Seeking to explore the moral dimension and implications of child abuse may appear a strange endeavour; self-evidently, there is nothing whatsoever moral, good or ethical about mistreating minors.

Yet philosophy, the academic discipline whose ethical branch is dedicated to the study of morality, rarely addresses why harming children is an obvious wrong. For example, the classical Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who 2300 years ago formulated the moral code that, along with Judeo-Christian values, still underpins Western society, rarely explicitly condemn the pederastic, man-male adolescent relationships widely practiced in their cultural context (Percy 2005). An exception within the philosophical canon is British empiricist John Locke, who in the 17th century not only formulated ideas that would guide the American Founding Fathers, but also engaged in an unambiguous, quasi-21st-century advocacy for the gentle and peaceful parenting of children (1693, 2017).

Moral clarity

Despite this relative lack of philosophical inquiry, children affected by child abuse emerge from their ordeals as inadvertent experts on moral matters, imbued with a first-hand knowledge of both the reality of evil, and of many of its means. While few individuals grow up entirely sheltered from pain and suffering, there is an enormous difference between, say, a child mourning the untimely loss of a beloved parent, and another child experiencing habitual mistreatment and neglect at the hands of one or more abusers.

Both of these children will have to grapple too early with one of life’s fundamental questions (‘why me – why do bad things happen to good people?’), yet the former will eventually have their faith in humanity restored by an outpouring of compassion from their community. In contrast, the second child learns that few, if any, adults are willing to listen to and believe them, much less have the courage to act to protect them. Unsupported and unaffirmed, this child is left to construe their sense of themselves, and of their current and future place in the world, based on a single, axiomatic certainty: this, the abuse and pain that I am experiencing, is wrong and should not be happening.

And with that, they possess a moral clarity and moral passion that set them apart from most people. In contemporary Western societies – most markedly, but far from exclusively, in academia – everything is relative, on a continuum or sliding scale.

The existence of truth itself, demonstrable through objective methodology based on rigorous empiricism, is queried and equivocated with subjective, experiential data: my truth is different from yours; ergo, there exists no such thing- diddums. In this line of thinking, it follows that there is no right or wrong, much less good or bad (or evil) anymore. Survivors of child abuse know better.

Suffering and the importance of meaning

When an abused child howls out in pain, knowing that those in earshot do not care, whom are they crying out to? A deity, a hoped-for, universally shared human conscience, or perhaps their future self, i.e., the one person who can be counted on to one day put things right, both for this particular child and others like it?

The wounded healer or crusader for justice are clichés rooted in reality, as is the notion that ‘hurt people hurt people’. The latter point is exemplified by the fact that 98% of the US prison population has an ACE score of at least 1, with over 75% of prisoners having four or more ACEs (American Psychiatric Foundation website). But nowhere is moral judgment more palpable than within that brutalized context, with offenders against children commonly having to be segregated for their own protection (James 2015).

It seems common-sensical to infer that without child abuse, society and the world would be less violent, safer and more peaceful places. Auschwitz survivor and existentialist psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote that, ‘suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning’ (2004:117); this meaning never occurs in isolation but instead always in relation to ‘a cause to serve or another person to love’ (2004:115). Survivors of child abuse will never lack for meaning. They possess moral certainty and the – painfully acquired – expertise to fundamentally change the world.

References:

American Psychiatric Foundation (2026), ‘What Are ACEs? A Guide for Probation Officers’, https://www.apaf.org/our-programs/justice/free-resources/what-are-pces-guide-for-judges/; accessed 08/16/26.

Frankl, Viktor E. (2004), Man’s Search For Meaning, The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust, Reading, UK: CPI, Cox and Wyman.

James, Michael S. (2015), ‘Prison is “Living Hell” for Pedophiles’, ABC News, https://abcnews.com/amp/US/prison-living-hell-pedophiles/story?id=90004; accessed 08/16/26.

Locke, John (1693, 2017), Some Thoughts Concerning Education, GB: amazon.

Percy, William Armstrong III (2005), ‘Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexuality’, Journal of Homosexuality (49, nos 3-4; 13-61).

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

Unlucky.

What an interesting way to describe ten years of someone’s life.

I had never heard of CPTSD.

I had been diagnosed with PTSD, as were my wife and daughter, by separate therapists, but I had never heard any of them mention CPTSD.

My son moved out of state at 19, not for college, the military, or a job; he just left with about three weeks’ notice. He even chose the day before my wife’s birthday, though he postponed it when I brought it up, if only for a few days.

