Undoing Moral Injury
What happens when a child is taught that their mind is a character flaw.
Trey Robinson
Some injuries do not look like injuries. They look like morals.
If you are taught early that your mind is a failure of will, you do not just feel defective. You feel guilty for the shape of your own attention. That guilt becomes a second diagnosis, quieter and harder to treat.
Moral injury is what happens when the people who were supposed to interpret you instead prosecute you. The lesson lands in the body as: I am the problem, and the problem is ethical.
Undoing that is slow work. It is not a slogan. It is the long refusal to keep serving a verdict that was never a reading.