Wins, Losses, and Hurt After the SCOTUS Term

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Reflecting on the Supreme Court

  • Moral Injury with Rev. Dr. Susan Ward Diamond and Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock

  • Outside of Politics: Ellen on Bluey

Content Warning: Today’s episode contains discussion of death by suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, please call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do it without you. To support the show, please subscribe to our Premium content on our Patreon page or Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, or share the word about our work in your circles. Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Instagram to keep up with everything happening in the Pantsuit Politics world. You can find information and links for all our sponsors on our website.

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:00:26] Welcome to Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. It's Beth. Sarah is out this month with her family. If you're missing her as I am, she is posting really wonderful accounts of her trip to Scotland and Ireland. On her Instagram profile: Bluegrassred. Today, I would like to take a different approach to the Supreme Court. And in order to do that, I want to share a couple of special conversations with you. One with Dr. Susan Ward Diamond and Rita Nakashima Brock, and one with my daughter Ellen, Outside of Politics. Before we get started, it would mean so much to us if you would take a moment to give us a five star rating and review on your favorite podcast player. This helps new people find us, which helps grow the community of listeners, and we are always learning from our community of listeners. It makes our conversations so much deeper and richer to hear from all of you. We thank you very much for your time.

[00:01:25] I started my career as an attorney. Despite joining a prestigious firm and receiving excellent legal training and being given opportunities that are rare for associates in firms of a certain size, I was really miserable. Now I love doing a lot of what lawyers do. I love to get lost in court opinions and to construct arguments. I even love to fret over commas and words, spacing and choosing the most precise word for the moment. But I can understand now why I was so unhappy in those days of practicing. My greatest love comes in zooming out away from which argument wins, to think instead about what might create the most good here. When a case reaches the Supreme Court, it does so in a this or that posture. There is no space for the third way that I'm always seeking. The court ended its term at the end of June, and there's plenty to discuss among the high profile cases. The court, as you know, barred race conscious admissions. It said the Biden administration lacked authority to implement its student loan forgiveness program. It told a website designer that she's free to exclude gay customers from her wedding services. It also rejected a fringe legal theory that would give state legislatures runaway power over elections. It permitted the Biden administration to prioritize immigration enforcement as it sees fit. It unanimously said that employers must accommodate workers who observe a Sabbath. It upheld a law that aims to keep native children with their tribes and traditions. These cases are all important. They'll have broad ramifications across society, politically, legally and culturally. And whatever you think of the legal analyzes, there are messages embedded in these cases that embolden some people at the expense of others.

[00:03:10] There are no third ways here. Some people won power and status. Some people felt their rights and opportunities rolling backward. And then there are the cases we never hear about. Lots of business cases that say so much about intellectual property and contracts, even art. And lots of cases about the power of regulatory agencies to carry out their mandate, which affects everything, including our air and water. And there are the criminal cases where all of our promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are tested in the most raw and personal ways possible. This court continues to have little regard for the people who found themselves at odds with the strongest manifestation of government power. The court decided in this term that federal prisoners who are made retroactively innocent by new case law cannot petition courts to overturn their sentences. Many people have written about what we learned this term, and many still will. For the most part, I think we see a court with a conservative majority deciding cases in a fashion that matches the modern conservative movement. Not quite MAGA, but a far cry from even the Reagan era. One of the better analyzes I read of this term from FiveThirtyEight said the fact that the conservatives on the court divided in a few high profile cases probably says more about the radical nature of the cases the court is accepting than their commitment to the conservative agenda. There are political and cultural dimensions to these cases that we'll discuss when Sarah is back. There are legal dimensions that I'll cover in detail on More to Say, one of our premium podcast. You can learn more about in the show notes. But today here, I'm thinking mostly about the impact Supreme Court decisions have on individuals. Every term the court decides matters that will require some people to act in a way that violates their own consciences. That's why I want to spend time with the notion of moral injury, which I think offers us an approach to considering how we as a society might find something like a third way on the other side of these binary decisions.

