I Can’t Keep Doing This: Professional Responsibility and Moral Injury

“I can’t keep doing this”

It’s a sentence I hear a lot from professionals responsible for others. They’re not burning out in the dramatic sense. They’re still going to work, still doing the job, & still functioning as far as anyone can see. But they feel like something inside them has shifted.

Not because they’ve stopped caring. Rather they can’t afford to care in the same way anymore because knowing what they should be doing and the reality of what they can do, feels too far apart.

And that hurts.

So they adapt. But, over time, these adaptations start to erode something important. They do what they can in a system they know doesn't work.

They find themselves doing things that don’t sit right.

Following policies that go against their instincts, even when they can rationalise why the policy is there, so say yes to actions that don’t match their values, because the system leaves no other choice.

It doesn't usually look like falling apart. More often it's a slow wearing down.

Quietly.

Unspoken.

Normalised

This isn’t about performance. It’s about integrity.

What’s being asked of you isn’t just difficult. It’s ethically disorienting.

Yet there’s little space to name that.

We hear talk of resilience and wellbeing,but not much of moral erosion, moral distress, or moral injury.

Sometimes we will talk about the big incidents - where there a catastrophic failing leading to psychological injury but not of what it costs to act against your own standards, in small ways, again and again.

The 'death by a thousand cuts' path to psychological harm.

Professionals in this position often report:

Emotional detachment

Chronic guilt or shame

Exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix

A growing sense of: “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

It’s not weakness. It’s an understandable response to sustained ethical strain.

We need better language for this experience. But however we talk about it, we need to start because, until we name it, we can’t support the people living through it.

We won't address the systems that lead to it until we recognise the harm they cause as legitimate and real harm.

This isn’t a failure of resilience.

It’s an injury to values.

And it’s more common than we think.

If this resonates, you’re not alone. And you’re not the problem.