Irreversible Trauma
Why Murder is Always Wrong
I can’t believe I have to write about this topic, but I’m compelled to do so given the current state of affairs. We’ve seen a rash of murders over the past year, some involving victims who were openly and publicly hated, leading to a chilling indifference or even outright justification from large groups—a phenomenon almost too much for us to bear.
I’ll admit: I’ve felt the pull of these justifications myself, the seductive logic that says certain acts of violence are understandable, even deserved. But as I’ve sat with these impulses and examined them I’ve come to recognize them as exactly that—impulses rooted in anger and a desire for retribution, not reasoned moral positions. Moving from this reactive stance to a more reflective, systemic understanding has clarified for me why murder remains fundamentally wrong, regardless of who the victim is or what they may have done.
As a psychotherapist, my professional life is dedicated to understanding and healing the human mind, focusing on its capacity for connection, resilience, and growth. When considering the act of murder, I am compelled to move beyond simple legal, theological, or spiritual arguments. From my clinical perspective, murder is deeply wrong because it represents the ultimate, irreversible act of psychological violence, shattering the foundational bonds of trust, security, and shared humanity that allow for healthy individual and our collective functioning.
Our Core Need for Security
Every human being possesses a fundamental, innate psychological need for safety and security. This need is the bedrock upon which personal identity, trust, and mental health are built. Murder instantaneously, and in the most brutal way, violates this core. It communicates the terrifying truth that one’s very existence can be arbitrarily and violently ended.
Impact on Victims: While the victim’s psychological experience is tragically brief, the final moments are often characterized by extreme fear, panic, and a sense of betrayal—a stark rupture of the expectation of safety in the world.
Impact on the Community: When an individual is murdered, the psychological contract of a society is broken. It breeds a pervasive, underlying anxiety among survivors, eroding our collective sense of safety and making it difficult for individuals to invest in their future and trust their neighbors.
The Perpetrator: A State of Deep Psychological Disintegration
The act of taking a human life requires a monumental psychological dissociation—a severing of the perpetrator from their innate sense of empathy and shared humanity. This is a clear moral failing; but it is also a sign of deep psychological injury and disintegration.
Erosion of Empathy: Our capacity for empathy, the ability to feel what another feels, is a key component of emotional intelligence and healthy social functioning. To devalue it is utterly nonsensical. Murder necessitates the systematic suppression or destruction of this essential capacity, reducing the victim from a complex human being to an object or obstacle. The person who commits murder often carries a massive, unresolved psychological burden of guilt, denial, and emotional deadening, which itself is a testament to the unnaturalness of the act.
The Cycle of Trauma: Often, the act of murder is the horrific endpoint of a chain of unresolved personal trauma, neglect, and psychological wounding. While this context can help explain the factors contributing to the act, it most certainly does not mitigate the wrongness of the outcome. Rather, it highlights how trauma, when left unaddressed, can metastasize into lethal aggression, perpetuating a dark cycle of suffering. There is no excuse for murder.
The Perpetrator’s Burden of Accountability
While no act can undo what has been destroyed, the person who commits murder carries a moral obligation to remain fully conscious of what they have done. The psychological disintegration required to take a life cannot be reversed, but it must be faced. For those serving life sentences, this may involve a rigorous, unflinching examination of the choices, wounds, and internal processes that culminated in the act—not to excuse it, but to witness it honestly.
In rare cases, a deeply truthful memoir or testimony—one that refuses minimization, rejects self-pity, and does not center the perpetrator’s suffering—can function as a form of accountability. Such a record offers no redemption and provides no balance against the loss. Its only ethical value lies in refusing denial. It may give survivors a fragment of understanding, serve as a warning of how violence germinates in the human psyche, and affirm that the perpetrator will live with full awareness of the devastation they caused rather than retreat into moral erasure.
This is not absolution. The loss remains total and irreversible. But sustained, conscious reckoning is the only remaining responsibility available to someone who has permanently violated another’s existence—and the only way their continued life might bear any moral weight at all.
The Multi-Generational Trauma of Grief
Perhaps the most compelling argument from my perspective is the irrevocable psychological damage inflicted upon survivors—the family, friends, and community of the victim. Unlike other forms of loss, the trauma of murder is distinct:
Complicated Grief: The grief following a murder is categorized as complicated or traumatic grief. It is not just about the loss, but the horror of how the person died. Survivors often experience PTSD, intrusive memories, profound distrust, and an obsessive need to understand an incomprehensible act. The closure sought in the healing process is continually denied by the violence of the event.
Intergenerational Echoes: This trauma can reverberate through generations. Children raised by parents who lost a loved one to murder may internalize that world as fundamentally dangerous and unpredictable, leading to attachment issues, anxiety disorders, and difficulty forming secure relationships—a long-tail psychological casualty of the original violent act.
The Inviolability of Human Potential
Finally, as a practitioner who works to champion human potential and growth, I see murder as the ultimate destruction of possibility. Every human life represents a unique and irreplaceable constellation of experiences, relationships, and unfulfilled potential—the kindness they could have shown, the art they could have created, the love and wisdom they could have given.
Murder is wrong because it is the unilateral destruction of one’s human journey and potential, an act that no institution or therapeutic intervention can ever undo or replace. It is the complete rejection of the very premise of our profession: the inherent value and worth of every human being and their capacity for good.
For the psychotherapist, murder is not merely a crime; it is an assault on the human psyche itself. It is the definitive act of psychological annihilation, one that destroys our core need for security, requires the perpetrator to psychologically dissociate from humanity, and inflicts a specialized, enduring form of trauma on survivors that ripples through families and communities. While we strive to heal the living and understand perpetrators, the act of murder remains intrinsically wrong because it permanently extinguishes the sacred, irreplaceable, and boundless potential of a human life, leaving an irreversible wound in the fabric of our collective minds.
This is why we must speak up when we encounter injustice, channeling our anger and grief into words and collective action rather than surrendering to the seductive pull of violence—because once we cross that line, there is no undoing the irreversible harm we leave behind. Democratic pluralism does not require moral silence in the face of annihilation. It requires that we argue, protest, and grieve within the boundaries that somehow preserve our shared humanity—because without those boundaries, pluralism collapses into sanctioned brutality, and even lethal force can be justified on ideological grounds, giving rise to a kind of neo-fascism.
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So key to state the harm from a pychotherapist's expertise.