Cultivating moral resilience

Photo by Marki on Pexels.com

Resilience is generally considered to be the ability to recover or adapt well to stress, adversity, or trauma; it ensures that change and challenge improve, rather than hurt our lives, and fortify rather than weaken our spirit. Resilience helps us to see that difficulties need not leave us eternally damaged; only temporarily challenged.

Moral resilience, while still a nascent concept, is related to psychological resilience but distinct in three ways. Cynda Hylton Rushton, a leading scholar in the field of clinical ethics and a professor of nursing and pediatrics at the John Hopkins School of Nursing, says, “Moral resilience focuses on the moral aspects of human experience; the moral complexity of the decisions, obligations, and relationships; and the inevitable moral challenges that ignite conscience, confusion, and moral distress.” Because the moral domain is connected with all dimensions of human resources — biological, psychological, cognitive, spiritual, and relational — building moral resilience can benefit us at a whole person or embodied level.

Self-expression: Choose and contribute in ethically clear and competent ways

Photo by Luan Queiros on Pexels.com

There are many ways to express ourselves, but when it comes to moral resilience, two ways can be particularly helpful: developing ethical competence and speaking with clarity and confidence.

Ethical competence involves ethical embodiment, that is living the values that we espouse by making sure that what we hold to be true and sacred is reflected in our actions. It is about immersing ourselves in the “moral” world by cultivating a moral vocabulary, imagination, attitude, and coherent character, as well as a dynamic moral posture — being patient with, and open and flexible to others’ values, desires, hopes, and fears.

Speaking with clarity and confidence means giving voice to our concerns by bringing distressing issues to the attention of invested others. Rather than seeing moral distress as an end in itself, consider it an opening to a broader and more substantive conversation about the dynamics of the situation. Speaking with clarity and confidence also includes knowing when to excuse ourselves from a situation, system, or relationship, whether it be for a short time or else permanently because that situation could irreparably harm our conscience.

Meaning-making: Don’t demand it. Create it.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Meaning-making is the process of how we perceive, interpret, and make sense of events in life, relationships, and ourselves. It gives us a way to organize memories and shape the narrative of an experience. Meaning also helps us to reconcile incongruities in our values, beliefs, and expectations and in our attitude toward life. This is especially important in times of moral adversity.

Senseless suffering is a big theme in moral resilience. We often think to ourselves, “Why am I continuing to do ‘this’ when nothing changes?” One way to create meaning is to consider alternatives that may not appear obvious or that you have previously rejected. Also, consider how this situation is asking you to grow. What new insights about yourself, others, and life have come to light?

A mistake often made when it comes to meaning-making is thinking it is a lesson to be learned or the “moral of the story.” Not so. Meaning-making is not trying to put a happy spin on pain, nor is it necessarily trying to teach us cautionary realities. Meaning-making simply helps us to broaden our thinking and feeling about a morally difficult situation and keeps us moving forward with integrity and principled action.

Moral distress

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

“Moral distress” is a term coined in 1984 by philosopher Andrew Jameton to describe the suffering nurses experience when institutional or systemic barriers prevent them from acting with integrity, particularly when it comes to fundamental moral principles and ethical responsibilities. At times, actions deemed to be ethical are different from the ones a person would naturally choose or reach for if otherwise available.

When we are morally distressed, we often feel muzzled, restricted, devalued, unheard, or dismissed. We easily become fueled by anger, disgust, fear, and frustration. Over time, these emotions can fill us with anxiety, depletion, or depression. A sense of being fragmented can set in, leaving us to question who we or others are at their core and what the world is, generally. Research also shows that moral distress has long-term consequences, such as burnout, exhaustion, numbness, disconnection, and diminished moral sensitivity (also called “compassion fatigue”).