[00:05:15] Moral injury is a concept that practitioners have been using with veterans for a long time. It gives veterans a community lens for processing and healing wounds resulting from their service. Scholars and practitioners are now expanding this concept of moral injury to health care workers and educators and ministers and nearly all of us who lived through the pandemic. I really like the work being done in this field because it recognizes that there are policies and events and Supreme Court opinions that impact all of us. By the very nature of living together, we are sometimes going to have to do or not do things in ways that conflict with our values. And it's important to say so and then figure out how to find comfort and restoration in other people who've experienced those same kinds of hurt. So I wanted to talk more about this with two leading voices on moral injury. The Reverend Dr. Susan Ward Diamond is the lead pastor at Florence Christian Church Disciples of Christ, where, full disclosure, I am an elder. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock is the senior vice president for moral injury programs at Volunteers of America and a commissioned minister in the Christian. Church as well. Together, they have launched a limited series podcast on moral injury called Soul Repair. Now, these are two Christian ministers, but this is a conversation about a topic that I think and hope will apply to everyone. Probably because Dr. Diamond is my own minister, I thought even more carefully about whether to air this conversation than I do for most guests. If you're not in the habit of listening to Christian ministers, please know two things. Number one, this is not a sermon. It is about an inclusive approach to healing from injuries caused by society. And number two, I'm comfortable sharing our platform with Susan's and Rita's voices because I know that every single person listening with no exceptions, would be enthusiastically and lovingly embraced by these two women exactly as you are. So I'm excited to share this discussion with you. I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time. So I would love to start with you, Rita. Can you tell me what drew you to moral injury work and how you, at this stage in your professional journey, define moral injury? Well.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:07:41] My dad was in the Vietnam War and I was an anti-war activist in college, which split our family. It was a bad thing. And he came home from Vietnam after two tours as a medic. He went in '67, I was just graduating from high school when he got back from his second tour and his personality was so changed I didn't want to live at home with him anymore. So I just stayed away from my family as much as possible because he was there. And it wasn't until I learned about moral injury that I had a suspicion maybe that's what happened to him. And then I talked to a cousin, and it turns out she's the only one he told this story to, but he never told anybody else I know in the family. That he had had a 16-year-old Vietnamese woman who was his translator when he went out into the villages to treat Vietnamese civilians with medicine from the U.S. military. That was a part of their peacemaking pacification program, and he was part of that. He had this translator and I knew about her because he told me she was about my age. She was an Asian young girl. So I knew about her. And he was very proud of her English and all of that. And then he came home and he was really different. And my cousin said, well, when she was asking me what I was working on and she was very close to my dad, I said, "Oh, I'm working on moral injury." And she said, "What's that?" And I said, "Well, it's what happens to your conscience when you have terrible things happen to you in war, you do terrible things." And she said, "Oh, I think that's what your daddy had." And I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, he found that girl's body." I said, "What girl?" She's like, "Well, he had like a spy or some young girl who does translate something she was doing for him. He worked with her and he found her body." And I said, "I know about that girl." She said, "Well, you know, she'd been raped and murdered by the U.S. troops." Then I got it. I got the whole picture of what had happened to him late in his time in Vietnam. And he came home trying to control me. He retired two years from 30 when he would have gotten a lot more benefits. And my mom was really angry that he wouldn't stay into 30 years. And his only reply to her was "Vietnam's army is not the army I signed up for."

Beth [00:09:57] That story is a really compelling introduction to a question I've been wondering about. How do you think of the intersection of moral injury with post-traumatic stress disorder and other diagnosable mental health phenomena?

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:10:12] I don't think-- and this is something that clinicians who study it sort of agree with me on. I mean, they they work in a clinical context, so they try to treat it as best they can, but they agree it's not a disorder. It's not that you have an out of joint relationship to reality. It's that you have a moral response to something that is actually morally devastating. And you can't erase it by saying you're thinking about it in the wrong way. And a friend of mine said, "Why would I forgive myself for killing another human being? I wouldn't be moral if I did that." So it's not disordered. It's not a condition. It's a normal human response to terrifying and terrible moral conditions. But it's an intense kind of suffering. And that's why clinicians themselves also are trying to find ways that don't tell people that they're distorted or they need to fix themselves, but try to help people, even in clinical practice, come to accept what happened as true and real and valid, and then to figure out what are you going to do with that knowledge? PTSD is a thing that's you fear system and things are out of control. And you you can't relate to normal reality in a way that's like you get triggered by things that everybody isn't afraid of and things like that. So there are good treatments for PTSD. And I think that people who wind up in wars or things like that might have both. And what the clinical community is saying is if you don't also look for moral injury as a separate thing, you may make the person worse.

Beth [00:11:46] I love that there is an emphasis on the moral injury side in the communal aspects of a person's suffering. I think that mental health treatment, what we understand about it, is that it is an individualized response and it requires an individualized prognosis.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:12:04] With therapy, you're there because somebody is an expert who's trying to help you fix yourself, but it's up to you to do all the emotional work. You have to do it all by yourself. And what we found in working with veterans in a pretty successful program we have, is if you put them in a group and you create a formal structure for a processing that they can trust, they get changed, but they don't know how. And there's something magical about the way the group itself is an organism of its own that helps people process. But it's not all on the individual, and that makes it a lot easier for people, I think, to get perspective on their experience, to empathize with others who didn't have a similar-- so there's a kind of imagination, playfulness, almost in that process of being changed that isn't such a heavy burden on the individual.

