Beyond Self-Care: Addressing Moral Injury and Moral Discrepancy in Clinical Practice
Live on Zoom
Massachusetts clinicians are leaving the profession at unprecedented rates, and the dominant framing — clinician "burnout" — fails to capture what is actually happening. Recent literature (Dean et al., 2024; Thibodeau et al., 2023) reframes the experience as moral injury: the cumulative cognitive, somatic, and relational cost of practicing under systemic conditions that erode a clinician's ability to deliver ethical care. Dean and colleagues describe moral injury in healthcare as a signal of systemic dysfunction and fractured trust, and a recent meta-analysis (Orgambídez et al., 2025) confirms a significant correlation between moral distress and emotional exhaustion (r = .33, p < .001, n = 2,425). Self-care interventions, while well-intentioned, treat an individual mismatch — they cannot resolve a structural and ethical injury.
This workshop offers practicing clinicians a clinical vocabulary and applied tools for working with their own moral injury, examining the three domains in which moral distress accrues — cognitive, somatic, and relational — with concrete protocols for each, evidence-informed regulation practices, and scripted approaches to maintaining boundary integrity with institutions, colleagues, and high-acuity clients without compromising clinical responsibility.
Our Presenter: Emily Bliss, LMHC
Emily Bliss, MA, LMHC, is a licensed mental health counselor in a private practice and was a former Assistant Program Director at a Massachusetts Community Behavioral Health Center, where she has spent her career inside the systems most associated with clinician moral injury. Over more than 12 years of experience in community mental health, she has worked as a BA-level care coordinator, an in-home therapist with at-risk youth and families, a fee-for-service outpatient clinician, and a program developer for individuals with co-occurring disorders before moving into clinical leadership. In her supervisory role, Emily has watched moral injury accumulate across her staff at close range — and has experienced it herself. She developed the conceptual framework taught in this workshop in response to that experience, translating the moral injury literature into an applied model for working clinicians. She also serves as a group leader in a community of practice for clinical leaders, where the framework has been tested with peers navigating similar structural conditions in Massachusetts outpatient mental health.
3 CEUs: October 24th, 2026 from 9am-12pm*
*Please allow 15-20 minutes at the end of the session to complete your CE evaluation.
Members: $110
Members, Retired or Not-yet-Licensed: $90
Non-members: $150
