Recovering From Moral Injury and Living Your Values

“Trust the people who move towards you and already feel like home. Trust the people to let you rest. Trust the people to do everything better than you could have imagined. Trust the people and they become trustworthy. Trust that the people are doing their work to trust themselves..” - Adrienne Maree Brown

Andrea Meronuck is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and the owner of New Moon Facilitation in Flagstaff. She is working as a trauma informed care consultant to Sage Home. Andrea is also the Clinical Director at Northland Family Help Center, and teaches Mindful Self-Compassion in the community and to counseling master’s students at NAU.

We are honored to have her on our board and for her contribution to this month’s blog.

Early Career

I began my career as a counselor at a community mental health agency. My job was to work with children who were in state custody due to being removed from their parents’ care, often due to their parents' active substance abuse. I primarily worked with babies and preschool-age kiddos, along with their older siblings. My role was multifaceted - providing in-home support for the child in foster care, individual and sibling group therapy, as well as family therapy with the parents. I also consulted with the child’s attorneys and made recommendations to their child welfare caseworkers.

Cracks in the System

Early on in my career, it was clear to me that the operations of the child welfare system were not something that anyone around me believed was actually functioning in the way we wished it would – the families receiving the intervention, or the professionals involved.

In an earlier blog post, Sage Home founder Marca and board member Marilee talked about an example of a mother whose baby was placed in a foster home in a different city than where she was living and receiving court-ordered substance abuse treatment. They discussed how this mom came into treatment with so much energy, but by being separated from her baby, she lost confidence, hope, and was not able to practice the basic skills of being a mother. In my work, I saw this through the lens of serving the children in that situation. When the only available foster family was in a different community, it was so hard to coordinate the connections. I saw parents overwhelmed with everything they had to do in a system that was very confusing to navigate. It was especially hard from a place of being very newly in recovery, facing emergent traumas, and the shame, stigma, and disempowerment of their current experience.

Difficulties in Logistics

Often, the first thing I had to do as a therapist for children in foster care was explain what was happening and why. I also explained what role each of the new people in their lives had, and how that impacted the course of this child welfare system experience they were in. Sometimes the very logistics got in the way of a child being able to live with their parents again. Sometimes things happened due to those logistics that were so painful, I had to tell these kids that I knew what was happening to them was not right. I am very thankful to my first clinical supervisor that gave me the grounding to be honest with the kids and with the parents so I could maintain some genuine relationship with them in the face of so many barriers.

Moral Injuries

Coming to therapy practice from a more macro level interest in policy and public health, became intimate with many of the societal factors that created impossibilities in the lives of many of the parents I came to know. Also, parents generously educated me on the sticking points they came up against in their recovery, as they pushed back against assumptions I held. Though I didn’t have the term for it at the time, we were dealing not only with personal and intergenerational trauma but moral injury as these parents attempted to navigate their lives, forced by oppressive conditions to take paths against their values to survive. As a passionate practitioner, this work also left me with moral injury. Options that children really needed to have the security of connection to their parents, while their parents also engaged in healing did not exist. I saw this moral injury at every level of the child welfare system.

“Moral injury refers to the lasting psychological, spiritual and social harm caused by one’s own or another’s actions in a high-stakes crisis. The injury comes from the transgression of deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. If unaddressed, the moral injury will fester, and the lack of meaning, emotional distress, and mistrust can persist for years. Although moral injury was initially applied to combat veterans, it clearly can also occur in other populations experiencing substantial conflicts in values.”

Learning More

The University of Minnesota School of Social Work has summarized research on moral injury in child welfare systems in professionals, parents, and children involved. They offer a free class to begin to elevate beyond analyses of trauma in families and vicarious trauma in professionals. For families and for professionals in this field, finding a pathway to a healthy life together for a family is as high stakes as it gets. Children ultimately suffer when we are not able to take steps to resolve and heal from moral injuries in every area of the child welfare system. 

Why Sage Home?

My involvement in Sage Home is a way to respond to the moral injuries I witnessed in my work. Sage Home keeps families together. Solutions to the layers and layers of change that are needed to build beyond what author Johann Hari talks about as ‘contingent connection’ with folks struggling with addiction. He notes that this requires building reciprocal, trusting relationships. To build what Hari talks about as a ‘social recovery’ to addiction, building worthiness and belonging in all individuals in a system is the antidote to shame and despair. The relationships between every person in the system need to be tended to with presence and care.

Moving at the Speed of Trust

I was first introduced to the Stephen M. R. Covey concept “moving at the speed of trust” by public intellectual Adrienne Maree Brown in the context of facilitating urgent social change. When trust is high, the speed of the task increases and the cost of the task decreases, especially during a crisis. In her book, Holding Change (2021), brown shares that through the process of trusting people, people become trustworthy. We need a child welfare system where trust can emerge, and from that foundation, as brown elaborates this concept, we define what the necessary boundaries are for how we operate this system.  With Sage Home, we aim to build an environment where we have the proximity, the time, and the space to develop trust between:

·        parents and their children

·        parents and themselves

·        families and support professionals

·        professionals with themselves and the systems they work within

·        and together as a community

With Sage Home, we are able to build the capacity to truly live our values and that is something I am truly proud to be a part of.

To learn more about Andrea Meronuck, you can view her bio here or visit our website.