The Courage to Leave the Moral High Ground

A subtle way childhood wounds can show up in adult relationships is through a sense of moral superiority.

Children are born with a naturally strong moral compass.

Even at a very young age, they can intuitively FEEL when something is off/there is a deep violation happening … even if they don’t understand or have the words to describe what is happening.

When a child has been deeply hurt, experienced trauma or abuse, has been repeatedly misunderstood, blamed, or emotionally neglected, the nervous system naturally looks for ways to self-protect.

Sometimes self- protection looks like withdrawing.
Sometimes it looks like people-pleasing.
Sometimes it looks like needing to be right (at all costs).

As adults, brains seek this need to be right because being right is a whole lot safer than being vulnerable. Being vulnerable means feeling ‘helpless’ and that is the last preferred option given their history.

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How this pattern can show up in adult relationships can often be via The Karpman Drama Triangle; which describes a dynamic where conflict shifts from understanding each other to deciding who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.

Through this lens, conflict gets divided into two rigid roles:

• I’m the one who’s been hurt .. the victim role.
• You’re the one causing the hurt .. the perpetrator role.

When this happens, partners stop trying to understand one another and begin trying to determine who holds the moral high ground.

The problem is that most healthy relationship conflict doesn’t fit neatly into those categories.

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While there are absolutely situations involving abuse, manipulation, or repeated violations where clear accountability is essential, many couples aren’t navigating those kinds of dynamics.

Many partners are simply navigating different protective nervous systems, different histories, different triggers, different perceptions, and different intentions, each trying to make sense of the same moment.

The moment one person treats their partner as "the perpetrator" rather than a person .. trying to understand and genuinely repair the issue at hand becomes much harder (if not impossible).

Very few people can stay open when they feel they’re being cast as the villain. And frankly, it is harmful for them to continue staying open to being cast as the perpetrator.

Being accused and blamed often .. bypasses their intellectual boundaries and it can impact their perception and erode their sense of self-trust over time.

Being spoken to with contempt (that moral one-upping by another) is also one of the biggest relationship ending predictors according to Gottman research.

This is one of the reasons I love Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Nonviolent Communication.

At its heart, it’s an invitation to take responsibility for our own inner experience instead of making someone else responsible for it.

Rather than saying, "You made me feel..." we begin to notice:

• "When this happened, I felt..."
• "The story my mind started telling was..."
• "The need underneath my reaction is..."

It’s a major identity shift that is required internally to be reflected in communication externally.

Responsible communication asks us to own our feelings without abandoning accountability. It allows us to express the impact of someone’s behavior without reducing them to their worst moment. It asks us to take an honest look at our past and assess if it is leaking onto the present.

This shift in identity also requires:

• The ability to tolerate more gray.
• The recognition that the past may be being projected onto the present moment.
• To willingness to accept that I can be hurting AND you may not have intended to hurt me.
• That my experience is real AND yours is too.
• That neither of us has to become the "bad guy" for repair to happen.

This isn’t easy work.

And if you have childhood/adult trauma or a major betrayal from your past that you have’t yet worked through, you may need to do some healing work first (to feel validated in all you’ve been through) before you can get to this kind of relationally sensitive external communication.

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Letting go of the victim role in relationship asks us to surrender the illusion that every conflict can be solved by proving who’s right.

It asks us to loosen our grip on certainty and become more curious than certain.
It asks us to move from judgment toward understanding.
It asks us to take responsibility for our own experience while remaining open to another’s.

This is what relational maturity looks like in action.