Longing for Coherence: Recovering Moral Orientation in Fragmented Times…

A Focusing Orientated Reflection

“Experiencing is always more intricate than any formulation of it.” - Eugene T. Gendlin

At a time when geopolitical conflict, uncertain leadership, and economic pressures are eroding trust in institutions, many people are experiencing a deeper moral disorientation. When the frameworks that once claimed to uphold law and justice appear fragile or inconsistently applied, the question arises: what remains reliable as a guide?

This reflection explores how moral orientation may emerge not only from political structures, but also from lived experiencing — the human capacity to sense dignity, fairness, justice and responsibility within unfolding situations.

A Growing Unease

Across many parts of the world today, people are experiencing a growing sense of unease about the direction of our shared future. The language of international law, human rights, and a “rules-based order” continues to be spoken, yet increasingly it appears to be applied selectively or set aside when inconvenient. Military actions are justified in the name of security, alliances override legal constraints, and institutions once assumed to safeguard peace seem less able to hold the line.

Recent events have reinforced this sense of uncertainty. Escalating conflicts and the selective invocation of international law have left many people questioning whether the principles meant to guide international relations are still functioning as reliable constraints on power. When actions that carry profound human consequences are justified in shifting or contradictory ways, trust in the moral frameworks guiding public life begins to erode.

Alongside this geopolitical uncertainty, there is also a widening sense of political drift. Across many countries, people are experiencing the economic consequences of decisions made far from their daily lives: rising living costs, strained public services, and growing insecurity about the future. Even within Western societies that once projected stability, many people now feel the weight of decisions made far from their daily lives, whose costs fall unevenly and whose direction feels increasingly unclear.

In such circumstances, trust in leadership inevitably weakens. Traditional markers of authority, office, rhetoric, and geopolitical alignment lose some of their persuasive power. Increasingly, people look instead for something more fundamental: coherence between words and actions, respect for shared principles, and genuine concern for human wellbeing.

For many people observing these developments, the result is not only political disagreement but something deeper: a sense of moral disorientation. When those entrusted with upholding ethical principles appear willing to set them aside, a quieter question begins to arise:

What remains trustworthy as a guide?

Moral Injury and Moral Awakening

The unease many people experience today is not only political. For some, it carries the deeper quality of what has been described as moral injury, the distress that arises when actions or decisions violate deeply held ethical expectations, particularly when those actions are carried out or justified by authorities entrusted with responsibility.

Moral injury has often been discussed in the context of war, where individuals confront situations that conflict profoundly with their sense of right and wrong. Yet similar dynamics can arise in civilian life when institutions that claim to protect human dignity appear to disregard the very principles they proclaim.

In such moments, people may experience anger, grief, disillusionment, or a loss of trust. The frameworks that once provided orientation begin to feel unstable. Yet this disruption can also open another possibility.

When the gap between proclaimed values and lived reality becomes impossible to ignore, moral injury may give rise to what might be called moral awakening. Instead of simply accepting inherited narratives, people begin asking deeper questions:

•  What values truly matter?

•  What kind of world are we helping to create?

•  What does responsibility ask of us now?

Genuine hope cannot be built on denial or comforting narratives. Hope must be able to face reality as it is , including the fragility of institutions and the fallibility of those who lead them. Without such honesty, hope risks collapsing into naive optimism or hardening into cynicism.

Yet even when public moral frameworks appear unstable, human beings do not necessarily lose all capacity for direction. Beneath ideological arguments and political loyalties, there may remain or may be recoverable something more immediate: a living sensitivity to dignity, fairness,justice, and the suffering caused when these are violated. It is this quieter sensitivity, when it can still be felt and trusted, that may function as a kind of moral compass.

Inherited History and the Body

These questions do not remain abstract for long. They reach inward into personal history, family memory, and the body itself. Moral injury, it turns out, rarely arrives without company.

Moral injury does not arise in isolation. It often touches older layers of personal, familial, and collective history. When public events disturb our sense of justice, they may also awaken inherited fears, silences, losses, and unresolved memories that have never been fully witnessed. What appears as a political reaction may therefore also be the surfacing of deeper historical pain.

