For Creed

Transforming Moral Injury into Compassionate Stewardship

Photo by Sarah Blesener: https://sarah-blesener.com

Moral injury is not just about what is done to you. It is about what you witness, what you can’t stop, and how that failure lives in the body like a bad inheritance. It begins in silence. In complicity. In the moments you are asked to look away and you do.

I was a child, and children have no power. But I knew. I knew what was right. I knew what was wrong. And I knew what was happening in our house was wrong.

Frank, our priest, was the man who moved into our home and into my mother’s bed. He was also the man who threw our dog out a second-story window. Creed was a shepherd, big and sweet and needy. He whined in the rain because he needed to pee, and Frank, offended by the sound of dependence, threw him like trash. The cast on Creed’s leg. The limp that never healed. A wound he wore for the rest of his life, as if to remind us what happened when you made a need visible.

The name Frank gave him, Creed, was its own desecration. A creed is a declaration of faith. This man, a priest, who quoted doctrine and wielded guilt like a rosary, broke every vow he spoke. The irony was barbed, cruel. He shattered faith like glass, and he named the dog after what he destroyed.

He kicked my four chihuahuas—Baby, Mitzi, Cha Cha and Rudy. He beat our cocker spaniel. I can no longer recall her name, only the whimper; high, sharp, echoing in my chest. I scrambled to gather them up, to pull them out of his path. It was always the helpless who bore the brunt of his rage.

When I look back, it is not only the sexual abuse that haunts me. It is that I could not save the ones who didn’t understand. The animals. The pets. The small bodies that flinched and cowered and tried to love us anyway. They had no reason to suffer. No sin to atone for. No mother to disappoint, no priest to obey. They were good. And they were hurt anyway.

And my mother, she was kind to them. She let them curl in her lap on the couch when she watched her soaps. But she never stopped him. Not once. Like she didn’t stop anything else. That is the thing I struggle to forgive.

It broke me in ways I couldn’t name until much later. When I saw the old photos of my pets; creased, yellowing snapshots of dogs laying in the flower beds, me holding Mitzi in front of the Christmas tree filled with presents—prettily wrapped things we didn’t need or want—I cracked open. The bruises on me healed in secret, but the flinch in my shepherd’s gait never did. That limp was a kind of testimony. A record. Proof that pain lived among us, and we all chose to survive it differently.

Survival teaches you things. It teaches you to lie well. To vanish inside yourself. To study a room like a crime scene. To make yourself small, silent, acceptable.

But it also teaches you who you will never become. None of us, my siblings and I, could save the animals we grew up with. But we rescue animals now. Not as owners. As stewards. We let them sleep in our beds. We feed them like family. We give them what we could not give ourselves: protection, peace, and a place to grow old.

There is a pattern. The studies are clear. Where pets are burned or drowned or kicked, there are children hiding behind doors. There are women in ER rooms and domestic abuse shelters. There are stories that cannot be told. The link between domestic violence and animal abuse isn’t anecdotal. It’s epidemiological. A known trajectory. A contagion. You can map it across cities and states, and every line drawn between a dead pet and a dead girl becomes harder to ignore.

This is what I mean by moral injury. Not just what you suffer, but what you carry because you couldn’t stop the suffering of someone else. It is a particular kind of shame. Not the kind you earn, but the kind you inherit. And you try, every day, not to let it shape you.

But it does.

And still, we love.

We name the new ones carefully. We guard them. We forgive their messes, their fears, their hunger, their softness. We never punish them for needing us, for having their own spirits and minds. We don't do what was done to us.

We refuse the second silence. We advocate for animal rights, spay and neuter, donate to shelters, and choose adoption over purchase. We urge our legislators to establish pet abuse registries. We speak up when we witness mistreatment—animals left in cars, wearing choke collars, dragged by the neck down sidewalks. We raise our voices even when it's uncomfortable, because looking away is not an option.

Caring for pets is something you learn, like caring for babies. My siblings and I learned how to do it, guided by the empathy that survived our childhood. Caring for a pet after witnessing abuse is a journey toward love. It's a way to connect. We educate ourselves about animal needs, attend training classes that emphasize positive reinforcement and kindness, and remain attuned to our pets' pain, loneliness, silliness, joy, needs, wants, and fears. We are there for them through it all.

And in the doing, something like faith returns. Not in God. But in ourselves. In our capacity to choose differently. To make another kind of family. One not built on silence. One that says: I saw what happened. I won’t let it happen again.

And we do it for Creed.