Beth [00:12:52] So, Susan, I came to know about moral injury through you, and my introduction through you was more expansive than just talking about veterans. So I would love for you to tell me what attracted you to this concept as a focus of your own theology and scholarship and how did you see it applying more broadly?

Susan Diamond [00:13:14] It goes back to Rita. And we've been we've been friends and colleagues for several probably a dozen years now or so. And part of my discovery about moral injury was from her. I was on a sabbatical one year. I went to my old alma mater, Brite Divinity School. I had met Rita a couple of years before at Obama's inauguration, his first inauguration. That's a whole 'nother story. But when I went to Brite, I saw her name on the door and that was where my office used to be. So I went in and said, "Okay, what's Rita doing here? And what is this Soul Repair Center?" That's what it was called. And so she and I met and she told me about moral injury with veterans, and I said, "Hey, I live in Montgomery, Alabama, where we're right at Maxwell Air Force Base. Lots of veterans, lots of of communities serving veterans. Can you come?" And we have an event to help educate clergy and social workers and those that are working with veterans. So anyway, that was where I was introduced to moral injury. We had something in Alabama, and then when I moved up to northern Kentucky in 2015, I really didn't do very much with moral injury with veterans. It's always been in the back of my mind.

[00:14:41] But during the time we were going through COVID, as we were beginning to move into that time and I was listening to the reports and I was seeing what was happening in my own household with a spouse who, after 50 years of employment, all of a sudden had no employment; everything was shut down; no hope. I mean, lots of stuff going on in our congregation. I was talking to people who were really in despair, and then we started seeing some of the same kinds of outcomes that happened with our veterans. One of the things about veterans that was very disturbing during these wars is the average death by suicide every day of 22 veterans in the United States coming back from these wars. And so we were starting to see some of this happening in the general population among health workers and other people who are on the front lines. And so I called Rita. I reached out to Rita. I said, "Hey, are you hearing what I'm hearing? Are you thinking what I'm thinking? That this moral injury is coming along with the pandemic as an epidemic?" And she said, absolutely. And so that was when I was writing a grant proposal for my sabbatical to do some research on moral injury and thinking about moral injury as a catalyst for faith communities to continue to look at what kind of mission and ministry we could have in the coming decades. And so, that's really kind of what led me into this whole conversation, and that's where it started.

Beth [00:16:17] Can you help put some specificity on the moral injury attached to COVID? I think it's harder to grasp then the moral injury associated with serving in the military because COVID presented so differently in all of our lives. So can you help me articulate, like, here's how this concept works in this context.

Susan Diamond [00:16:35] As I have been talking to people all over the country, and that was one of the wonderful things about sabbatical, was I was free to travel, and so I was able to talk with teachers who had been out of the classroom and how that whole relationship between student and teachers and children the kind of stuff that they're going through. Even now we're seeing the effects of COVID on the educational level, but also this sense of loss of hope, despair. I talked to teachers who felt a great deal of betrayal by their supervisors, their principals, people who were higher up that were telling them what to do that they did not feel right about. I had a teacher who actually went back to school for training to open the school after being shut down for several months. COVID was still exploding, and she was the only one in her group that was wearing a mask. And she ended up getting COVID and she was blamed for getting COVID. So this whole sense of betrayal, I think, is one of the things. I think in the health care industry we saw that too. We had lots of people who were starting to die by suicide. They just could not cope with what they were experiencing. We talked to nurses, we talked to doctors. And I'm saying we, Rita and I, in our podcast, we'll talk a little bit about that. But we interviewed people who were just at their wits end because everything was around COVID. And so others that should have been getting treated were not being able to be treated because ERs were overrun and people were coming in who were saying, "Don't say I'm dying of COVID, say I'm dying of anything else, but don't say I'm dying of COVID because it's not real." The things that they were talking about were unbelievable. And the depth of asking the question, "What am I here for? I'm not a clergy person. I'm not supposed to be holding the hand of somebody." I've talked to several pastors who-- and I struggled with this as well, not being able to go and do the thing that I am called to do because I wasn't allowed in a room with somebody.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:19:11] I was deeply moved at the end of April 2020, so just a couple of months into the COVID crisis, because I had talked to a battlefield surgeon and Vietnam was a friend of mine, and he said, "You're going to see it in the doctors." It's like if you're in war theater, you're just constantly getting casualty, casualty, casualty. And you have to learn to triage. You have to decide who lives and who dies and who gets care. And then you have to give the best care you can possibly give. And people still die. And it's mass casualties. He said doctors in medical schools aren't trained to triage. They're trying to save everybody. And he said that's so hard to face into that you lose people and then you get overwhelmed. And he said they're going to have moral injury. You can just bet the medical profession is going to be slammed by it. And we had this conversation when COVID had started to surge. A month later, at the end of April, just around the time of my own birthday, an ER doctor in the Bronx took her own life. And so I was fascinated by the story. And at almost the same day, a rookie EMT also took his life and so they both died by suicide. And I'm trying to figure out, okay, what's going on with all this? And she had an ER that was piling up bodies; she got COVID herself. She was out for two weeks. And when she returned-- and perhaps she wasn't completely well, it's not clear. But when she returned, her ER was out of control and she couldn't get it back under control. And she just went catatonic. She just sort of zoned out. And so her supervisor put her in psychiatric care for a week and then sent her home to her family to recover. And what her brother-in-law whom I know told me was that she did start to get better, but the thing she kept saying is, "My career's over. My career's over.".

