Responding to Soul Injury: Tools for Hope and Healing.

Soul Injury is defined as a wound that separates a person from their real self, caused by unmourned loss and hurt, unforgiven guilt and shame, and fear of helplessness or loss of control. Tools and interventions have been developed to guide people impacted by Soul Injury. This study assessed the effectiveness of 12 tools and interventions provided during a 4-day Soul Injury Leadership Institute. This 2-part investigation included an online survey of participants who had attended a 4-day Institute training and a post-Institute narrative inquiry conducted as virtual structured interviews. Ninety-one professionals completed the online survey, which inquired about the impact of specific Soul Injury tools and interventions on the respondents' personal and professional life. The Anchor Your Heart tool was the most frequently used tool and had the most enduring utilization across time and settings. Qualitative data collected in virtual interviews with 15 volunteers demonstrated the power of the Write/Tell Your Story technique in which storied narratives permit an individual to integrate powerful experiences such as traumatic events, serious illness, and even death, providing further validation that Soul Injury is an important human phenomenon.

Validation of the Soul Injury Self-awareness Inventory.

Traumatic lifetime experiences can complicate peaceful dying, causing latent wounds such as posttraumatic stress disorder, moral injury, and soul injury to reemerge at the end of life. Soul injury is defined as an overlooked, unassessed wound that separates a person from his/her own sense of self. The Soul Injury Self-awareness Inventory (Soul Injury Inventory) was developed to identify unresolved losses and hurts that threaten a sense of self. The Soul Injury Inventory is a brief, 10-item instrument that opens the door to meaningful conversations with patients, caregivers, and professionals. This article describes 2 validation studies conducted to measure the reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity of the Soul Injury Inventory. In study 1, the Soul Injury Inventory was demonstrated to be a psychometrically sound tool in which all questions contributed significantly to a single factor characterized as soul injury. In receiver operating characteristic analyses, scores less than 23.5 were shown to be indicative of soul injury with optimal sensitivity and specificity. Study 2 demonstrated that the Soul Injury Inventory has excellent test-retest reliability. The Soul Injury Inventory also has strong internal consistency, as demonstrated in studies 1 and 2. These 2 validation studies, taken together, demonstrate that the Soul Injury Inventory is an excellent, invariant measure of soul injury.