Beneath the moral disorientation of our time lies something deeper than political disagreement or institutional failure. It lives in the body. It lives in time, or rather in time that has been fragmented.And this is where our age-old survival instinct asserts itself. What we call Trauma is, in its deepest nature, that instinct at work, pulling us out of the present when the present becomes unbearable.  The nervous system scatters time,past, present, and future lose their coherence. This is not weakness or pathology. It is the body’s attempt to survive what cannot yet be integrated.

But what has not been integrated does not disappear. It waits. And when we are called upon to make decisions, moral, political or collective, it is there. Not as explicit memory. Not as conscious thought. But as fear in the body. As pain that has no name. As a reaching for certainty, for an enemy, for a simple explanation, in a situation that asks for something more.

We did not arrive in the world as blank pages. We were born into our development, carrying with us the unintegrated history of those who came before. Our ancestors’ fears, their wounds, their silences, their unspoken shames, these did not end with them. They live in us, in the body, in the nervous system, in the patterns of response we mistake for simply who we are.

These histories do not live on only as ideas or memories. They can continue living in the body itself as vigilance, urgency, numbness, fear, shutdown, defensiveness, or the search for certainty before reflection has had time to arrive. What has not been sufficiently witnessed or integrated may continue shaping perception long after the original events have passed. This is what makes collective trauma so difficult to see and so powerful in its effects. It does not announce itself. It shapes perception from within, determining what feels safe to feel, what must not be seen, what requires immediate reaction, and what remains impossible to acknowledge.

Integrated history is different. When the past has been met with sufficient relationship, presence, and witness, when it has been allowed to complete more of its process, it does not disappear either. But it becomes part of us in a different way. It lives in the present as wisdom, as depth, as the capacity to feel without being overwhelmed, to act without being driven entirely by invisible fear. This is human development. Not the elimination of history, but the gradual capacity to live in relationship with it rather than under its unconscious control.

Collective Identity and the Need for Enemies

This is why the question of moral orientation reaches far beyond the individual. A person or a people, or an institution shaped by unresolved collective fear may begin organising itself around certainty, an enemy, control, or a permanent threat. Not always from malice, but from a nervous system and historical memory that have never fully known safety, recognition, or trust.

We can see this not only in individuals, but in communities and peoples whose histories have been shaped by survival, loss, displacement, resistance, and continuity. Communities that have endured genocide, forced displacement, colonisation, or ethnic cleansing often develop profound forms of resilience rooted not only in survival, but in continuity of relationship to land, memory, language, ritual, and shared history.

Where a people have lived in continuous relationship with a land over generations, land is not merely territory or property. It becomes part of collective selfhood held in memory, language, labour, burial, food, weather, story, and daily life. In such histories, the defence of land is often experienced not only as political resistance, but as defence of life, identity, ancestry, and continuity itself.

Collective suffering can deepen a people’s capacity for solidarity, continuity, and care. But it can also become organised around fear, permanent threat, humiliation, and the inability to recognise the humanity beyond one’s own group.

Resilience alone does not guarantee openness. A community may preserve extraordinary strength, identity, and continuity while still carrying unresolved fear, grief, or historical pain. Where suffering becomes sealed inside defensiveness, rigid identity, or unresolved threat, collective identity itself can harden into enclosure, making recognition of the outside world increasingly difficult. When collective pain cannot be sufficiently witnessed, acknowledged, or metabolised, it does not simply disappear with time. It may continue living in the body and in the culture,  in silence, rigidity, inherited fear, defensive certainty, or the inability to recognise the suffering of others.

In this way, inherited suffering can either deepen moral sensitivity or narrow it, depending on whether it remains open to a wider humanity or collapses inward around fear and identity alone.Unintegrated suffering does not remain contained within the past. Unless it is met with sufficient witnessing, responsibility, justice, and humanity, it can become organised around fear, identity, and the need for enemies.

Vamık Volkan’s work on large-group identity helps illuminate how communities living under unresolved collective threat may come to organise themselves around the psychological need for enemies and allies. In such cases, the enemy is not only a political opponent, but may become part of how the group sustains its own threatened identity.