[00:21:06] What was true at the time was that she believed (and they could not persuade her otherwise) that because she had a psychiatric hospital episode in her diagnosis, that she would lose her liability insurance and her medical license, which can happen to a doctor. You can't get mental health care and get a diagnosis in some states; like only 13 don't penalize doctors. So she took her own life at that point. And who knows what all the factors were. But she was carrying so much and she'd been wanting to be an E.R. doctor since she was 12 years old. So it was a devastating story and a sad one because she was so good at what she did. And she had a church, and she was in a weekly Bible study. She had all the support systems you'd think would get you through that, and somehow she couldn't get through it. So I realized this is going to keep happening. And a colleague named Dr. Mona Masood [sp], a psychiatrist in near Philadelphia, actually opened a hot-line for doctors who could talk to other doctors, other psychiatrists, so they could get help without having to get a diagnosis. And she had 80 volunteer psychiatrists when she started this hot-line. She now has 800 volunteers. So that's just doctors. Then there's the whole nursing profession also. And they went through the same thing with the doctors. And they usually help patients die. They didn't have time. They'd intubate somebody, try to intubate another patient, and that patient would have already died that they just intubated. And so, it was just devastating and it was really high stakes life or death conditions.

Beth [00:22:44] Yeah, I think these stories are really helpful in giving me some words to articulate a tricky thing about COVID, because when you hear moral injury your brain kind of goes, "Oh, well, maybe something immoral happened and we're in pain because of it. But I think the breadth of your work and the conversations you're having with people across disciplines about COVID (and this has to apply to veterans too) illustrates that what is moral is not always clear under circumstances, and sometimes our context makes it so that we are pursuing what we believe to be the greatest good or what we've been asked to serve under the circumstances. And still something about it feels deeply wrong in a way that's intensely painful.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:23:37] Extremely painful. I think the worst thing when people are in dire circumstances and struggling to survive, the worst thing that can happen is to feel helpless. That you have no control over what happens to you. And I think a lot of people felt that way. And when you're in that situation, it's just miserable. It's a place of despair, of depression and cynicism. And so you just sort of feel like no matter what you do, there's nothing that can be done.

Susan Diamond [00:24:05] And like veterans coming home from war, these dark feelings and the betrayal and everything, you don't want to talk about it. You don't want to you don't want to talk about it, and so you internalize it. And that's where it moves from moral distress into deeper levels of injury a lot of times.

Beth [00:24:24] So tell us about these healing circles and the way that you facilitate dialog among people who don't want to talk about it but also want a path through it.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:24:35] We had a program for two years that was pilot tested with 100 veterans, and it's 50 hours of processing for them. And the first three days focused on the trauma, and the second three days focus on rebuilding their sense of trust in themselves and each other in a meaning system that can integrate what happened to them. So when COVID hit, we pulled our best-- and it's all peer facilitated in small groups, so veterans trust other veterans. There are no experts fixing anybody. They're just there to support each other in it, and it worked really well. So we pulled our best facilitators out from that program and said, "If you only had like an hour to 3 hours with people, what exercises do you think would actually help people process in that short amount of time?" So we created a one hour online program called Resilience Strength Time, and the acronym is REST. And that's free and open to the public. And we started that in the summer of 2020. And it's slowly build and it takes forever to get people to use things like that. But people who do use it often come back. And we decided we needed to teach clergy and chaplains this process also. And I had a new assistant come on board who's just amazing. She's so competent and efficient and good. And so she helped me and the two of us put together a one day course. And the first 3 hours gives clergy and chaplains and-- some clinicians even takes the course-- 3 hours to process their own feelings. Because we just assumed if they're coming to the course, they're interested in moral injury. They probably have some of it, or at least some moral distress stored up. And so, we did the process in that and then we had some informational stuff and some other strategies like using arts and other things for helping people recover. Susan took that course, and then we train people from the course to be facilitators later. And so Susan also went through that too.

