Death of Eve

Eve from Illinois runs a blog about an abusive family that functioned on lies, deceit and manipulation. She is not a counselor or psychologist, everything she writes about is from her own personal experiences. We have conducted an interview with her.

When did you start writing down your own personal experiences?

I kept a diary as a child, but once my mother found it she destroyed it. I began to keep a journal in my twenties but I was in too much emotional pain and trying to heal to consider sharing my story. When I was in my thirties, I began thinking about writing a book but then I suffered a traumatic event and suffered PTSD. It was about five years ago that I began writing more seriously with the thought of writing a book one day.

Do you read your writings over again?

Yes. I always wait a week or two and go back to read what I’ve written to see if sounds good or needs a rewrite.

If yes, whenever you re-read your posts, do you ever feel the hurt all over again?

I don’t feel the pain anymore, but sometimes I do get sad thinking about how I was denied living a normal childhood.

How do you overcome PTSD with sheer determination?

I believe it starts with accepting that you have a problem and accepting that PTSD is a mental illness. It can be very difficult to accept having a mental illness, but once you accept this truth, you have to be dedicated to researching how to overcome PTSD with mental exercises, breathing, diet and facing your fears.

What should someone do if he/she would like to find inner peace?

It’s my belief from my own experience, that in order to overcome being abused and finding peace in our hearts and minds it is important to accept that we have been damaged emotionally and mentally and how we react to life is most likely not normal. Once we can accept that we have been damaged by our abusers, we can begin our healing by learning healthy and normal behaviors. It’s also important to surround ourselves with positive people we can learn from and who will help us. We find inner peace when we have unlearned the behavior our abusers taught us and learn to live a healthy and positive life. We find inner peace knowing we survived and our abusers lost in their mission to destroy us mentally and emotionally.

On surviving mental and emotional abuse, what kind of strengths should one cultivate?

What gave me strength was the conviction to not let my abusers win. I knew the only way I could make them lose was to reinvent myself and reverse all the damage they had done to my mind and live a happy life as a mentally and emotionally healthy individual. Whenever I felt like giving up, I would think of my abusers and imagined them laughing knowing I had failed in life. The image in my mind of my abusers celebrating my failure in life pushed me to keep going in my healing process. For me the No. 1 strength to surviving and healing is a determination to win.