You’re not actually burned out. That’s not the right label. You’re heartbroken, because the values that made you want to practice law don’t feel aligned with the legal system right now.That’s what’s called moral injury; and right now, a lot of lawyers are experiencing it.

Welcome to The Lawyer Burnout Solution, the podcast for women attorneys who want to move from survival mode to a sustainable, fulfilling lawyer life. I’m Heather Mills, and this is Part One of a two-part series called When the System Feels Broken.

Today we’re naming the quiet, collective heartbreak so many lawyers are carrying. Rhe kind that comes from watching our faith in the rule of law erode in real time.

By the end of this episode, you’ll understand what moral injury is, where the term comes from, how it hijacks your body, and why so many of us who believed in the system are starting to lose faith. Next week, in Part Two, we’ll talk about how to move from feeling powerless to feeling possibility again. 

Over the last year, I’ve talked with lawyers from all different parts of the profession. An immigration attorney told me she can’t sleep after another one of her clients is deported because of a policy change she couldn’t stop. A civil-rights litigator described spending weeks reconciling contradictory court orders on voting access. She said that it feels like the rule of law is shifting under her feet faster than she can brief it. And a federal agency lawyer confessed that every memo she writes feels like a compromise. They’re still showing up. Still drafting, still arguing.  But each day, something inside them hurts.

I remember that feeling years ago, sitting at my desk after we’d lost a case that should have been a slam dunk for our plaintiffs. We had done everything right. The evidence, the law were all on our side. When the decision came down, it was like the judge hadn’t even read our briefing. I remember staring at the order and realizing that doing everything right doesn’t always mean justice will follow. That was the first time I felt the crack between the law and what’s right and I didn’t have words for it then.

I wish I could tell you that moment passed quickly, that I shook it off and kept going. What actually happened is that I got really good at performing fine. I buried the heartbreak under efficiency. I told myself, “This is just how it works. You win some, you lose some.” But every time I ignored how wrong it felt, I drifted further from the reason I went to law school in the first place.

That’s what I hear now from so many lawyers. It’s not that they’ve stopped caring; it’s that caring hurts too much when you can’t do anything with it. That’s where moral injury begins.

The term moral injury comes from military psychology.
It was coined by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in the 1990s to describe what happened to combat veterans who came home carrying more than trauma. They hadn’t just witnessed violence; they’d been ordered to do things that violated their moral code. It wasn’t fear they struggled with. It was shame, grief, and betrayal.

Since then, the concept has expanded beyond war zones to healthcare workers during the pandemic, to teachers, to social workers, and increasingly, to lawyers. Because law, at its best, is supposed to be a moral profession. The lawyers uphold fairness, truth, due process, justice. So when those principles are eroded or weaponized, lawyers experience something strikingly similar to those soldiers: the pain of being complicit in a system that betrays its own ideals.

Moral injury isn’t just burnout with a fancier name. Burnout is a type of depletion that comes from chronic stress. Moral injury is a wound to the part of you that still believes law should mean something. It happens when you participate in or witness actions that violate your sense of what’s right, and you feel trapped inside that contradiction. The profession tells you to keep performing, keep billing, keep producing. But when your conscience is screaming and the system says, “Be objective,” your nervous system goes to war with itself.

So why does it feel so painful?

Your brain can’t actually distinguish between physical threat and moral threat.  When your integrity is on the line, your body reacts as if you’re in danger: heart racing, shoulders tense, breath shallow. And because you might not be able to do anything in the moment to fight the system or flee the case, you freeze.

That freeze starts to look like numbness, cynicism, or quiet despair. That doesn’t mean that you’re broken. You’re protecting yourself from repeated moral pain. Moral injury doesn’t just live in your thoughts. It imprints in your body.

Each time your brain perceives your values are being violated, it sends a threat signal through your system: cortisol spikes, your vagus nerve constricts, your prefrontal cortex, the part that reasons, goes partially offline.

Over time, that repeated cycle rewires your sense of safety. Your body starts to treat strong feelings like hope, conviction, or even joy as dangerous, because the last time you cared that deeply, it hurt. So you stop letting yourself feel at all. That’s when disconnection takes root. Not because you don’t care, but because your biology is trying to spare you more pain.

So we’ve talked about what moral injury is and why it hurts so much. Next, let’s look at what this actually feels like inside the day-to-day practice of law.

Whether you’re a public defender juggling impossible caseloads, a transactional lawyer feeling the pressure to close deals no matter the cost, or a solo practitioner absorbing every client’s stress, the pattern is similar: the work starts to lose its meaning.

What once felt alive with purpose starts to feel like something you just have to get through. Over time, the calling that once inspired you begins to feel like just a job, or worse, a burden.

For immigration lawyers, it’s watching families torn apart under new enforcement priorities and knowing that, no matter how well you advocate, you can’t always protect them or keep them safe.

For federal government lawyers, it’s watching regulations they helped draft be dismantled or rewritten so quickly that the law itself feels unstable.

