Sometimes, character defects are described as coping mechanisms that no longer work. Apparently a merciful neutralisation of condemnation of others and self, this actually deletes the domain of morality altogether. There is no such thing as selfishness, malice, or bullying: the violent are merely not coping terribly well; those that deliberately plot for the downfall of others—lying, distorting, extorting, and manipulating for selfish or retributive ends—are only defending themselves because they are wounded ('hurt people hurt people'), and so on.
Tosh. There is such a thing as right and wrong, and that is the precise content of the moral (not psychological) inventory of Step Four:
"When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight." (Chapter 5, Big Book)
The inventory of course has psychological elements, but it must be not be reduced to a forensic tracking of beliefs, thinking, and behaviour back to origins lying outside the individual (the childhood influences), stripping the individual of moral agency and responsibility. This renders the individual a mere puppet of the past, a broken piece of software, a tree bent and contorted by decades of cold, northerly winds, an algorithm, less than human, actually not a human at all: a cipher.
This rendering is not a mere theoretical possibility. One encounters it constantly. I had a conversation recently with an adult (who had been an adult for a very long time) who said that he was not able to be honest because of 'abandonment trauma' (NB he had not been left in a wicker basket by the side of the road as a child or anything remotely as dramatic as that): a pure denial of moral responsibility (for honesty, in sane adults of sound mind, is a question of moral choice, not capability), with the blame placed squarely on an overdramatised incident from decades ago.
One could respond: there are behaviours that appear to have little or no moral import and could be cast as psychological coping or defence mechanisms, for instance excessive focus on academic success to gain favour or forefend condemnation, but even these are moral in substance: there's the self-centred preoccupation with the perceptions of others, which is pride, there's reliance on self not God, there's the abandonment of activities in favour of God or others in order to pursue those selfish ends. Whilst the assessment of moral behaviour in children is tempered by the fact that they are not yet fully formed on any level, hence the usual lenience exercised towards children who have committed crimes, this does not render the behaviour in question, or the motivations behind it, amoral, that is to say beyond the bounds of morality, a mere behavioural maladjustment. Children can indeed be 'naughty' and not just 'misunderstood'.
Now, a distinction must be made between the person and the behaviour. The person is ultimately innocent, holy, etc. It is the ego that has them held hostage and has them believing that the ego's goals are their own. But that does not detract firstly from the moral horror of what the ego is capable of nor from the agency the person is morally responsible to reassert. The failure to do is a moral failing, but that moral failing, which can be grave, does not infect the substance of the person, does not lend the person their character.
In this way, I can retain my full moral faculties whilst exercising forgiveness of the person, really a refusal to condemn the person for the behaviour or see them as anything less than a child of God. The person (the other, and I myself) retains the capability for godliness on earth.