"I met Miguel during my research inside a prison in Cali, Colombia. He spoke calmly, without urgency, as someone who had revisited the same memories many times. He did not dramatize his past or ask for understanding. He told me he had spent years incarcerated for more than 50 killings carried out as a paid sicario, moving across the country according to where the work took him."
"Those moments were not chaotic or impulsive; he expected them. Before each shot, the same thoughts arrived in the same sequence, regardless of who stood in front of him or where he was. Place and circumstance faded quickly as his attention turned inward. Years of exposure to threat, neglect, and silence had shaped a mental process that no longer required effort."
Violence often emerges from long-standing emotional patterns shaped by chronic fear, humiliation, neglect, and survival training rather than sudden impulses. Repeated exposure to threat trains bodily reactions and thought sequences so that actions precede reflection. Individuals can enter a familiar internal place before each violent act, where place and circumstance fade and attention turns inward. Emotional numbness and moral disconnection reduce internal resistance and allow violence to proceed as routine. Survival instincts prioritize self-preservation, maintaining guarded identities formed early in life. Years of silence, neglect, and conditioned responses solidify a mental process that normalizes lethal behavior.
Read at Psychology Today
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