This individualisation of trauma is typical of medical model thinking, but its unfortunate consequence is that our society is disinclined to regard the victims of structural violence as being the victims of trauma. Accordingly, the empathy we ordinarily show survivors of (individual) traumas is withheld from those who are victims of social trauma. It is no wonder, then, that we think nothing of confining offenders with the most traumatic social histories to the most traumatising places on earth.

“I knew from what happened to my father and what I’d seen on television that a career in sports didn’t last forever. Athletes have a small window of time to work with their body. And injuries don’t care whether you are young or old. The important thing was that if running didn’t work out for me, I would at least have a diploma from a respected university that would help me get a job. That would be my future, I decided, but for now, I had to get faster.

Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn’t applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work. Input this canceled memory once again, and you have to repeat the whole journey from the very beginning.

But the consequence of relieving pain is the damage that results from failure to experience pain. Although there is a great deal of useless pain in the world, on balance we are better off with pain than without it.

Throughout this chapter I’ve been trying to emphasize how physical emotions are, that becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise; it is training your body to respond in open and interactive ways. To recover from painful traumas, people need to live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives. Someone who has been abused has to experience intimacy that is safe. Someone who has been abandoned has to experience others who stayed. This is the kind of knowledge and learning that is held at the cellular level. The rational brain is incapable of talking the emotional body out of its own reality, so the body has to experience a different reality

firsthand.