Susan Diamond [00:26:38] That was a very, very wonderful experience. It was all online, which was I didn't know if it would work if it was online, but it really did. But the piece that was so important was it was structured in such a way that everybody had the opportunity to speak and nobody was there to fix the other person. So that was my big learning from moral injury in the aftermath of COVID. I think that's what MIRAC stands for, Moral Injury Recovery in the Aftermath of COVID. The other piece that contributed to what I'm calling healing circles of trust, comes from a healing circle of trust in northern Ohio that's done by an organization called Warrior's Journey Home. And this is specifically for veterans. But I want to lift that up because the power of what we're talking about is this peer group. And the time when I was with them and observing what they did was the very weekend of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so you can only imagine in a room of 15 veterans from all of the wars basically still living from Korea all the way up, it was so raw. They were so angry, but they also were there for each other. And it was a fabulous opportunity to see how important these peer groups are. So having experienced both of those and thinking about moral injury on a broader scale from the veterans community outward, I wanted to see what we could do at our church. Beth's a member of my congregation. So at our church, for moral injury, people who are struggling with moral distress and moral injury in small healing circles. And so we gather together.

[00:28:38] And one of the things that I took from Rita's training is the importance of being quiet and listening. Being quiet and listening and nonverbal affirmation. So when someone says something that you can tell that they are hurting, we need to be able to communicate we are with them. And so placing your hand over your heart when that happens is an incredible thing. And it's incredible in person when you're sitting around that circle and you're seeing everybody putting their hand over their heart as you are sharing the hardest thing you've ever had to share. One of the things that I have learned is when those healing circles take place, and what I did was train two of our elders to be facilitators, is when that happens in that kind of community-- and I am not the expert and I'm not the fixer, but we are there to be in a ritual setting together. We have an Indian talking stick that's six feet tall, and the person who's holding the Indian talking stick has the floor and they are able to say their truth. We use a lot of different rituals that go along with that so that we've smudged the place to prepare the space. We prayed over the space. We have a cross that has grace written on it. There's just a lot of of symbolism and ritual that we go through so that people have a sense that they are in the place of the holy. I think that's one of the things that moral injury also reminds us of as people that are part of faith communities, is that what we are as human beings to experience things morally, but spiritually healing has to be a part of the healing of the moral injury.

Beth [00:30:28] Yeah, I love that there is an effort to to say that this is sacred, that what you're participating in is bigger than you.

Susan Diamond [00:30:35] Yeah.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:30:35] Yes.

Beth [00:30:36] I want to ask you about the expectation from participation in this kind of work. I like that you said you're not trying to fix. I would love to just talk about what people see in terms of outcomes, and I'll do that by way of personal story. So I was in a car accident at 17 where someone died in the other vehicle. And I think that has probably constituted the great moral injury of my life because I caused the death of another person and that is an anonymous relationship to me still. There was no possibility of redemption or reconciliation with the family or even mourning. It was like not mine to grieve. And still it was. I've done a lot of therapy around this. I have taken the individual path, but it is a different kind of healing for me whenever I tell that story and someone reaches out and says, "Me too. I have also been a driver in a fatal car crash." I have integrated all this to accept that this pain will always be, this will always hurt, and that it can soften and that connection can come from it to other people. Is that kind of how you set people up as they walk into these healing circles in these spaces where you're doing soul repair?

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:31:57] We invite people by explaining a little bit about how moral distress and moral injury can affect your life, and then say the way it affects your life you can process. You don't have to let it drive your life, but it will never not have happened to you. But you have choices about how you remember it and what it what it will mean to you as you move through your life. And so we just do a lot of different kinds of sharing exercises where they write about it and each person shares, and often they will get a different perspective on their own story from somebody else's sharing of a very different story. They can see how that person is thinking about it in a way that isn't very helpful to them and then they're wondering, well, maybe I'm doing the same thing. There's sort of ways they learn from each other in the reflecting process. Because when you're asked to listen completely to someone's story and you're not expected to comment on it, to judge it, to fix it or have an opinion about it, the guidelines are share your own experiences and listened deeply to others. And so the facilitators are trained to hold that silence. And that's an awkward thing in Western culture, to hold the silence. But there's something magical that happens not only to the people listening, but to the person speaking. Sometimes they said it for the first time and they need to hear themselves say it and take it back in.