He left most of his belongings, even his car. I drive it now and then just to keep the oil in the engine and the battery charged. To my knowledge, he hasn’t missed a payment since he left. It’s been three years. I text or call him once a week, but he leaves me on read most of the time—for months on end.

Recently, my wife and I started downsizing; our house is too big for just the two of us. When I was cleaning out my son’s room and putting his things in storage, I came across a book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Then I came across another book, The Complex PTSD Workbook, and then another.

He’s the only one of us who hadn’t sought professional counseling over the last ten years of our lives; he wasn’t ready to.

I sat down on his bed and started thumbing through the books. There were underlined and highlighted passages—pieces of paper with notes about how he was feeling on certain days—a journal of loose pages and corner scribblings detailing his emotional health over the year before he moved away.

It is bittersweet to see your child seek the help they need, knowing they need the help.

I know he has been through a lot—we all have.

I was never one for flight

A family of four, each one of us with a form of PTSD. Our family looked so different ten years ago. I loved coming home to them. It was the best part of every day, but life can turn sharp and quick. When it does, it doesn’t right itself easily.

For us, it was a decade we never saw coming.

We did manage to turn it around, but it was never the same, and there were many casualties—time being the biggest one.

I spent so much of that decade in fight-or-fight-harder mode that it nearly cost me everything.

I was so dedicated to supporting everyone else—so dedicated to being the rock that couldn’t afford to break—I missed the cracks forming.

My wife needed me; my daughter needed me. My son needed me—so did work, my mortgage, and groceries.

HR, some executives, and peers at work knew what was happening in our lives. They would sometimes ask, “How are you still going?” I would give a suppressed, half-hearted laugh and say, “The same way you would, if it were you—no choice.”

They told us not to Google it

They knew my son had gone into the hospital one day years ago and didn’t come home for nine weeks. When he finally did, he had lost a third of his body weight, and he was legally blind.

After taking a prescription for an ear infection, the same one he had taken multiple times before, he had a reaction that almost killed him. Toxic epidermal necrolysis, or TEN—the doctors told us not to Google it—they were right.

Over the next four years, my son would go through 40 surgeries and procedures on his eyes. It was like having a newborn again; we would put medicine in his eyes every two hours, every night, for nearly two years. He had both eyes sewn shut at different times and had to have his eyelids reconstructed.

His eyes had become so sensitive to light that he lived in the darkest corners of our home. It’s the reason I tinted all of the windows—so he wouldn’t have to hide in his own home.

At 13 years old, the pain was so bad and so constant that he begged to have his right eye removed. He knew it was an option; the eye doctor had spoken about it.

I couldn’t do it.

If there was the slightest chance his sight could be saved—we needed to try. But I wasn’t the one in pain.

The light was clearly in view

Just as we were nearing the end of our dark tunnel—the light clearly in view—my daughter disclosed that my father had been abusing her over the four years since my son had gone into the hospital.

We spent the next five years in a criminal legal battle attempting to get some semblance of justice for my daughter. She eventually got it, but the fight was hard and long. Lines were drawn, and the only people left on our side of it were my wife, daughter, and son.

Those nine years shaped my children, and they reshaped my wife and me.

Fatigue and microfractures

I remember sitting in the courtroom for sentencing, thinking We made it through; somehow, we made it through.

I know—naïve.

Within a year, in a momentary realization of what my life had become—how far it was from anything I had ever hoped for my family—I would almost make a mistake no one could come back from.

A decade of fighting for my son’s health and eyesight, my daughter’s justice, trying to hold my family and marriage together—through the worst decade of our lives—and a year later, after it was all over, I finally hit the wall.

It’s what engineers call a catastrophic failure—fatigue and microfractures accumulating slowly over years, the very weight of the burden being the same thing that holds a structure together while slowly destroying it. When the burden is finally lifted, the stress removed—everything collapses.

As I sat on my son’s bed, thumbing through his notes and highlights and reading about CPTSD, I realized not all of his notes or observations were about him.

He had been making notes about me.

He was always a really smart kid.

My son has been through more physical and emotional pain than most people three times his age. I imagine that his room, the house he grew up in, even his mother, his sister, and I are all painful reminders of everything he has gone through—everything our family has gone through.

Maybe that’s why they call it complex.

I talk about this often with my wife; she always asks, “What else could we have done?”

She’s right; it’s very hard for people who are drowning to save each other, and we were all drowning.

I just thought we would have time to heal afterward—time to recover as a family. But we all surfaced at different times.

And I guess I am still waiting for my son to surface.

I just left him another message.

God, I miss him.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving: Pete Walker MA, MFT
The Complext PTSD Workbook, Arielle Schwartz, PhD, CCTP-II, E-RYT, EMDR-C