I am watching the Monday March 15, 2010 episode of ABC’s General Hospital. I have just watched the slow motion scenes of Kiefer physically assaulting Kristina Corinthos Davis and then the subsequent scenes where she lies on the ground after the abuse and her abuser blames her.
I know those cries. I know the perversion and brainwashing of abusers. And I know the humiliation.
In this case, her abuser cries:
“Look at what you made me do!”
And…
“Why do you always make me so mad?”
after he abuses HER.
It is a very hard thing not only to be have been abused, but to have been abused by people who are supposed to love you. The fact that they are your family somehow keeps you holding on long beyond when you should. It certainly did for me. If I could go back in time, I would give up my abusers a long time ago…knowing what I know now. I actually gave one of them up four years ago next month (April 23, 2006), but the other I made excuses for, for too long, because his abuse was less frequent. I have only “very” recently stopped doing that (making any excuses for his abuse). You don’t know what you need to know in order to give up family abusers…the TRUTH…because when someone who is supposed to love you hits you and convinces you deserved it, you have been in fact brainwashed in some form. The more distance you can get from the abuse, the more the truth starts to appear. That is what is slowly happening to me.
The first time I started to see “any” truth, was after one instance when I was physically abused for spraying some air freshener in my abusers’ bathroom and ended up staying at the mother of of a friend’s house for at least a week…it might have been two weeks. Instead of getting up the morning after the abuse and being treating as though “I” had done something wrong, as Kristina was, I was not abused a second time in that way, on that occasion. That gave me some distance to think and to “start” to see things for what they truly were.
In that particular abuse instance, I arrived home and walked through the front door and was confronted by one of my two abusers who came at me in a physically intimidating manner and screamed “Did you spray something in our bathroom?”. It is hard to explain to anyone who has not been hit how you know you are about to be hit. After decades of that fear, I call it ‘reading the tea leaves’. What do tea leaves have to do with being abused? Nothing. It is just what I call it…the instantaneous reading a victim of physical abuse does, of their abusers’ body language. When you are abused you have eyes on every part of your body.
I responded that I had sprayed some air freshener in their bathroom earlier.
My female abuser responded “the floor was sticky and I blamed your [male abuser]”. Moments later I was escaping being hit and tried to lock myself in a nearby bathroom. I was not fast enough. My female abuser slammed the bathroom door against my body, so I was pinned behind it and ordered my male abuser to “hold [me]there”. He responded with seething anger: “Don’t you worry. I will.”. I can still hear in my head right now, exactly how he sounded when he said that. After that my body was slammed with the door more times than I can count and my male abuser screamed if I ever did that again that “[he] would put me through a wall” and that “[he] would kill me”.
When they were eventually done and left, I locked the door and sat numb on the bathroom floor trying not to cry because I knew if I cried I would be hit again.
I eventually left the bathroom and slowly made my way up the staircase, that was located between the bathroom and the front door. When I reached the third step from the top, my female abuser appeared and screamed, “how dare you spray anything in our bathroom”. I prayed, not religiously, that I could get into my room without anything else starting so I walked really slowly by her, trying not to antagonize her in any way. I made it safely into my bedroom and locked the door, both locks.
At the end of the March 15, 2010 episode when Kristina is questioned in front of her parents and a family friend police officer and asked who abused her, she lies. She protects her abusive boyfriend and says it was someone else. I have never lied about my abusers. I just didn’t tell anyone for most of my life. The more you start to see the truth, the more you realize that protecting them was a mistake.
What I know for sure is…that if someone watched me watching this episode…they would see through my reaction to it and they would KNOW.
Elina Grace Edwin
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