What Doesn’t Kill You…

We are familiar with the much clichéd saying, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”. Or the Joker version, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stranger”.

I can understand the reasoning behind the 2 sayings. Say, you’ve got multiple stab wounds, for some reason. The reason why the stabbed area might be stronger is because scar tissue usually is thicker than normal skin, albeit less flexible. And the reason why you will be stranger is because you will have multiple scar tissues, which will look different than your normal integumentary tissues.

But what neither saying addresses is the stage between the stabbing and the scar tissues fully formed and the wounds fully healed.

First of, you need to make sure that There is no major arteries getting nicked or severed, which means that the stabbee is going to bleed out and die. You need to have super glue handy to hopefully be able to plug up any artery that got nicked without depriving the limb of blood supply, causing it to die and go gangrenous.

Then, after you are sure no one is bleeding out or any limbs going necrotic, you have to contend with the possibility of infection. You have to clean the wound thoroughly, soak it in antiseptic, or just wash really thoroughly in saline, encouraging your own T-cells to fight whatever germs it can, and innoculate thé stabbee with all sorts of antiserum, booster shots (rabies, tetanus, etc), and antibiotics to make sure that you don’t go sepsis before any of these scar tissues can form.

Then, you have to figure out if there are any internal organs need repairing, if anything is damaged beyond repair that you will need to consider getting a transplant. Of course, if any of these is going on, you will have all the risks of major surgery attached.

After all those, you will still need to suture the sound of it is too big or deep, then bandage the whole lot. With this, you will have all sorts of puss, seeping yucky liquid, itchiness, scabbing, not washing the affected areas while they are healing, and severely reduced mobility.

The skin that will be formed over the wound at first will be thin and itchy. But you cannot itch it. It will have scab, which is hard and pokey. You can’t pick on those, since it might damage the fragile skin underneath.

If you successfully pass through all those, you will finally get some scar tissue protecting the damaged bits underneath. If you are one of those unlucky ones who got severely damaged internal organs requiring transplant, you’ll end up with immunosuppressant requirement all the rest of your life.

This is just like what happened to a relationship when trust is broken. You start with a deep wound. You take stock whether you are going into shock, whether you are going to bleed out, are all your major arteries intact, etc. This is something that you might need to do on your own, taking stock whether you can accept this and try to go to the next step of healing yourself, and the relationship.

Then, you go on to the infection prevention stage. You and your partner will need to sit down and tell each other everything. And it needs to be everything, nothing held back, nothing hidden, nothing left for “well, he/she/it will never find out anyways” kinda deal. You tell each other absolutely everything. Just like how if you have a single germ left in your wound it could mitosis out in no time into a colony, secrets are the same. It will mitosis out, and it will be an infection inside, which might lead to sepsis later.

After that, you figure out the why. Why is this betrayal happening, and how to fix it and prevent this from happening again in the future. Sometimes, you might need help with this, like a couples counselling, or therapy. You will need to do a LOT of talking and sharing, and figuring out. Just like repairing the internal organs that might have been damaged.

Beyond this, no one is meant to have privacy for a while, just like the absence of skin. You have to share everything with each other. Show tremendous amount of good will toward each other, and try to rebuild the trust. Accept that things happened, and that you’ve decided to salvage things. You need to work on that instead of keeping blaming the other person for the thing that happened. Stop picking the wound, show good will, be very very open, and try to heal. But just like your body is doing the healing and not you, these things will take its own time. You can’t force it to be faster than it needs to be. Sometimes this will take a few months, sometimes a few years. Just like how wound healing speed is different for each person. The speed of this will be the speed of the slowest person in the partnership.

After a while, one day, you will find that you can trust the partner a bit more than you could before. You could stop obsessing whether or not some more betrayal is going to happen, whether or not you need to keep your head on a swivel because the knife might come from any direction at all. You find out that you worry a bit less, and you can smile a bit more. The scar tissue would’ve formed a bit then to protect you and your relationship from the rest of the world. It would never be the same, of course, your relationship, just like how a scar tissue is not going to be the same as normal skin tissue. But hopefully, you got into the habit of sharing, and opening up, and talking to each other such that your relationship is stronger. There might still be triggers, or times when you worry, but hopefully, you can talk to your partner about those times, and you can get the reassurance you need that everything is alright (given that everything is actually alright, if something is wrong, your partner should tell you so that you can try to fix things, obviously).