Moral Injury and the Relational Self: (When the World Breaks in and Therapy Must Meet the World) – Carole Shadbolt – SERIES TWO

In this powerful and timely recorded seminar, Carole Shadbolt explores the concept of moral injury and its profound implications for relational psychotherapy and supervision.

Moral injury names what happens when we are exposed to, participate in, or witness events that violate our deepest moral values, and discover that there is no adequate action, language, or repair available. Often described as “intense psychological distress resulting from actions, or the lack of them, which clash with an individual’s moral or ethical code”, moral injury is not a diagnosis, nor is it synonymous with trauma. Instead, it sits at the intersection of ethics, relationship, power, and context.

In contemporary practice, moral injury frequently emerges when the wider world presses into the consulting room and cannot be left outside, through social injustice, political upheaval, institutional constraint, professional dilemmas, or collective crisis. In relational therapy, moral injury is understood not as pathology, but as a rupture in the moral field between self, other, and world.

Expanding on themes first introduced at the IARTA 2025 Conference, this seminar offers a rich relational and reflective space in which Carole explores:

• What moral injury is, and why it matters urgently in our current world
• How to distinguish moral injury from trauma, burnout, and compassion fatigue
• Moments when external realities demand ethical recognition rather than purely intrapsychic processing
• Silence, incommunicado states, shame, and ethical distress as relational  phenomena
• The impact of institutions, power structures, and professional constraint on moral agency
• Pathways toward restoring dignity, realigning moral identity, and bearing, together, what can feel unbearable

With her characteristic depth and relational clarity, Carole invites us to consider how therapy must sometimes move beyond the consulting room to meet the ethical and social realities shaping both client and practitioner.

This recorded webinar is particularly relevant for psychotherapists, supervisors, and trainees seeking to think more deeply about ethics, power, and the impact of the social world on the therapeutic relationship, though practitioners from other fields may also find it valuable.

✅ Listen anytime, anywhere — as you explore the conversations that refuse to stay silent.
✅ Access on demand for one full year
✅ Earn CPD certification. By simply emailing IARTA after viewing.

This webinar was originally recorded on the 23^rd  of February 2026.

Audio lecture – 1hr and 50 mins 

BUY NOW – £24

Carole Shadbolt lives and practices in the United Kingdom. Originally trained as a social worker, she worked both generically and as a specialist psychiatric social worker at The Maudsley Hospital (Institute of Psychiatry, London). She later qualified as a Transactional Analyst at Metanoia under the tutelage of Petruska Clarkson, Sue Fish, and Maria Gilbert.

A founder member of the International Association of Relational Transactional Analysis (IARTA), Carole has served on its Steering Group and taught for many years on the MSc in Relational Transactional Analysis at Metanoia Institute. She maintains an independent psychotherapy and supervisory practice in Oxfordshire.

A published author and relational psychotherapist by instinct, Carole has long-standing interests in LGBTQ+ issues, diversity, and the invisibility and trauma of chronic mental illness, themes that deeply inform this work.