One government shared with me that Policy changes are part of the job—but lately they’ve been so fast and so drastic, that it’s left her feeling disoriented.

And for lawyers in private practice, it might mean representing clients whose choices don’t sit right with you. And I want to be clear. This isn’t limited to public-interest work. I’ve coached partners at corporate firms who’ve built impressive careers, but quietly admit they’ve lost the sense of purpose that once fueled them.

That’s moral injury too: the moment you start wondering whether the ladder you’ve been climbing is still taking you where you want to end up.

I get it. The social contract you believed in, that justice is real, laws mean something, truth eventually matters — feels like it’s cracking.You’re trained to fix things, but this? This feels unfixable. So your mind whispers, Why even try?

In this episode, we’re naming moral injury: the heartbreak and disillusionment that come from seeing your ideals collide with the system. Next week, we’ll talk about learned helplessness: what happens after that heartbreak settles in and you start believing there’s no point in trying. You’re not the only one feeling this.

One immigration lawyer told me she keeps a spare shirt in her car because she sweats through the first one before court.
She said, “My body knows before my brain does that it’s going to be another day of fighting a system that doesn’t listen.”
That’s what moral injury looks like — not just exhaustion, but a nervous system preparing for another blow to its sense of rightness.

If you’re experiencing moral injury, you might notice things like this:
You feel rage at the headlines one minute and complete apathy the next.
You’re still doing the work, but it feels hollow.
You feel guilty for not caring more and exhausted from caring so much.

If that’s you, nothing’s wrong with you.
You’re having a human reaction to an impossible level of cognitive dissonance.

Your pain isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s evidence that your moral compass still works.

The profession may reward stoicism, but stoicism isn’t strength. It’s suppression.
Caring, in times like these, takes courage.

You can’t control every verdict or policy or leadership decision.
But you can refuse to let despair define you.
You can name what’s happening as moral injury instead of pretending it’s just “stress-management failure.”
Because once you name it, you can begin to heal it.

If you can, pause for a moment.
Take a slow breath.
Place a hand on your chest and notice what’s there. Tightness, heaviness, maybe nothing at all.

Then say quietly: 

It makes sense that this hurts.
I care.
I care about justice.
I’m allowed to grieve what feels broken.

That small acknowledgment begins the moral repair when moral injury happens.

Repair doesn’t happen in one grand gesture or in one small moment either.
It happens in many small moments of truth-telling, sometimes just between you and yourself.
Every time you pause long enough to say, “This isn’t okay,” without turning it into a productivity problem, you come back to your own integrity.

You can’t control the courts, or Congress, or your agency’s leadership.

But you can keep your own moral center intact.

That’s where real change begins. Not with outrage alone, but with reminding yourself:

I still know what’s right. And I can act from that knowing, even in small ways.

I don’t have a tidy answer for how to stay hopeful when the system keeps breaking your heart.

But every week, I sit with women lawyers... immigration lawyers, federal attorneys, litigators, in-house counsel and I’m reminded that despair only exists because we still care so deeply.

And that caring, even when it hurts, is the seed of everything that can still be repaired.

What we’ve been talking about today: this heartbreak, this disillusionment, is what’s called moral injury.

And like any injury, it needs care to heal. When I talk about repair, I don’t mean fixing the whole system or pretending things are fine.

Repair, in this context, means coming back to yourself—slowly reconnecting with your own integrity, your own sense of what’s right, even when the world around you hasn’t changed yet.

Sometimes that begins with something as small as what we just did: pausing, naming what hurts, letting it matter. Those moments don’t fix everything, but they start to re-anchor you in your values instead of your despair.

That’s the first step of moral repair.

Next week, we’ll move into the next phase of this conversation: what happens when that heartbreak hardens into hopelessness when your brain starts whispering that there’s no point in trying.

That’s what we call learned helplessness. And we’ll talk about how to rebuild a sense of power and forward motion from there.

Before we wrap up, I want to share something that’s been studied outside the legal world but feels deeply connected to what we’ve talked about today.

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at physicians experiencing burnout and what we now understand as moral injury that same sense of disconnection between their values and the systems they work in.

The researchers found that even a few one-on-one coaching sessions helped doctors feel more aligned with their values, less burned out, and more connected to the purpose that first brought them into their profession.

I think the same applies to lawyers. We may not work in hospitals, but we know what it’s like to care deeply inside systems that don’t always make space for that care. Coaching isn’t about fixing the system overnight — it’s about realigning with what matters to you so you can show up from integrity instead of exhaustion.

If your work and your values feel out of sync right now, I can help you start to reconnect them.

You can book a free 20-minute call with me — it’s a confidential space to talk through what’s been weighing on you and explore what repair could look like in your own life and career.You can book it at heathermillscoaching.com/call

That’s it for today.
Thanks for listening and for caring enough to keep showing up, even when it hurts.
Remember to be gentle with yourself this week, and I’ll see you next time.