Eva’s mother becomes ill when the actress is eight years old. “The moment we heard that was heartbreaking,” says Eva Dragonfly. “At the same time, the issues of the day also returned, although as a family we also lived from treatment to treatment.” Eva mightn’t really be a child at that time. “I started doing housework when my mother was still alive, the laundry became ‘my thing’. (…) When she died, I automatically became the ‘lady of the house’. It was a matter of survival, and I quickly became independent. .”
The actress only went to therapy years later to cope with the death of her mother. She is ‘called to task’ during her theater training. “If you don’t go to therapy, you can’t stay here,” she is told. “At that time, I struggled with any form of vulnerability. I would tune out or just not come to class.” She would like to complete the training and enters the therapy process with some skepticism.
“I think I’ve done everything, from EMDR to family constellations. If you take out the bingo card, I can fill it in completely,” she says regarding her therapies. “For me it might not be otherwise. You can only distract or numb yourself to a certain extent, but the sadness does not go away and there comes a time when you are confronted with the lamp.” Therapy gives Eva tools to deal with the loss.
Recently someone close to her died. “I’ll go once more, I thought. Life doesn’t exist without death and maybe it has extra value because of it. But I think grief is really something terrible.”
Eva is now the mother of daughter Ida. “When I started wondering whether I wanted to become a mother myself, I went back to therapy.” She thought she didn’t want children. “But strangely enough, the arrival of my daughter had a very healing effect. Like an existential shift, in which my place in the hierarchy literally shifted. Of course, raising children is sometimes tough, but I would never have wanted to miss this.”
Eva can be seen weekly in the comedy drama series from March 11 Soil on NPO 3. In it she plays Cat who, due to a past loss, now struggles with intimacy and relationships that keep failing. Eva won a Golden Calf for the series.
