Everyone starts faultless.

Every person is conceived faultless.

Before anyone learns fear, before anyone learns to flinch, before anyone learns what they have to do to be loved, there's a person who has done nothing wrong and hasn't had anything done to them yet.

That's where everyone starts. It doesn't last long.

The damage starts earlier than memory.

What happens to a child starts adding up before they can remember it, and in some ways before they're born. The stress of the people carrying and raising them. The chaos or the calm of the house. What gets praised, what gets punished, what gets ignored.

None of it is chosen by the child. By the time they can think about any of it, a lot of their wiring is already in place. This is why two honest adults can walk into the same moment and read it completely differently. They didn't start from the same place.

The adults who cause the harm owe the accountability.

When an adult harms a child, through violence, neglect, contempt, or just by never doing their own work, the responsibility sits with the adult. It doesn't get shared out. It doesn't get excused by how the adult was raised, even though that is usually part of the story.

Every adult who shaped a child should be able to meet that child's eyes and say what they did. Most never will. That doesn't cancel what they owe. It just means it goes unpaid.

It isn't their fault, and it's still their job.

Here's the part that doesn't seem fair, because it isn't. The child who was harmed ends up doing the healing. Not because they owe it, but because they're the one who has to live in the result.

Waiting for the people responsible to fix it can take a lifetime and usually doesn't come. So the work lands on the person who least deserved it. Doing it is not admitting fault. It's refusing to let the harm keep running your life.

And as that child grows, the same rule starts to apply to them. Whatever they pass on to the next child is theirs to answer for.