Through The Wound

 

Through the Wound: A Voice from the Underside of Covert Violence

When vulnerability becomes a mask for harm, the real wound, the original, raw one, is never given the space to breathe, let alone heal. And when we reward that performance of pain instead of looking beneath it, what we’re endorsing isn’t recovery. It’s rot.

This is a difficult truth to name, harder still to live around. Because what I’m speaking to here isn’t overt brutality. It’s the kind of harm that lives in silence and thrives in applause. The kind that wears a smile. The kind that cries “help” while holding a knife. This is the hidden cost of weaponised victimhood: it becomes a contagion. One wound births more. A legacy of fracture.

We can’t talk about healing if we don’t name the foundation. If the ground we’re standing on has been soaked in distortion, if the story we’re operating from is itself built from injury twisted into strategy; then everything that grows from it will be a continuation of that harm. Harm begets harm. Wounds do not close when they’re used as leverage.

It gets worse when the story, the context, is kept controlled. Context is everything here. The moment a narrative becomes a shield, a smokescreen, a tactic, it starts to do the work of the weapon. When we interpret events only through the lens offered to us by the person benefiting from that distortion, we become agents of it. Unwitting or not, we grow its reach. We amplify its damage.

Let’s be honest: that’s how communities get split, families unravel, and people walk away from each other stunned, unsure what just happened. And often, they blame themselves. That’s part of the point.

There is a snake in the garden, and yes, sometimes the only path forward is to sever it at the head. Not in vengeance, but in clarity. Not in cruelty, but because sometimes the continuation of pain is so embedded in the system that only radical honesty can stop it. And sometimes the “snake” isn’t a person. Sometimes it’s a pattern. Sometimes it’s an intergenerational script. But whatever it is, you can’t just be polite to it and hope it goes away.

Children, when caught in the middle of these dynamics, are often turned into weapons without ever knowing what’s been done to them. That’s part of the cruelty of it. We think of children as innocent, and they are but innocence doesn’t make them harmless. Especially when they’ve been shaped, subtly or aggressively, to channel one person’s pain onto another. To become the vessel through which unfinished business gets projected.

What happens when that child becomes an adult? The same energy, rage, manipulation, entitlement, may now come with autonomy. And we’re left wondering why another cycle has begun, this time with even more reach and devastation.

Here’s the core of it: to use victimhood as a weapon is to construct a tool that harms others while appearing to be the harmed one. It demands loyalty, demands belief, and rejects accountability. It feeds itself on sympathy, on silence, on protection at all costs. And the damage is targeted; it isn’t random. It goes where it hurts most. Like a heat-seeking missile. But all the while it plays the part of the trembling, injured soul.

This is why it’s so dangerous. Because it confuses those around it. Because it gains power through people’s good intentions. Because those who try to call it out are painted as aggressors, monsters, betrayers.

And still it needs to be named.

A baby shark may be small. It may be “cute.” But it’s still built to bite. And when it grows up, when its teeth are sharper and its jaw stronger, the damage multiplies. That’s not a metaphor about children. It’s a metaphor about patterns of abuse we refuse to see because they come in palatable, socially acceptable packages.

So what can be done?

We start with this: truth must be uncensored. The ability to speak openly, to challenge sacred narratives, to say, “I am being harmed by someone claiming to be hurt,” is essential. Not because every accusation is valid, but because silence protects predators. Especially the kind dressed in victimhood.

The community matters. The group must be protected. The health of a whole society cannot depend on feeding one person’s unprocessed pain while denying reality to everyone else. If a person, a pattern, or a belief is costing others their peace, safety, or truth, then that cost must be accounted for. We cannot afford to excuse harm simply because it arrives in familiar packaging.

Let me leave you with an image. A child, angry, furious, crushes the head of another while screaming, “I’m the victim!” And those around rush to shield the child. They protect them. They praise their courage. And they join the attack. They call the one being crushed “abuser,” “threat,” “problem.”

That’s what covert violence can look like. And it happens. More than we want to admit.

And yet the solution isn’t retaliation. It’s recognition. Naming what’s happening, changing the context, challenging the script; these are the beginnings of healing. They are how we stop the weapon from doing more damage. They are how we finally start to see the wound.

Because real healing is possible. But only if we stop protecting the performance and start listening for the truth beneath the noise.

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Through The Wound is a partner essay to “Weaponised Vulnerability: A Psychological and Sociological Analysis of Covert Violence and Its Impact on Individuals and Communities.” This companion piece speaks from the underside. Less from theory, more from lived observation. Less from the books, more from the bruises culture doesn’t like us to talk about.