Everyone suffers loss. Personal loss is painful; professional loss can also be painful, especially when our occupation provides a strong sense of identity. In cases where professional loss feels personal, we turn to peers and colleagues as well as family and friends to help us bounce back, usually through talking, because recovering from trauma requires encouragement and inspiration, not silence. Recent research examines the damaging effects of silence in managing trauma that has its roots in moral injury.
Moral Injury on the Front Lines
Studying moral injury within policing, Patricia Pariona-Cabrera et al. (2026)[i] adopted a research-based definition of the term as “the psychological distress” officers experience when exposed to trauma as a result of “perpetrating, failing to prevent or witnessing actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” The authors note that moral injury was initially studied in service members but has recently been explored within the fields of social work, healthcare, and policing.
Studying 371 police officers in Australia, Pariona-Cabrera et al. found that employee silence increases the indirect negative effect of moral injury on job satisfaction and engagement, and the indirect positive effect on an officer’s intention to leave the agency. They recognize that police officers are not only on the front lines of maintaining safety and public order, but they are also tasked with protecting other emergency service agencies to enable them to perform their duties. Pariona-Cabrera et al. note the challenging, demanding nature of police work, which is shaped by public expectations as well as consistent exposure to trauma and stress, resulting in significantly high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as compared with the general population. The authors explain that police officers’ moral injury contributes to developing PTSD and that experiencing moral injury over time can deplete coping resources, especially without access to the personal resources necessary to navigate daily challenges.
One thing that can help employees work through moral injury, however, is not necessarily the passage of time or taking time off, but spending time just talking.
Moral Injury Requires Moral Support
Within a variety of contexts, personal and professional, many people are assisted by the opportunity to talk through trauma. The support, attention, and encouragement of professional peers who can relate to workplace-specific trauma are valuable sources of comfort due to shared experience. Pariona-Cabrera et al. note that moral injury causes officers to doubt the extent to which their work has a positive impact, which decreases job satisfaction and engagement, and increases their intention to leave. They note that an authoritarian style of management in combination with paramilitary overtones can prompt a culture of silence and potentially impact officer mental health as well as the willingness to speak up. Taken together, these factors also contribute to job dissatisfaction and high turnover. The authors suggest that human relations departments should be proactive in providing appropriate resources, ideally preemptively, rather than waiting to respond to a request for help when it might be too late, especially within a culture that values silence and strength.
Pariona-Cabrera et al. note the applicability of their research to police agencies as well as other frontline emergency services around the world. They highlight the importance of their findings, which illuminate the detrimental impact of employee silence on the link between moral injury and prosocial behavior and encourage increased investment in practices that can decrease employee silence and promote mental health and well-being in the police force, and beyond.