[00:33:28] So you listen to yourself in that silence as well as others listening to you, and there's some change that begins to happen I think with that process of speaking and then silence and everybody is not interrupted. If they are over irate, we just have them breathe a little. We teach mindfulness breathing that also helps people calm their brains down. And then if they're still not composed well enough to talk, you can say, "Would you like us to come back to you? Or we can wait a minute." So you just very gently help people tell the worst thing that ever happened to them. There's no expectation, there's no goal that they need to get to in that process. It's how the process itself brings them forward into different emotional spaces. I remember a woman in one of our programs who said at the end, she said, "The thing I realized is that I've had so much trauma and pain in my life, I thought I wasn't myself unless I was in pain. I didn't feel like myself if I wasn't in pain." And she said, "I learned this week that I don't have to be in pain." She said, "I can let that go now." I don't know what that means. I just know that she seemed a lot better and her children reported she was very different when she got home and that the program saved their family.

Beth [00:34:49] That's beautiful.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:34:52] And it's not that she's ever going to forget all that. When it's real and it happened to you, it won't go away. So you have to figure out whether it's going to be an anchor that you have to pull painfully along or it's something that you are able to pick up and be. It's just part of your bundle of things.

Beth [00:35:07] Yeah, it will never have not happened to you, it's just such a helpful sentence. That's a really helpful sentence. Susan, We've talked a lot about the church component of this, that this is an exercise that you want faith communities to engage. And I know that is the spirit of your podcast in your upcoming book, which I want to hear about in just a minute. But first, I want to ask you, is this an ecumenical inquiry, and is there a way to apply a moral injury and the healing work of soul repair outside of faith communities?

Susan Diamond [00:35:39] Yes and yes. So one of the things on our podcast we're very clear about is that this is not just ecumenical, it's interfaith or no faith. And that's the point. It's sure, yes, we do incorporate Christian and other kinds of faith, tradition, rituals in with what we are doing. We integrate who we are-- whoever the group is, but it is not dependent. I'm just saying my thesis is that this is something I believe that our faith communities are called to. And certainly in my Christian tradition, it is something that I think needs to be revisited because of the foundations that we have in our faith tradition of healing, that Jesus was about the work of healing in the world. But, again, that's not just limited to Christianity. It can be incorporated in all kinds of different ways.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:36:46] I would say moral injury is a modern term for an ancient affliction that almost every religious tradition understands. How you fail your conscience and feel like you don't deserve to live. So there are lots of traditional rituals and things. There was an ancient Christian penance system that's fallen out of this. It's fallen into disuse mostly, except in certain fairly traditional kinds of Christianity, but it was just called penance, and it was a rehabilitation process because you had done something that separated yourself from God and you needed to get your soul back. What's surprising to me in the work of moral injury is to hear scientists like psychiatrist say we're born moral. It's part of the human condition that we're born moral because we need love, and the way you do love is you be good. And when you fail, it's a devastating thing because we, all of us, for our whole lives long need loving relationships. It's not something you ever outgrow. And there are lots of reasons that people violate their own moral foundations, sometimes there's nothing else you can do. But when that happens, you have to actually come to terms what happens to your conscience and to your soul. And because a meaning system is and law for all relational things, moral injury is a relational process of recovery. You can't do the work yourself. It doesn't work that way.

Susan Diamond [00:38:12] This is one of the things too that I think in churches and faith communities of all kinds, what we experience in an hour of worship together is communal, but it's it's not necessarily deeply relational. And so being able to come together in a small setting where we are sharing things that probably you don't share with too many people, the deep pains in our lives, I was amazed, I really was, in our pilot groups how quickly people wanted to share and how that they wanted to connect with each other. And even though there was not a whole lot of dialog going on in the circle because our purpose there was to listen, when we walked out of that space into another space, there was real relationships going on with talking and hugging and caring and that kind of thing. So as the church is starting to come back from being separated, physically separated from each other for a long time, this kind of thing can really be helpful. And I think especially as we are now experiencing so many traumas with gun violence, this is not going to go away. The need is not going to go away.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:39:43] I wanted to also mention because I forgot to say this, that one of the veterans I've come to know who's got a Ph.D. in anthropology, but he was a veteran in Iraq he was being treated for his PTSD and receiving some help for that from the VA, but he felt miserable. He just kept feeling miserable. And he found this program that another VA I think was doing where the non-Native veterans were welcome to do Native American ceremonials with them, and they were doing the sweat lodge process. So he decided he'd try it. And it really is what lifted his miseries, really what brought him back to himself in an important way. And so he wrote his doctoral thesis and he studied non-Native veterans doing Native American ceremonials. And he was born a Christian in Appalachia. So it isn't like that was his tradition. But he said that process is what really addressed the moral misery he was in from his time in war. Even a Christian person might find another tradition. And we use mindfulness breathing because it's so helpful to calm down emotional stress as you're going through it. So the wonderful thing about living in an interfaith context is if you do it respectfully, you can use things from other traditions with great appreciation because they help, they actually work.