The Revolutionary Pause

Yet here something crucial must be said. Trauma, historical suffering, and collective fear do not automatically eliminate responsibility or choice. Even within the most constrained circumstances, there may remain a space, small, difficult, and hard-won, in which another response becomes possible.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, understood this with a clarity born of the most extreme human suffering. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms,to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

In this space between what is done to us and how we respond lies something irreducible, the possibility of choice, even when everything else has been stripped away.

When fear, fragmentation, and inherited trauma dominate collective life, reaction begins to replace reflection. The nervous system searches for certainty, immediacy, and relief. In such conditions, the capacity to pause before reacting,to remain present long enough for something more human to emerge, becomes increasingly rare.

Yet it may be precisely this capacity that protects moral life from collapsing into repetition, ideology, or dehumanisation. Mary Hendricks Gendlin calls this the “revolutionary pause”: the space in which we interrupt automatic reaction and allow a felt sense to form. That space between what happens to us and how we respond is not passive. It is a living threshold. It is where inherited fear may loosen, where new meaning may begin to form, and where choice becomes possible again.

Colonised Language and the Living Word

This matters because reaction rarely arrives alone. It comes clothed in ready-made language, slogans, inherited narratives, institutional phrases, and moral justifications that make response feel unnecessary because the meaning has already been supplied.

We live increasingly inside what might be called colonised language: words and frameworks emptied of living meaning, replaced by the language of power, institution, and control. This is language that manages reality rather than meets it. It offers the appearance of moral seriousness while keeping lived experience at a safe distance.

As Marta Fabreget observes, colonisation can also occur when “naming replaces sensing”, when conceptual frameworks overwrite the living complexity of experience itself. But there is a deeper paradox here that deserves attention. Even the language of trauma, healing, and moral recovery can become colonising when it loses contact with lived experiencing. The very words meant to restore dignity, resilience, integration, healing, moral injury can harden into institutional vocabulary, applied from outside rather than emerging from within. When this happens, the language of liberation becomes another form of management.

This is why the revolutionary pause cannot itself become a technique or a formula. The moment it is packaged and administered, it loses the quality that made it transformative. It must remain, each time, a genuine interruption, something that happens in the specific texture of a particular life, a particular body, a particular moment of history.

“Focusing is a force for peace because it frees people from being manipulated by external authority, cultural roles, ideologies and the internal oppression of self-attacking and shame. This freeing has to do with an ability to pause the ongoing situation and create a space in which a felt sense can form.”

Mary Hendricks Gendlin

The revolutionary pause, then, is not only therapeutic. It is relational, moral, and collective.

When one person pauses, truly pauses, before reaction, before inherited certainty, before the colonised language rushes in, something shifts in the space around them. It creates permission. It creates possibility. In a world organised around speed, reaction, and fragmentation, the pause itself becomes a form of resistance. And resistance, when it is genuine, spreads.

Fragmented Time and the Younger Generation

Is this what we are witnessing when older generations speak with longing about the past,despite its hardships, despite the aftermath of war, despite economic difficulty?

Perhaps what they are reaching back toward is not the hardship itself, but the moral clarity that accompanied it. Decisions were harder in material terms, but simpler in ethical ones. The suffering was visible and local. The community was embodied and present. The compass, however battered, still pointed somewhere recognisable.

This longing may carry a bodily memory of something that feels missing now, not a wish to return to hardship, but a remembered sense of ground, coherence, and shared moral orientation. When it makes itself felt as a reaching back, it may be pointing less toward the past itself than toward a quality of belonging and ethical clarity that felt possible then and feels increasingly out of reach now.

For younger generations, this recognition is largely unavailable. They have not lost moral clarity; they have inherited a world in which it was already fragmented before they arrived. For many, the timeline was never whole; they inherited fragmentation before they had the developmental resources to name or navigate it. This is not universal: some younger people arrive with remarkable groundedness, clarity, and moral courage. But as a generational condition, the structural difficulty of finding stillness, continuity, or moral orientation in accelerated digital culture is real and deserves honest acknowledgement rather than dismissal.

Social media and technological acceleration promised connection while producing something closer to perpetual exposure, the sensation of presence without the reality of genuine contact, the appearance of community without its weight or responsibility.

