Other forms: torturedly
Anything that's tortured involves extreme difficulty, distress, or suffering, like a tragic character's tortured past.
To emphasize how harrowing and painful it was, a historian might talk about the tortured history of slavery in the U.S. And if someone has a tortured expression on their face, she's expressing some kind of discomfort (either physical or psychological). Tortured comes from torture, originally "contortion," from the Late Latin tortura, "a twisting or writhing."