People who heal from deep trauma — even horrific trauma like rape — must at some point stop holding the other person as a monster. You can say “it was totally not okay for that to happen to me” while still opening your heart to the person who did it. But you cannot see them as wrong and still heal.
“The sense of right and wrong prevents a lot of healing in this world.”
This is because healing requires an open heart, and moral judgment closes the heart. It’s hard to open your heart to something your mind insists is wrong. The healing process involves seeing the full situation — including the other person’s fear, pain, or confusion — without collapsing into either self-blame or other-blame.
The same principle applies to childhood trauma: when we see that our parents were scared and their fear came out in a certain way, we’re relieved of both self-judgment and judgment of them. We also gain a deeper perspective that helps us recognize similar patterns in the future.
This doesn’t mean condoning harmful actions. It means refusing to dehumanize the person who did them. As Joe notes, the first step of dehumanization — from political division to historical atrocities — is always “they’re wrong.”
Related Concepts
- Right and wrong dissolve into embodied morality
- Judgment signals unfelt emotion
- Self-forgiveness breaks the shame loop
- What’s vulnerable is personal, not a universal morality