Hartmut Rosa’s work on social acceleration helps us understand this. He argues that technological acceleration does not simply change the pace of life; it fragments the relationship between past, present, and future so severely that identity itself becomes unstable. And Byung-Chul Han deepens this picture, describing a generation not lazy or uncommitted but exhausted and empty, navigating a digital landscape that produces fragmentation where connection was promised.

And yet younger generations feel the unintegrated parts. They carry the unwitnessed collective history in their bodies, the ancestral fear, the unspoken shame, the unresolved grief, without the emotional and moral skills to recognise what they are carrying or why. This makes their confusion not weakness but a natural response to an impossible inheritance. They are feeling what has never been named for them.

This, of course, is not true of all young people. Families and communities that have managed to integrate their collective history, that have named their wounds, witnessed their pain together, and carried their story with honesty tend to produce younger people of remarkable resilience and moral clarity. Integration, even partial, is protective. It gives the next generation something solid to stand on.

There are communities, including among Indigenous peoples and other historically rooted cultures, where younger generations appear less devastated by modern moral disorientation when they remain connected to land, elders, language, ritual, memory, and shared responsibility. This does not mean such communities are free from trauma or injustice. Rather, it suggests that cultural continuity can provide a living moral landscape, one that helps younger people know who they are, where they belong, and what responsibilities they inherit.

The question then becomes not whether we can simply return to an earlier moral landscape, but how we recognise both what has been lost and what still quietly remains. We may not fully possess the moral map ourselves, otherwise we would not be living through such profound fragmentation and disorientation. The task may therefore be less about handing younger people fixed answers, and more about helping create the conditions in which all of us can recover orientation together: developing the emotional and moral capacities to carry what we have inherited without being driven by it invisibly, and remaining connected to a moral landscape wider than fear, fragmentation, and reaction.

Conclusion: Hope Without Illusion

Hope must now be understood differently, not as optimism, certainty, or denial, but as the willingness to remain in relationship with reality without surrendering our humanity. Elsewhere, I have described this as hope without illusion: a form of hope grounded not in comforting narratives, but in the courage to remain present to suffering, uncertainty, and moral responsibility without collapsing into cynicism or despair.

The Three Compasses framework, developed more fully elsewhere, attempts to describe how three dimensions, inner experiencing, relational life, and collective responsibility, form an integrated moral orientation. In times of fragmentation, what becomes clear is that none of these can substitute for the others.

Moral orientation can no longer depend solely on institutions, ideologies, or inherited certainties. We are being asked to recover the inner compass of lived experiencing, the relational compass of genuine encounter, and the collective compass of shared responsibility, not separately, but together.

A compass does not remove uncertainty. It does not eliminate conflict, grief, injustice, or responsibility. But it helps us remain oriented toward what is human when fear, fragmentation, and certainty threaten to pull us away from one another.

Gendlin wrote that experiencing is always more intricate than any formulation of it. This is as true of moral life as of anything else. Our frameworks, however carefully constructed, will always be outrun by the living complexity of what we actually face. The compass does not give us the map. It simply helps us remain oriented while we find our way.

And in times such as these, that orientation itself becomes a form of peace building.

References and Further Reading

Eugene T. Gendlin.Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (1962); Focusing (1978)

Mary Hendricks Gendlin. Focusing as a Force for Peace

Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

Iain McGilchrist. Ways of Attending.How Our Divided Brain Constructs The World (2018)

Iris Murdoch . The Sovereignty of Good (1970)

Hartmut Rosa . Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2013)

Byung-Chul Han .The Burnout Society (2015); The Transparency Society (2015)

Vamık Volkan.  The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (1988); Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (1997)

Frantz Fanon.  The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Zygmunt Bauman,  Liquid Modernity (2000); Postmodern Ethics (1993)

Marta Fabregat. Substack Essay.Why I do not use the word Trauma. How language can disconnect us from the  organism’s wisdom. Jan 11, 2026

About the Author

Patricia Foster is a Coordinator, Focusing Trainer, and Therapist with The International Focusing Institute (New York). She is also an EAP Certified Person Centred Therapist. She offers training in Focusing for groups and individuals, and provides Person- Centred and Focusing-Oriented therapy. Her work integrates experiential philosophy with practical skills that help people listen more deeply to their own lived experiencing….