Being the change takes enormous courage.
Meet courage.
For Ashley Grogg, a registered nurse with nearly 20 years experience in cardiac care, it has taken the courage to first look inward and examine her own path and the experiences that diverted her from her own value system. She is now writing about this inner work and the healing journey she has embarked on and is blazing a new trail for redemptive medicine and the deeper healing she feels is sorely needed.
Ashley is committed to this work and has created Wellness Through Awareness as a way to integrate compassion and personal values in to health education.
Her course Healing Moral Injury is a powerful and timely opportunity.
Explore the concept of moral injury, its causes, and the importance of addressing it. This program provides guidance on the healing process for individuals affected by moral injury. Participants will gain insights into recognizing and understanding moral injury, and learn strategies for coping and healing. Through recorded presentations and FREE workbook, attendees will develop a deeper understanding of the impact of moral injury and how to navigate the healing journey. Join us to explore the complexities of moral injury, foster healing, and support individuals in overcoming the challenges associated with it. This course includes: Nearly 2 hours of video instruction Free Workbook with 60+ pages Certificate of Completion Moral Injury Badge
According to the course,
Moral Injury is when an individual experiences a situation that goes against their moral beliefs and causes guilt and shame.
Here’s a great example:
It’s not surprising then that shows like Baby Reindeer and films like Protocol 7 are finding so much resonance among audiences despite their disturbing subject matter. Many of these tragic stories become increasingly relatable as the devastating impacts of moral injury erode our society and strike closer and closer to home.
We have a lot of healing to do.
Over the last four years, no one with a conscience escaped the discomfort of moral conflict. For most, living in alignment with our consciences and value systems while trying to respect others was a daily struggle.
“Just following orders” led to countless instances of moral injury. Some accepted or forced medical interventions for vacations, social acceptance, admittance to college or job preservation. Some used fake vaccine cards and lied about their medical status. Still others ridiculed or discriminated against others based on medical status or political beliefs or remained silent while others were mistreated. To add insult to injury, “virtue signaling” became the cultural facsimile for personal integrity.
Learning to live with ourselves and each other in the aftermath of a four-year psyop is going to require a introspection and forgiveness.
Ashley recognized this and decided to start with herself.
“I thought it was burnout”
Initially, Ashley took comfort in “evidence-based medicine.” There was safety and security in the protocols that she associated with the standards of medicine. That is until she recognized how standard practices were failing some patients and tried to address the unmet needs.
When you get that punitive measure for taking that extra step and doing what’s right and you don’t stand up and say “no, this is wrong” and you don’t help create change, you fall into those habits and those patterns. And your moral injury just continues to grow and grow. Because you’re not living in congruence with your beliefs.
She refers to what she witnessed in hospitals as “the degradation of medicine” and believes that it has driven many skilled healthcare professionals out of the system.
You have to decide, am I going to buck the system and risk losing everything or am I going to sit down, shut up and do the best I can and make changes in the little areas that I can? And that’s what I hear a lot of people do. But what eventually happens is, they either break and separate and give up completely, or they double down on these thoughts or beliefs.
Intuitively, Ashley understood that she needed to get proactive about aligning with her values. She did everything she could within the constraints of her profession to meet patients’ needs, but she couldn’t (and wouldn’t) shake the awareness that individual care should encompass so much more. She found it increasingly difficult to work within a hospital setting that prevented her from offering the best care she could provide and ultimately robbed her of a sense of fulfillment and pride in her work.
Here I am, I’ve left western medicine because it was sucking my soul out. And I thought it was just burnout. But it was moral injury… The part that really bothered me was that I was constantly putting bandaids on people’s problems and we weren’t doing any prevention. We were just helping them gimp along until the next time. And a lot of that pain, the guilt, the shame, the resentment, the self-loathing, it was not by other people. It came from me. It came from my own conscience grating on me.
Eager to get beyond bandaid solutions, Ashley tried to introduce basic measures to improve patient outcomes within a heart failure program that she had helped to create… to no avail. There was simply no stepping out of hard lines that had been drawn within the hospital setting. Ultimately, she had to choose between her job and her moral convictions.
Healing outside the box
She opted to leave her job and stay on a learning curve. Ashley later created The VAERS Project to “mend the broken vaccine safety net” and educate healthcare professionals about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that is (poorly) maintained by the CDC and FDA.
The VAERS Project was huge for me in making up for the guilt I had over vaccinating people. All of the people I was vaccinating were elderly with multiple co-morbidities in the middle of an acute exacerbation. I just got them stabilized to the point where they could go home, but I’m giving them a vaccine. How many of them did the inflammation tip the scales and bring them right back in?
Wellness Through Awareness, which incorporates these and other educational tools, is the product of her own healing journey. She is hoping to transform healthcare through compassionate health education and the vitality and ingenuity that comes from living in congruence with conscience and core beliefs.
“In health, we have to remember that it’s our duty to share with the person the knowledge that we have, give them the best direction that we can, encourage them and empower them to seek out more information if they’re not comfortable with what we’re giving them. And what happens after that is under their control,” she says.
“I think we’ve gotten so lazy and comfortable and dependent on protocols and prescriptions that we forget the creativity that goes into problem solving and what it really takes to coexist. It’s not just about bowing down and bending over backwards to the other person. It’s about a mutual respect… It’s that authenticity in relationships that forms trust.”
I’m so grateful for Ashley.
Honestly, I wish every healthcare practitioner would take this course, or at least visit this idea. As Operation Bird Flu ramps up, imagine having doctors, nurses and policy-makers who refuse to bow to pathological protocols and who speak up when they see measures that inflict harm on fellow human beings. I’d love to see the broken system called out. I’d love to see good practitioners unshackled and unscripted. I’d love a health care system that nourishes both practitioners and patients and isn’t beholden to bureaucrats and public-private partnerships.
But a lot would need to change. It would require space for introspection and forgiveness. It would require personal responsibility and open-mindedness.
Trust begins with us. It’s time to heal. From within.
If you want to learn more about moral injury and how you can start this healing journey, go here and use the code: intromi to get 20% off. Happy healing!
Just a little local awareness raising...
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