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Pain Bleeds Crime: Stories from a forensic psychologist in prisons and out.
"The most dangerous people I met weren’t monsters. They were broken children wearing adult faces."
________________________________________
Pamela Nathan, clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, uncovers the inner worlds of society’s most dangerous and broken—whether behind bars or hidden in plain sight.
In Pain Bleeds Crime, she shares twenty-three gripping true stories from her decades working in maximum-security prisons, courts, and forensic hospitals. The crimes are shocking—murder, rape, paedophilia, assault, fetishism, bestiality, and more—but what lies beneath is often even more confronting.
Each offender, whether male, female or transgender, reveals a hidden world shaped by trauma, pain, and silence. Pamela enters these inner worlds to feel and then to have revealed the internal crime scenes, to see what made them break—mentally, emotionally, morally. These aren’t excuses. They’re revelations.
You’ll come face-to-face with people whose crimes horrified the public—people who insist they’re not violent, or that “it just happened”—and come face-to-face with the dark the past never really goes away. With unflinching honesty and rare insight, Pamela shows how the past never really stays buried—and how behind every act of violence, there’s a story waiting to be told.
Brutally honest, deeply unsettling, and impossible to forget, Pain Bleeds Crime is a journey into the darkest parts of humanity.
"Mad, bad, or sad—when we listen to the story, we see the person."
"A chilling exploration of the trauma and pain behind the most heinous crimes."
________________________________________
Pamela Nathan, clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, uncovers the inner worlds of society’s most dangerous and broken—whether behind bars or hidden in plain sight.
In Pain Bleeds Crime, she shares twenty-three gripping true stories from her decades working in maximum-security prisons, courts, and forensic hospitals. The crimes are shocking—murder, rape, paedophilia, assault, fetishism, bestiality, and more—but what lies beneath is often even more confronting.
Each offender, whether male, female or transgender, reveals a hidden world shaped by trauma, pain, and silence. Pamela enters these inner worlds to feel and then to have revealed the internal crime scenes, to see what made them break—mentally, emotionally, morally. These aren’t excuses. They’re revelations.
You’ll come face-to-face with people whose crimes horrified the public—people who insist they’re not violent, or that “it just happened”—and come face-to-face with the dark the past never really goes away. With unflinching honesty and rare insight, Pamela shows how the past never really stays buried—and how behind every act of violence, there’s a story waiting to be told.
Brutally honest, deeply unsettling, and impossible to forget, Pain Bleeds Crime is a journey into the darkest parts of humanity.
"Mad, bad, or sad—when we listen to the story, we see the person."
"A chilling exploration of the trauma and pain behind the most heinous crimes."
243 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 30, 2025
3 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2025
This book explores a series of real, often brutal crimes, through the eyes of a forensic psychologist working with convicted criminals in prison. Searching and uncovering the background of these people the author uncovers through her theraputic sessions with them, the triggers for her client's crimes which inveriably turn our to be traumatic events they experienced in childhood. The book provides a deeper psychological understanding of what provokes offenders to commit horrific crimes and why the current systems of institutional correction often lacks fundamental strategies to achieve true causal understanding, treatment and effective rehabilitation. This is a must read for professionals dealing with serious offenders as well as anyone interested in true crime.
January 10, 2026
A truely heartbreaking account of a brave and compassionate therapist who highlights the origin of criminality and the ineffectual solutions for perpetrators in an antiquated prison system. The system does little to heal these broken people only adding to the pain, anguish and suffering they experienced in childhood.Hopefully thanks to Pamela’s work in the forensic psychology field and this book, change may come sooner.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews