Service members’ exposure to potentially morally injurious events: Intimate partner knowledge and response

Moral injury entails functionally impairing moral emotions, beliefs, and behaviors resulting from enacting, experiencing, or witnessing events that transgress deeply held moral beliefs. Moral injury is associated with concerns about disclosure regarding military experiences, such as feeling judged. Yet, little research has documented the extent to which intimate partners know about service members’ exposure to potentially morally injurious experiences (PMIEs) and their reactions to this knowledge. The current study is a secondary analysis of data from a sample of 579 couples (1,158 individuals) that included male service members’ reports of experiencing specific events during deployment (i.e., PMIEs by self, PMIEs by others, loss, or life threat) and their female civilian partners’ reports of the service member telling them about such events. Results suggest that partners are significantly less likely to report being told about service members’ exposure to PMIEs compared to exposure to experiences of threat and loss. In general, service members’ reports of the seriousness of deployment experiences and their distress regarding these experiences were associated with a greater likelihood of partners’ reports of being told about such experiences. In the current sample, partners had low ratings of negative changes in opinions of the service member after learning of their exposure to PMIEs by self or by others. Although preliminary, findings may inform understanding of the conditions under which disclosure of military experiences to intimate partners is more or less likely and the type of partner reactions that might be observed among military couples in intact relationships.