Holding the Tension: Care, Crisis, and Collective Moral Injury

Over the past decade, my career path has taken me from emergency rooms and disaster zones to global response efforts and law school; through it all, the foundation laid by the IDP program has remained constant. It did not simply influence that journey, it made it possible.

My path into these fields began long before graduate school. As a first generation American, I grew up in a multicultural immigrant household. My mother is Palestinian and Colombian, having migrated from Colombia, and my father, Chinese, having migrated from Taiwan. Both were shaped by migration, colonial histories, survival, and intergenerational trauma. Growing up, I didn’t have the language for it, but I was born into an awareness that pain and resilience travel across generations. In college, while studying international studies and politics, I worked as a refugee case manager and realized I wanted to remain close to the human side of global crises. DU’s IDP program became the bridge between structural analysis and relational care.

That bridge became real during my externship in Malawi, working across clinics in the city of Mzuzu. It was there that the gap between academic knowledge and implementation revealed itself sharply. I confronted power dynamics in real time and became aware of how Western training and the credibility it automatically carries, can shape our presence in complex environments. That awareness stayed with me throughout my career; through years of crisis work in emergency departments, jails, and mobile response units, and later through five and a half years working in response to disasters and complex emergencies nationally and internationally. I provided technical advising, designed MHPSS programs, trained responders and deployment teams, and supported survivors in both response and recovery contexts.

Over time, I began to encounter the limits of care alone. In the humanitarian era of my career, the organization I worked with often wanted to support communities yet were constrained by access, geopolitics, and legal frameworks. That tension led me to pursue an LL.M. in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. I chose this path not to replace my clinical lens, but to balance it with a structural and forensic one, and to better understand the legal frameworks shaping the environments in which we intervened. While studying law in Germany, I continued deploying to crises, including during the war in Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion. October 7th, and the devastation[1] in Gaza that followed, became another rupture for me. It reinforced a difficult truth: legal mechanisms can be activated, yet accountability often remains slow, uneven, and politically constrained. 

Collectively, these tensions between care and constraint, law and enforcement, ideals and implementation, have sharpened the lens through which I view what is unfolding in the United States today.

How is the Current U.S. Climate Shaping Our Individual and Collective Mental Health?

When I think about the collective mental health of this country, the emotions that surface most clearly are grief and anger, both rooted in pain. Many Americans are asking, ‘How did we get here?’ While others may quietly think, ‘This has always been my lived experience’. Both responses are rooted in history with a divergence that reflects something deeper. For some, the question signals shock at a perceived rupture; for others, it underscores that grief and anger were never arrivals, but inheritances shaped by longstanding structural harm. In that sense, what we are witnessing is not only collective distress, but collective moral injury: the psychological and spiritual impact of repeatedly confronting systems that betray professed values of equity, safety, and dignity.

In therapy, we often look backward to understand the present; not to dwell in the past, but to understand how earlier experiences shape current reactions. The same applies at a societal level. The United States has not consistently engaged with the full scope of its history; particularly the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, segregation/Jim Crow, Japanese American internment camps, immigration exclusion policies, and foreign policy interventions abroad. Many Americans, myself included, were raised within narratives emphasizing national heroism and moral righteousness; everything the U.S. had ever done was somehow ‘justified’; rarely was accountability met in full. So when ideals are strongly held but historical harms are not fully integrated, collective identity becomes fragile. When leadership or policies feel misaligned with professed values, the rupture is not only political, it becomes existential.

Therapeutically speaking, this is the moment when shadow material surfaces. Healing requires acknowledging not only the parts of ourselves we celebrate, but also the parts we have denied or minimized. Without integration, the shadow does not disappear; it resurfaces through repetition and fracture. What feels sudden to some may feel cyclical to others. This misalignment between ideals and reality can generate collective moral injury. Moral injury occurs when deeply held values are violated by institutions once trusted. At a national level, when citizens perceive a widening gap between stated commitments and lived realities, disillusionment, anger, and shame follow. Without shared historical reckoning, shared response becomes difficult.

At an international level, moments of global crisis often make these contradictions even harder to ignore. When U.S. military actions abroad –such as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President and occupation in Caracas, or the most recent bombings in Iran –prompt questions about international humanitarian law, civilian protection, or accountability, many Americans find themselves grappling with a quiet but unsettling dissonance between the values they were taught and the realities they witness. For some, these moments become another way that collective moral injury surfaces.

