“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6
Abstract
This paper introduces an infographic tool called The Moral Injury Experience Wheel, designed to help users accurately label moral emotions and conceptualize the mechanisms of moral injury (MI). Feeling wheels have been used by therapists and clinical chaplains to increase emotional literacy since the 1980s. The literature on the skill of emotion differentiation shows a causal relationship between identifying emotions with specificity and emotional and behavioral regulation. Emerging research in moral psychology indicates that differentiating moral emotions with precision is related to similar regulatory effects. Based on this evidence, it is proposed that increasing moral emotional awareness through use of an instrument that visually depicts moral emotions and their causal links to MI will enhance appraisal and flexible thinking skills recognized to reduce the persistent dissonance and maladaptive coping related to MI. Design of the wheel is empirically grounded in MI definitional and scale studies. Iterative evaluative feedback from Veterans with features of MI offers initial qualitative evidence of validity. Two case studies will show utility of the wheel in clinical settings and present preliminary evidence of efficacy.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Simon Lasair, Research Chair at St. Paul's Hospital Saskatoon, Canada, and Dr. Anja Visser, University of Gronigen, for their review of the paper’s methodology. The author would also like to acknowledge the influence of Dr. Tine Molendijk’s work which seeks to expand the conception of moral injury beyond “the result of violations of an internally harmonious, intra-psychic code” (Molendijk et al., 2022). The concept of the fourth quadrant of the wheel, representing the moral injurious experience of disorientation from inevitable and unavoidable moral conflict, is based upon her research (Molendijk, 2018, 2022).
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Fleming, W.H. The Moral Injury Experience Wheel: An Instrument for Identifying Moral Emotions and Conceptualizing the Mechanisms of Moral Injury. J Relig Health 62, 194–227 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01676-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01676-5