Restorative justice is a centuries-old approach that seeks to empower people to address the harms, needs and obligations that arise when a crime has been committed by bringing together victims, offenders and members of their respective communities. The face-to-face open dialogue process is focused on personal accountability and reparations; it is achieved when victims and offenders share deeply personal and painful life experiences with the least likely person in the world — each other. Restorative justice requires its participants to lay bare feelings of self-loathing, suffering, rage, loneliness, rejection that they have hidden from the world and often from themselves. They must face reckonings they have long resisted.