The Moral Injury of Wife Abandonment
I was listening to an interview on CBC radio the other day with Brian Stewart, a journalist with a long career of reporting from areas of the world touched by war, famine or other great tragedies. He talked about the emotional conflict that he experienced, watching human suffering but not being permitted to help - he was required to simply report on it.
He said that when he was in that position, he experienced moral injury - a wound to the soul; a spiritual hurt. Although the term is usually applied to situations in which people are required to act against their conscience, like a journalist not helping a dying child or a soldier being expected to kill, it struck me that when a woman’s husband turns on her and suddenly leaves, she has also experienced moral injury.
The term was first coined in the 90s by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who defined moral injury as having three components: "Moral injury is present when (i) there has been a betrayal of what is morally right, (ii) by someone who holds legitimate authority and (iii) in a high-stakes situation."
Moral injury is a form of deep psychological and emotional distress that arises when someone is subjected to actions that violate their core moral values or sense of what’s right. People who experience moral injury may describe:
A sense that this should not have happened
Deep betrayal, grief or disillusionment
Shame or self-blame (“I should have seen this coming”)
Loss of trust in not only others but in themselves and in life itself
Feeling unmoored: “The rules I live by no longer seem to apply”
Doesn’t this apply to women who have been abandoned out-of-the-blue? To me, it’s vitally important because it gives a name and an explanation of why wife abandonment is not only an emotional hurt but more profoundly, it’s an existential wound that makes you question what life is all about. We live our lives according to an unshakable moral compass and we firmly believed that our husbands did as well.
So how to heal from moral injury? Here are some aspects that lead to healing:
Make sense of what happened
Stop blaming yourself and resolve your feelings of shame
Let yourself feel the grief of the loss of the assumed goodness, safety and shared values you had with your husband
Rebuild trust in yourself and gradually in the world
Claim back your own moral compass
For many women, recovering from wife abandonment is a very hard and complicated process. I hope that by having a name for why it’s so hard will help you be kind to yourself and regain trust in the world.
