It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. You know, we spend a lot of time on this show talking about how trauma shows up in people's lives, but there's a specific

kind of wound that researchers and clinicians say has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

It pertains to war and deaths in war and other things. It's called moral injury. And it doesn't

come from what was done to you, but from what you did, what you

witnessed or what you failed to prevent when it cut against the grain of some of your own

deepest values. Michael Valdivino, a clinical psychologist, veteran, and trauma specialist,

defines it this way in his new book.

He writes,

Moral injury occurs when we make choices that so violate our conscience and produce such unbearable consequences that we come to see ourselves as irredeemably bad people.

Now, that concept was born in the study of veterans,

soldiers who came home not just haunted by fear or violence, but by something harder to name, something that sometimes comes from the deaths that they inflict in a war.

But Valthavino Sartre is in his new book, Moral Injuries, when good conscience suffers in a world of hurt, that this wound isn't confined to the battlefield. Michael Valdivinos joins us now. His book is Moral Injuries, and it's out now. Michael, thank you so much for joining us for this. Welcome to WNYC. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. And before we get into the book,

by way of introduction, you are a clinical psychologist, a trauma specialist, and a veteran who served in Afghanistan. That's an unusual combination of credentials to bring to a single subject.

How did those three identities converge into this book? Yeah, that's a great question, Brian.

I would say that all of it converges into this book.

I think, you know, I write the book from a bipartisan manner,

but really trying to not just create a language for folks to sort of name what they might be feeling.

But also I tried to give real world examples of how my life, both growing up,

but also my professional life, examples of moral injury in those contexts and how it showed up

for me, how I discovered it, and some strategies about what I did to try to repair myself.

And so you write about arriving in Afghanistan during your service in the military.

You write, I naively assumed that the Afghan people welcomed our assistance.

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