Beth [00:40:58] I love that. Well, I know you have a podcast coming up, a limited series to share stories from people experiencing moral injury in lots of different contexts. Tell us what you really want people to know about it and where they can find it.

Susan Diamond [00:41:11] It's called Soul Repair After Moral Injury, and the purpose of it is to help anybody who's interested in learning about moral injury, but also especially focusing on how can faith communities and people who are in caring professions, people who just care, how can we help each other and how can we grow in understanding and also self-understanding? I think that's one of the themes I think that comes out all throughout the six episodes. It's a limited podcast, six episodes, and we are interviewing all kinds of people. We start with the question, what is moral injury? We're talking with a panel of people that are in the field and those who are passionate about it in lots of different ways and coming from lots of different perspectives. First responders, health care professionals. Who else Rita?

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:42:09] Oh, gosh. Theologians and veterans also.

Beth [00:42:15] Well, I have gotten to hear bits and pieces of it, and I am really excited about it and so grateful for all of your work and for you spending time with me telling us about it.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:42:25] And I would be remiss not to say that we do have these online programs. We have ones for first responders only, veterans only, and one for the general public that's called ReST. And the one for first responders is just Rest4firstresponders.org. And the other one is just Voa-rest.org. And people can go and spend an hour sharing with others anything they're carrying that's morally distressing to them. I have actually participated occasionally, and I find them incredibly helpful.

Beth [00:42:56] Well, thank you so much. We'll make sure to put all those links in our show notes. I hope to continue to follow the work that you're doing.

Susan Diamond [00:43:02] Thanks.

Rita Nakashima Brock [00:43:03] All right.

Beth [00:43:04] Thank you so much to Susan and Rita for joining me today. Next up, we're going to continue thinking about feelings, but in a very different light. My daughter Ellen joins me to chat about her favorite exploration of emotion. The TV show Bluey. Ellen, thank you for being on Outside of Politics with me today. Can you tell people who don't know you how old you are and something fun about yourself?

Ellen Silvers [00:43:56] Okay, so I just turned eight and I play the harp.

Beth [00:44:08] That is awesome. Okay. You asked me to do a segment with me about your favorite show. What is that show?

Ellen Silvers [00:44:15] It's not my favorite show, but I love it.

Beth [00:44:16] Okay, what show is it?

Ellen Silvers [00:44:17] It's called Bluey.

Beth [00:44:19] People are going to want to know what is your favorite show if not Bluey.

Ellen Silvers [00:44:21] Well, it depends. I don't really know.

Beth [00:44:28] That's fair. I'm kind of moody about my television too I get that. Okay. Why did you want to talk about Bluey?

Ellen Silvers [00:44:33] Well, I really like it. And I know a bunch of other kids really love it too. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about it on a podcast.

Beth [00:44:46] What do you think it is that makes Bluey so much fun?

Ellen Silvers [00:44:50] Well, I think it's how it's so funny and it's sweet and it makes me laugh. And it gets kids thinking about problems in the show.

Beth [00:45:07] Oh, I like that. It gets kids thinking about problems. Maybe you could tell people who've never seen an episode of Bluey what it's about.

Ellen Silvers [00:45:13] So it's about this character. So there's a whole family of Heeler dogs, and the main character is Bluey, who is a six-year-old Blue Heeler. And then her little sister Bingo, who is a four-year-old red Heeler. And then they're mum and dad. And mom's name is Chili and Dad's name is Bandit. And it's how they all live together and how Mum and Dad really support the kids a lot.

Beth [00:45:50] Oh, that's really nice, Ellen. And where do they all live?

Ellen Silvers [00:45:53] They all live in New Zealand.

Beth [00:45:55] So tell me what you feel like you have in common with Bluey and then what feels different to you.

