Prejudice, intolerance and stigma are endemic in human interactions, and yet they can be relatively invisible. These “structural traumas” are often obscured by social convention such that environmental difficulties are experienced as internal deficits. Failing to recognize the ways patriarchy imposes itself can increase the divide between the lived experiences of reason and feeling and between conscious and unconscious ways of knowing. When basic human functions become gendered, disrespect for the more primary ways of knowing associated with feminine sensibilities become internalized. This internalized disrespect threatens to leave us disconnected from sensory aspects of awareness, including the affective signals that are crucial to social development. The simultaneous empowerment and denial of the power of structural trauma can exacerbate personal trauma. Embodying experience and bringing it into language helps patients, such as the one presented here in a clinical vignette, to demarcate both the structural and personal aspects of trauma.