Welcome to Beyond Stability, where psychiatrist, researcher and humanitarian adviser Dr. Suzan Song shares reflections about how we think, decide, and partner during uncertain times to find a sense of groundedness and joy.
When most people hear the word grief, they picture a specific kind of loss. A death. A divorce. Something with a before and an after that everyone around you can see.
But some of the most disorienting grief I encounter doesn't look like that at all.
A senior executive I worked with spent twenty years building a reputation for principled leadership. He prided himself on rebuilding team cultures, championing equity, and getting results without much wreckage. But he recently told me something that I’ve now heard from multiple values-based leaders: "I can work all day, totally mission-driven and know I’m doing the work, and still be told I'm the problem."
He wasn’t just having a bad week, he was describing a kind of loss—not of his job but of the version of that job that made sense to him: the organization he was inspired by and the story that told him why the work mattered.
That’s grief. And it’s the least likely to be named.
There’s a term for the wound that opens when your values and your institutional reality split: moral injury. First documented in soldiers forced to act against their conscience, it’s since been identified in physicians, aid workers, and increasingly in leaders inside organizations whose stated values and actual operations have quietly separated.
It’s not the same as burnout, which is structural, when the job asks for more than it should. Moral injury is a wound to your integrity—the gap between what you stand for and what you’ve been asked to do or unable to prevent. Burnout often ends when you change jobs. But moral injury can travel with you, because it lives in what you did, witnessed, or failed to prevent.
What makes it harder is the voice that says you should be grateful.
Nothing looks different externally. Same job, same title, same income. So you tell yourself you're overreacting—that the problem is you, your restlessness, or impossible standards. The nagging feeling gets written off as a personal deficiency rather than a reasonable response to something real having changed.
Psychologists call this minimization under social comparison: knowing others have it worse, we preemptively dismiss our own experience as invalid. But suffering isn't relative. Your nervous system doesn't know that someone else has a harder situation. So the dissatisfaction is real regardless of whether or not you think it’s legitimate.
What actually helps is more modest than you’d expect.
Accuracy is an anchor. Not "I'm being ungrateful" or "maybe I'll always be dissatisfied" but "I am grieving something real, and the fact that it still looks the same makes it harder to name.”
Not all of this is the same problem. There are two situations that might feel the same from the inside but require entirely different responses. One is circumstantial—a difficult manager, a restructuring, dysfunction that may resolve. The other is a fundamental incompatibility between who you are and what the organization has become. The first calls for patience and targeted action. The second calls for an exit, even if the timing isn't right yet. Most people in moral injury are applying first-situation solutions to a second-situation problem, which is why nothing they try relieves the feeling.
Build something that’s genuinely yours. When external scaffolding stops providing meaning, build some internally. Not by quitting right away or making large decisions yet, but by identifying one or two things that are genuinely yours: a project you believe in, a person you're developing, work that asks something real of you. You’re not waiting to feel better, you’re building a platform to help you see more clearly.
On May 13th (tomorrow!) I'm going live to talk about these themes. Informal, no slides, based on your questions. This is the first in what will become a regular series of conversations, including interviews with leaders working at the edges of these questions across sectors. If you recognize yourself anywhere in this, I'd be glad to have you there.
→ Register here— it's free “Loss, Identity and the Pressure to Keep Going”
Notes & Invitations
Why We Suffer and How We Heal (Penguin, 2026) draws on two decades of clinical care and humanitarian fieldwork to examine how people find grounding after rupture.
If it resonated, a review here makes a real difference. Sending it to someone who’s having a hard year is also a good way to let them know they matter to you.
Free Guide to building your own Three Friends of Winter Circles here
Longer reflections, press, and events at www.suzansong.com
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