral healing entails both a rehabilitation and a finetuning of our moral values to support a better functioning as a human being in a less-than-perfect world (in our eyes).
The rehabilitation part consists in consciously remembering and honouring why our values are so dear to us – what they mean in our own words, how they make us who we are, uniquely so. When we carry an open moral wound, it is easy for despair to make us forget why we care in the first place and, instead, we become overwhelmed by the pain and the anger/fear. Reconnecting to the essence of our values, and to the role they play in making us the unique individual we are, helps contain and cleanse the wound.
The finetuning part involves the slightly uncomfortable but necessary process of discriminating further, more precisely, more assertively, which contexts warrant or deserve the full investment of our moral values, and which contexts are not ready for or not open to it. Having remembered the essence of our values, we are more apt at appreciating their iridescence, the way they play against light, and how they shed a brighter or smaller shadow. This finetuning process acts as the cauterization, necessary for the skin to regenerate and regrow. It is understood not as a moral compromise, but as moral maturing. From anointed (or self-appointed) moral warriors, we learn to become moral sages, and to embody our values in a more graceful, yet still immensely powerful way. And we learn that doing so is always ever so unique, just as we are. And that, in itself, is quite an amazing achievement.