Ellen Silvers [00:46:01] We both go to elementary school and I love to play games with my friends and I try with my sister. And when I don't have in common with Bluey is that Bluey is an older sibling and I'm a younger sibling, so I can relate more to Bingo.

Beth [00:46:24] Is there anything that you have seen in Bluey's family that you think, oh, that really feels like our family?

Ellen Silvers [00:46:31] Yeah. Where the parents try to be super, super fun and which makes the kids seem really happy. And sometimes the kids fight. Bluey and Bingo fight a lot, so that makes me think of me and my sister.

Beth [00:46:54] Do you have a favorite episode?

Ellen Silvers [00:46:56] Yeah. There's this episode called Swim School where in that episode they go to, I think, their uncle's pool. And Bluey pretends to be the teacher. There's big fish and little fish. Little fish is the shallow end. Big fish is the deep end. So first they start off with little fish and they learn how to do things. And their teacher's name is Karen. And they say no dobbing, which means no tattle tailing. So then they go to big fish and they have a different teacher who says she loves dobbing. And when they tattletale, they get to complete big fish. But they keep tattle tailing, which makes them sad. And then they get back in the pool, back to little fish, because one of the characters he didn't complete them. And they go back in the pool to support him.

Beth [00:48:10] Well, I know that you do love doing games in the pool that have stories behind them. What's your favorite day we've had in the pool? I have one in my mind. I wonder if it's the same as yours. What's your favorite thing we've played in the pool.

Ellen Silvers [00:48:22] Well, it's the day me and you were playing basketball with that little hoop and riding on the little horses, which were realy pool, noodles and the big things were up in the sky.

Beth [00:48:36] Yeah. We turned on these little fountains in the pool, and we rode our pool noodles and made up a whole story about cave and all the adventures we were having. So I can see why you like that episode of Bluey.

Ellen Silvers [00:48:46] And we named our horses.

Beth [00:48:48] Yes. You know what I really like about Bluey?

Ellen Silvers [00:48:51] What?

Beth [00:48:52] I like that Bluey's mum and dad, you can tell, are really trying hard to make good choices for the family and to participate in the family in good ways. And they don't always get it right. And sometimes in the episode you can see that they're learning things just like the kids are. And that feels really true to me about being a parent.

Ellen Silvers [00:49:13] What's so awesome about Bluey is that it's kid friendly and nothing really that inappropriate happens, so little kids can watch it.

Beth [00:49:22] But then parents can find something in it too, I think.

Ellen Silvers [00:49:25] Parent enjoy it too and they are happy that their kids watch it.

Beth [00:49:32] I remember an episode where the mum was trying to get the kids to stop using a certain phrase and the kids really pressed her on why throughout the episode and they talked about how their friends family used that phrase and do we think we're better than them? And by the end of the episode, the mum realized like, hey, I don't know why I'm making this rule. This isn't a very good rule. And I've thought about that episode a lot since then.

Ellen Silvers [00:49:57] The phrase they're using is the word dunny, which they mean toilet, and their mum doesn't enjoy it. The funniest thing in that episode is Bingo says, "Does the queen say dunny? No, the queen does not say dunny, then I'm not saying it either."

Beth [00:50:24] I couldn't remember what the word was. Thank you for that. It does also lead to you saying some very charming expressions from New Zealand that we wouldn't otherwise. Well, Ellen, thanks for talking to me about this.

Ellen Silvers [00:50:35] Yeah. If you're listening to this and you have a kid, you should tell them. If they don't know what Bluey is, then they should try telling your kid to watch it because it's really great.

Beth [00:50:50] And you got a Bluey birthday present. You want to tell everybody what that was?

Ellen Silvers [00:50:54] What was it again? I forgot.

Beth [00:50:59] We're going to go see Bluey live.

Ellen Silvers [00:50:59] Oh, yeah. We're going to go see Bluey live.

Beth [00:51:02] Did you just have so much birthdaying (sic) that you can't even remember at all?

Ellen Silvers [00:51:05] Yeah.

Beth [00:51:06] That's how it feels to me. All right. Well, I appreciate you being here.

Ellen Silvers [00:51:10] Thank you.

Beth [00:51:11] Thank you all for listening today. I really hope you enjoyed this different approach to the very important decisions the Supreme Court has made this term. Don't forget to rate and review the show if you enjoyed it. We'll be back in your ears this Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

Beth Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.

Sarah Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.

Beth Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. Executive Producers Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. Tawni Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Danny Ozment. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago.

Beth Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.

Alise Napp1 Comment