He entered the restorative justice room with the careful steps of someone who had lived too long in survival mode. At 26, he carried the weight of a life shaped by hunger, abandonment, and the need to defend himself long before he understood his own emotions. As a teenager, he worked as a sicario in Medellín, pulled into a world where fear became currency and silence became armor.

During the restorative session, he confronted his own story with a mix of shame and exhaustion. Nothing he shared excused the harm he caused, yet everything he revealed helped clarify the emotional logic behind his violence. Research continues to show that early trauma, especially emotional neglect and abuse, significantly increases the likelihood of criminal behavior and aggression in adulthood (Cantürk et al., 2021). His story embodied this pattern, carved through years of fear and invisibility.

These are the seven lessons he taught me, not from theory, but from the visceral truth of a life shaped in the shadows.

When asked about his first act of violence, he said, “In my house, nobody hugged. Nobody asked anything. Nobody cared.” His aggression did not grow out of rage. It grew out of emotional starvation. Puente-Ortega, Moreta-Herrera, and Torales (2025) confirm in their systematic review that

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