Moral injury, and why the worst thing a high-control group does to you is often the thing it makes you do
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| "The Things We Blame Ourselves For" is a thought-provoking article by Australian Clare McIvor.
It will be relevant to those in the process of leaving, or have already left, high-control religious groups. And I believe it speaks especially to those who supported the system, even while deep down a small part of them was suppressed, ignored, and perhaps dying. |
“Moral injury creates two victims.”
Since leaving high-control religion, and even more so since starting the Australian Cult Survivors Network, I’ve been thinking about the damage of high-control groups. It’s not often the things we believed that wound us. It’s what was done to us. The control, the shunning, the commodification of youth and earnestness, the way it was turned into labour. The way dissent was squashed. The way questions became fears, thinking became dangerous, and self was suppressed. The surveillance. The relationships. The financial and health loss. The sermons and one-on-one sessions that rearranged our insides before we were old enough to have opinions or autonomy.
It’s all of that. It’s in the eyes and in the stories of every survivor I work with.
But there’s one thing we find it a lot harder to wrap words around, and it keeps so many of us awake at night. I didn’t know until a few years ago that it had a name. Moral injury. Its the wound left behind by the things you were forced to do, or complied with, or witnessed and failed to stop because of the totalitarian control the cult or high-control group had over your mind and body.
A friendship that was cut off because leadership said they were an impediment to our progress. A parent cut off because they weren’t supportive of the program. The child we told about hell under the guise of spiritual protection, that really scared them into compliance. The time you sat silently and watched someone humiliated or forced to confess in front of the whole group.
This is moral injury, and it’s hard to know what to do with it. For me, it’s the queer community that invokes this feeling in me. The things I said. The things. I believed. The things I didn’t know until my husband came out. And the youth of the church I was in. People say, “but you were different” and tell me that somehow I was a comfort to them. I still don’t believe it, to be honest.
Moral Injury isn’t a cult phenomenon: its an artefact of war
In the 1990’s, clinicians working with Vietnam veterans noticed that something: the PTSD seen in the veterans was a little atypical. It didn’t fit the normal fear-based model of post -traumatic stress.
In the 1990s, clinicians working with Vietnam veterans noticed that something in the men’s suffering didn’t fit the fear-based model of post-traumatic stress. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, writing from years inside the VA system, argued that the deepest damage often wasn’t terror at all. It was betrayal. He eventually put it in three parts: a betrayal of what’s right, by someone who holds legitimate authority, in a high stakes situation.
A decade and a half later, a group of psychologists led by Brett Litz broadened it. In a 2009 paper that has become the standard reference, they described a potentially morally injurious event as “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Not just what was done to you. What you did, what you didn’t stop, what you watched, and what you found out later.
When you start thinking about those four doorways with the cult or high-control group you left in mind, it can get a little confronting. We were all in those situations. All four of them. And you can bend yourself into pretzels trying to explain it away, or your therapist can reassure you time and time again that you were powerless, you had to protect yourself, you didn’t know what you didn’t know. But the sting still stays.
Why it hits high-control group leavers.
A high-control group doesn’t just harm you. It recruits you into the harm. The whole engine runs on recruits becoming participants in their own imprisonment. We become like a network of spies keeping an eye on eachother and rushing back to the leader with intel, knowing that favour with the head honcho is safety, and compliance or devotion equal favour.
Moral injury hits leavers of cults and high-control groups because we don’t recognise the way our own consent dissipated, or how compliance was survival so much as we remember what we did to stay in that system. We were the ones who invited new recruits. We were the ones who policed each other’s appearances, prayed for someone’s “deliverance” from being gay. We set up the chairs, handed out the flyers, attended or lead the discipleship sessions, and acted as full-voiced supporters of the regime. When the group needed hands, you were the hands.
And we did it sincerely. That’s the sting. At times we enthusiastically complied without doubts. Other times, we wholeheartedly complied to quiet doubts. The way that these groups operate is by lovebombing a person through the early stages of indoctrination, and then adding costs to the latter stages of indoctrination. Once you are in, you know that any misstep can cause social, spiritual, financial, physical, mental and emotional repercussions. You tell yourself that you are in it because you believe it and it is the truth. But there is a cost to doubt, so you silence doubts. But for the most part, you believe it, and you act on your belief, and your belief was been installed by people who had a lot more clout than you when it came to your own life.
So when you leave and your conscience comes back online, it comes back online pointed at you. Not at them. At you.
This is why so many survivors describe a type of shame that recovery language doesn’t quite reach. It’s just not “I was hurt.” It’s “I did this too.” “I saw it.” “I failed to stop it.” And every attempt to say “but I was manipulated” feels, from the inside, like a dodge, because part of what the group taught you was that excuses are what weak people make.
There’s also the illusion of choice here. No one chooses to join a cult. They choose to go to a short course, or a barbeque, or some innocuous or beneficial thing. The rest is a tactical recruitment into a thought-reform process with systems of control and domination attached.
I’m not over the moral injury aspect of the world I left. I don’t think I ever will be. And its silly! I was not recruited into it, I was raised into it. There’s a difference there. However, it all seems like splitting hairs when you try to make yourself feel ok.
