CONTENT WARNING
A note before you read: this article touches on war, killing, moral injury, religious guilt, and the fear of death and damnation. It also explores ideas — including psychedelic-assisted therapy — that may sit outside, or directly challenge, frameworks you have lived inside for a long time. You don’t have to read it today. If something in it unsettles you, that unsettling may be worth sitting with rather than resolving quickly. If you need support right now, the Help Now page is here.
My father was a good man. I mean that in the fullest sense — not simply that he was kind, though he was, but that goodness was the organising principle of his life. He devoted himself to others. He had a faith that gave him structure and meaning and a clear sense of what it meant to live well.
He also fought in the Second World War. And he came home carrying something that his faith, for all its depth, could not resolve.
He had shot people. In a war, in circumstances not of his choosing, doing what he was ordered to do. But the man who pulled the trigger was the same man who believed, with complete sincerity, that killing was a sin. And the religion that had formed his conscience told him, in terms that left little room for interpretation, what happened to people who sinned and did not find absolution.
My father spent the rest of his life afraid of hell.
Not metaphorically. Not as a background anxiety. He was a man of genuine faith, and genuine faith meant that the threat was real to him — as real as anything in the physical world. The war had forced him to act in ways that contradicted everything he believed about who he was and what he was for. And the framework that might have offered comfort was the same framework that condemned him.
There was no way out of that knot from inside it. He carried it until he died.
What moral injury actually is
There is a term for what my father experienced, though it wasn’t widely used in his lifetime: moral injury. It is distinct from PTSD, though the two often coexist. PTSD is, at its core, a fear response — the nervous system stuck in a state of threat, unable to register that the danger has passed.
Moral injury is something different. It is the damage done when a person acts in ways that violate their own deeply held beliefs about right and wrong — or when they witness such acts or feel they failed to prevent them. It is a wound not to the nervous system but to the soul’s sense of itself.
Veterans carry this in particular ways. The soldier who followed orders and killed. The medic who couldn’t save someone. The officer who sent people into situations they didn’t come back from. These are not simply traumatic memories. They are experiences that have become woven into the person’s understanding of who they are — I am someone who did that — and that understanding, once formed, is extraordinarily resistant to ordinary treatment.
Talk therapy can help with many things. It is less well-equipped for moral injury, because the problem is not a distorted perception that can be corrected with evidence. The person is not wrong that they did what they did.
The suffering comes from the meaning they have made of it, and meaning lives at a depth that words often cannot reach.
A door that nothing else could open
This is where the research of the last decade becomes important — and where I want to be careful, because I am not offering this as a simple solution or a universal prescription. I am offering it as a door that, for some people, has opened onto something that nothing else could reach.
Psilocybin — the active compound in what are commonly called magic mushrooms — has been the subject of serious clinical research at Johns Hopkins University, Imperial College London, and New York University, among others. The results, particularly for treatment-resistant depression and end-of-life distress, have been striking enough that the scientific community has largely stopped treating them as fringe findings.
But what is perhaps most relevant here is what participants in these trials actually report experiencing. Across cultures, across backgrounds, across belief systems and the absence of them, the accounts converge on something remarkably consistent: a dissolution of the ordinary sense of self, a feeling of connection to something larger than the individual, an encounter with what many describe as unconditional love or acceptance, and — critically — a shift in the story they had been telling about themselves.
Not an argument against the story. Not a reframing or a cognitive restructuring. A direct experience of something that made the story feel, for the first time, like a story — rather than the truth.
For veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD, MDMA-assisted therapy has produced results that the standard clinical toolkit has not been able to match.
The MAPS trials — the most rigorous studies conducted to date — found that a significant majority of participants no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD after treatment, including people who had been suffering for decades and had not responded to anything else.
The FDA review process has been slower than the science, for reasons that are more political than medical. But the direction of travel is clear.
What I think about when I read this research
I think about my father when I read this research.
I think about what it might have meant for him to have an experience — not an argument, not a reassurance, not a priest’s absolution, but a direct, embodied experience — of being held rather than condemned. Of encountering, from the inside, the thing that his faith had always pointed toward but that the guilt had made unreachable. Of being shown, rather than told, that what he had done in the war did not define the totality of what he was.
I cannot know whether that would have helped him. I know that nothing else did.
What I do know is that the suffering he carried was not a character flaw or a failure of faith. It was the predictable result of placing a human being in an impossible situation and then giving them a framework for understanding it that offered condemnation without exit.
Religions have a great deal to answer for in this regard — not because faith itself is the problem, but because the specific, punitive versions of it that many people of his generation were raised inside were extraordinarily well-designed to generate exactly this kind of unresolvable guilt.
The cruelty of it is that the people most likely to be destroyed by moral injury are often the most conscientious — the ones for whom the contradiction between what they did and who they believed themselves to be was sharpest, because their sense of who they were supposed to be was most deeply felt.
Good people. People who cared. People who, in different circumstances, would never have been in that position at all.
What this means for people who are still carrying it
I am not suggesting that psychedelics are the answer for everyone, or that they should be pursued outside of appropriate clinical and therapeutic contexts.
The research that exists is conducted with careful preparation, professional support, and structured integration afterwards. The experience can be profound and it can also be difficult. It is not recreational and it is not trivial.
What I am suggesting is that the category of suffering that includes moral injury, religious guilt, and the existential fear of death and damnation is a category that our conventional mental health system has not served well — and that there is now credible evidence that something can reach into that territory and offer relief that nothing else has managed.
For people who are actively dying with unresolved fear. For veterans who have carried the weight of what they did for fifty years. For anyone whose suffering lives at the level of the soul rather than the symptom — the question of whether this kind of help should be available is not a fringe question. It is a question about what we believe people deserve.
I believe they deserve every door we can open.
If you are carrying something like what I have described — moral injury, religious guilt, a fear that what you have done or failed to do has placed you beyond the reach of peace — I want to say this directly:
The story that says you are beyond redemption is not the last word. It is a story. It was formed in particular circumstances, under particular pressures, inside a particular framework. And frameworks, however deeply they have shaped us, are not the same as the truth of what we are.
My father was a good man.
The war did not change that.
The guilt did not change that.
What it changed was his ability to feel it.
That ability can sometimes be restored. Not always, not easily, and not by any single path.
But the door is not sealed.
That is worth knowing.
If something in this article has brought up something for you, the Help Now page offers grounding tools and crisis support lines. You do not have to be in crisis to use it — it is there whenever you need a moment of steadiness.
For those interested in the clinical research mentioned here, the MAPS Foundation and Johns Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research are the most credible starting points.