HomeBiography, The Whole Story...
Life as she knew it ended in 2001 when she survived the same rare heart condition that killed actor John Ritter, but was left with disabilities that the people closest to her would never acknowledge. The only person who had ever offered any nurturing care to her all her life was her grandmother when she was a child, but her parents ignored all illnesses and injuries which was ironic considering they both worked in healthcare, mom was even a nurse. So, of course, Evening-Marie married a man who treated her the same way it registered as right; it was all she knew. Long after her husband was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, Evening-Marie would study psychology and realized that she had been surrounded by and loved people who would not ever be able to love her in return. Once she understood personality disorders she saw the predictability of what had happened, but by then the damage was done, and the damage was significant.
After she drove herself to the hospital in the midst of a heart attack, just as she had done in the throes of labor a few years earlier, Evening-Marie feared that she wouldn't have much in the way of support when she got home, but she couldn't have predicted that the people closest to her would actually try to destroy her because she needed them and they saw her as a burden. The truth is that what happened to her was only possible because her denial about the people she loved was thick, but there was no one reinforcing reality. Both of her parents and her husband had personality disorders so whenever she had tried to confide in anyone inside of the system about the way she was treated they turned it around and blamed her, and because most people are loved by their parents no one ever validated her sense that she was not loved by hers. She believed that the neglect and abuse was love because that is what everyone told her all of her life. Her rock bottom was four years to the day later on April 12, 2005, and by then, Evening-Marie had lost everything and everyone that she cared about, and she didn’t understand what had happened or why. She thought about her decision to come back to Washington, her choice in husbands, her beliefs about what she was doing with her life, and she remembered how sure she once was that she had it right. The life she had five years earlier was all according to a plan and she was so committed to it that she couldn't see that it had started to destroy her. She was unhappy, and was being treated for depression and anxiety for years, she knew the people closest to her didn't care about her and she didn't feel safe, and eventually she accepted that she was the crazy one, the problem and that if only she would fix herself they could all be happy, and she realized this is the way it had gone all of her life. Finally, the veneer started to crack. That day in 2005, was when she first heard herself say the three words that were the key to her freedom, "I was wrong." From that moment forward who she was did not matter to her nearly as much as who she would become.
Evening-Marie Ransom describes her life so far as three completely dissimilar lives, and only parts of the woman in those lives carried forward into the next. First is the life that was planned, and that life went from childhood all the way until she was a mother herself. This woman had a back-story that was drilled into her head. The story was that her parents were happily married high school sweet hearts and their family was perfect. Truth was her parents were narcissists and therefore hated having to think of anyone else’s needs but their own. When Evening-Marie came back home and started to recover repressed memories her parents saw her as a threat, but she stuffed them back down for another ten years until it all took a toll on her physically resulting in a near fatal heart attack at barely thirty years old. She learned much later that her husband had suggested that drugs caused the heart attack, which was the excuse they all must have used not to take care of her. It wasn't true but no one ever asked. People wanted to know how this could happen, and so he found a willing audience ready to believe a story that kept them safe, their world unchanged. When no one did anything to help take care of her she blamed herself for not asking. Of course, later she'd realize that it was reasonable not to think she would have to ask for help upon being discharged from the ICU, but her denial was the only alternative she felt she had because the truth was unbearable. Problem was, denying it didn't make it any less true.
She was surrounded by people who could not love her and it got so bizarre that outsiders were noticing what she couldn’t. One day, waiting to go into court to keep her parents from taking her home, Evening-Marie’s lawyer asked her why her parents hated her. She felt like she’d been slapped in the face. She wondered how many times over the years someone had said something like that and she had made excuses, dismissed it, but not this time. This time she just said, "I don’t know". After nearly dying, her husband and family abandon her, steal her assets, forge her signature, lie about her in court, call her friends and do what they can to isolate her, refuse to help her, never once ask her what she needs. This four year period was like a train wreck. The things she experienced didn’t seem real, but they were. This was the life of a vulnerable woman who just could not understand or believe what was happening to her until it was undeniable and too late.
In 2005 Evening–Marie Ransom’s third life began by living in reality. This period was all about enormous growth. She went back to school, built a business, had surgeries to fix her injures, bought a home, and won back custody of her kids. She takes readers through the painful process of letting go of out dated and false beliefs which are often cherished, even when very destructive and limiting. She describes the realizations that would wash over her especially as she began to study psychology and came to learn about personality disorders. She and many others have successfully followed the steps Evening-Marie discovered to fully reinvented lives, recovered joy and renewed hope in life and love.