It was a tricky thing, the cult inquiry in Victoria. Because I read accounts of people who had grown up in my group. And I remembered them from a different angle. The kid with glandular fever (mono), who was so exhausted he could barely stand and stayed at home on a Sunday morning, only to be dragged from his bed by youth leaders and brought to church, and made to dance? I remember it, from the vantage point of the stage. I played keyboard and sang while the guys stood around him, shoving him to make him dance, or when his arms hung limp at his sides. I saw the exhaustion in his body language. I saw the dissociation in his face.
I bore witness. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make trouble. I had to comply with leadership. But I bore witness, and I did not stop them.
Moral injury creates two victims. I will never be the greater victim in that scenario. He is. I was an adult. He was a teen. I was leadership. He was youth. It is his scar, and I read it on paper and saw it in technicolour memory. But a thousand cuts of the same type scar my soul.
The other side of moral injury is the betrayal side
Shay’s version requires legitimate authority. A pastor, an elder, an apostle, a father, an “anointed” leader — these are people holding not just power but moral authority. They were, in the group’s telling, the ones who could tell you what was right. When they turned out to be running a protection racket for abusers, or building a property portfolio, or grooming teenagers, the injury wasn’t only that you were deceived. It was that the faculty you used to tell right from wrong had been in their hands the entire time.
For kids who were raised in these fundamentalist groups, these cults or high-control groups, that damage is pretty hardcore. I dance with it every day. How is it that I was raised reading the same Bible as my parents and my siblings who are still on the inside, and yet my moral compass spins out at the things they think (or at least act as if) are right)? How does that even work? How can you be raised with “thou shalt not lie” over your head, and then be punished for calling out other people’s lies? The schisms are hard to look at.
The psychologist Jennifer Freyd has a related idea: betrayal trauma, which she describes as what happens when the people or institutions you depend on for survival violate your trust or wellbeing. She extended it to institutional betrayal, wrongs committed by an institution against people who depend on it, including failing to prevent or respond decently to harm.
The aspect of this that involves us depending on the institution for survival - that’s not an overstatement for anyone raised in one of these systems. Your housing, your friendships, your family, your eternity and your entire sense of what a good person is; one person, or the institution built around them, held all of it.
Moral injury and PTSD often travel together, but they are not the same thing.
PTSD is organised around fear and threat. The treatments that work for it are built for fear and threat. Moral injury is organised around guilt, shame, and the collapse of a moral framework. You can complete a very good course of trauma therapy, genuinely reduce your hypervigilance and your nightmares, and walk out still convinced you are a bad person who did unforgivable things. Nothing in the fear-based work touched it, because it wasn’t a fear-based problem.
The people who work in this area are fairly blunt that treating one does not treat the other. It’s worth saying to a therapist, in those words, if what you’re carrying is closer to I did that than I’m afraid of that.
I’m hoping that research on this issue grows with time, and with it, the options we have around recovery. But for now, calling it what it is, assigning it a name and identifying it as something that happened to many people is helpful on some level.
There’s also a growing evidence base for moral injury outside the military, including work that speaks directly to religious contexts. An Australian study published in Social Science & Medicine in 2022 interviewed 42 survivors of LGBTQA+ conversion practices and found moral injury and spiritual harm to be distinct injuries in their own right — damage to religious self-concept and to the survivor’s relationship with community, alongside the more familiar mental health outcomes. If you went through conversion practices, or watched them happen to someone else, you were not being dramatic about it. Researchers have now put a frame around exactly what you experienced.
What might repair look like?
I want to be careful here, because I think this is where a lot of recovery content gets glib. Moral injury does not resolve by being told you weren’t responsible, and it certainly doesn’t resolve by people telling you that you were always different. You were brainwashed. It wasn’t you. You were powerless to act. It almost never lands, because it asks you to accept a version of events in which you weren’t really there. You were there.
What seems to help more is holding both things at once. You did it. You did it inside a system engineered to make you do it. Those are both true, and neither one cancels the other. There is a lot for us to learn about what happens to agency and consent under coercion, under group-based coercive control as that term emerges into the world.
Perhaps we can somehow own an action, but identify ourselves as a clearly defined part of a production line and still send the bill to the people who built the machine?
The other thing worth knowing is that moral injury seems to be, at least partly, a community problem rather than a private one. Guilt that came from a group tends to need a group to be metabolised. Not necessarily a religious one — a survivor space, a friendship, a sponsor, a person who has done the same things you did and who won’t flinch when you say them out loud. Gosh, the words, “yeah, me too” mean so much to a survivor who was isolated on their way in, and isolated again on their way out.
You were made into an instrument. That is a thing that was done to you, and the fact that the instrument had a conscience is still bloody hurts. The guilt is not evidence that you were bad. It’s evidence that you were good enough that they had to work on you.
If any of this is sitting heavily, it’s worth talking to someone — a therapist who understands coercive control, or a survivor line. In Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14.
Sources
- Litz, B.T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W.P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). “Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706.
- Shay, J. (2014). “Moral Injury.” Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182–191. See also Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Atheneum, 1994).
- Freyd, J.J., betrayal trauma theory and institutional betrayal — Freyd Dynamics Lab, University of Oregon.
- Jones, T.W., Power, J., & Jones, T.M. (2022). “Religious trauma and moral injury from LGBTQA+ conversion practices.” Social Science & Medicine, 305, 115040.
- The Moral Injury Project, Syracuse University — moralinjuryproject.syr.edu