There is also a structural dimension to this tension. For decades, the United States has signed but not ratified several major human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities[2]. Signing signals alignment with universal principles. Ratification, however, binds a state to formal oversight and accountability mechanisms. The longstanding reluctance to ratify certain protections reflects a historical hesitancy toward binding external enforcement. At the same time, the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly enumerate positive rights such as health care, education, or housing. This structural absence reinforces a longstanding gap between moral endorsement and enforceable commitment.

Even where binding treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[3] have been ratified, enforcement has often depended on political will rather than consistent structural implementation. As debates intensify around civil liberties, due process, and equal protection, many Americans perceive a widening gap between professed commitments and lived realities. When both international obligations and constitutional ideals are violated, the disorientation deepens. It begins to feel like betrayal of foundational values.

Another contributing factor is the politicization of human rights language itself. Human rights are intended to be universal, yet they are frequently absorbed into partisan frameworks where protections are interpreted as ideological positions rather than shared civic commitments. When rights become associated with political identity rather than baseline protections, their universality erodes. What should function as common ground becomes contested terrain.

This reframing alters how violations are perceived. Instead of registering as breaches of collective ethical standards, they are often filtered through partisan loyalty or opposition. Over time, this dynamic can dull the public’s moral alarm system. When universal principles are recast as political preferences, their clarity weakens. That erosion contributes to fragmentation and deepens the sense of collective moral injury, particularly for those who understand human rights as foundational rather than negotiable. Psychologically, this resembles a society distancing itself from its own ethical shadow rather than integrating it, allowing contradictions to persist beneath the surface until they reemerge in moments of rupture.

This dynamic is compounded by the United States’ strong orientation toward individualism. While individualism fosters autonomy and innovation, it can also isolate people within systemic stress. When structural problems are framed as individual shortcomings, loneliness intensifies and social trust erodes. From a psychological perspective, the country is experiencing prolonged collective distress. At the individual level, this manifests as anxiety, burnout, hypervigilance, and uncertainty. At the collective level, it appears as polarization, eroded trust, and difficulty mobilizing in unified ways despite shared awareness of instability. Repeated exposure to visible conflict and violence, amplified by social media and emotionally arousing news cycles, further activates the collective nervous system. Over time, chronic activation can lead to dissociation and desensitization. Harmful rhetoric becomes normalized. Urgency fades. Hope erodes.

In that sense, the country resembles a nervous system in prolonged hypervigilance. We see fight in activism and protests, flight in disengagement and withdrawal, freeze in paralysis and hopelessness, and fawn in attempts to preserve stability, or appease systems in power. There is broad awareness that something feels unsettled, yet fragmentation --in historical, social, and psychological --makes coordination and connection difficult. We sense threat together but struggle to regulate together.

And yet, this is not the full story.

Collective stress can also catalyze resilience and post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth refers to the positive psychological changes that can emerge after a person or society struggles with a highly challenging or traumatic experience. I have seen communities reorganize under strain, both internationally and domestically. Mutual aid networks form. Civic engagement renews. Conversations surface that once felt impossible. Connection remains one of the most powerful regulators of the nervous system. Post-traumatic growth does not deny harm; it suggests that disruption can clarify values and deepen commitment to repair. The same forces that fragment can, under the right conditions, foster integration.

If this resonates, my takeaway is simple: what we learned in this program is relevant anywhere. It taught us to think collectively, practice cultural humility, and remain trauma-informed in systems that are often dysregulated. Stay grounded, empathetic, curious, pragmatic, and hopeful. Know what you can and cannot carry. Distinguish when to be a witness rather than a carrier. That distinction is not detachment, but more so sustainability.

Just as importantly, remember who you are. Your histories and identities shape the lens you bring into this work. Wear that with intention, humility, and fierce protection. This field taught me to hold complexity, and to see pain and resilience at the same time. And as Psychologist Dr. Mullan says, ‘May we honor the beauty and necessity of mutual aid in all of its forms, and be willing to recognize the fluidity of human experiences’.

Jen Peng, MA, LPC, LL.M

LPC | 0016406

LL.M. International Human Rights & Humanitarian Law

(MAIDP '17)