The critical reappraisal of sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church depends fundamentally on survivor testimonies. Through autobiographical writing, survivors challenge dominant religious narratives and expose the power asymmetries that enabled abuse. A recurring concern in these narratives is the struggle to find a language that renders the injustice suffered—often in childhood—intelligible and communicable without reproducing discursive patterns complicit in abuse. The search for adequate language thus emerges as a bottom-up response to institutional and religious power inequality. From a narrative-ethical perspective, this paper examines two literary autobiographical works that explicitly reflect on the difficulty of writing and on the search for an appropriate language for experiences of abuse: S. Bernard, Paper Cuts (2018), and J. Haslinger, Mein Fall (2020). The analysis explores how the struggle for language is intertwined with fragmented memory, doubts about its reliability under conditions of trauma, and efforts to reclaim a vulnerable yet self-determined identity. In doing so, it reconstructs the ethical ethos of language articulated in these narratives. The paper proceeds in three steps: First, a narrative analysis of both texts; second, a comparison of their implicit ethical positions regarding truthful testimony under traumatic conditions; and third, a reflection on the ethos of reading. Reading survivor narratives is itself a morally charged practice that can either reinforce or challenge existing power inequalities. The paper therefore asks what constitutes an ethically responsible mode of reading and what responsibilities are placed upon readers when engaging with survivor testimonies.