Emerging from the Shadows: Healing After a Lifetime of Trauma and Rewriting My Story
By Sieglinde W Alexander
Author of Haunting Shadows from the Past
I am 76 years old. I’ve spent most of my life carrying the weight of severe childhood abuse, chronic depression, and the belief that I was somehow responsible for everyone else’s happiness. I have endured years of therapy, medical treatment, and trauma work—including EMDR. Yet, in many ways, I remained emotionally frozen, bound by fear that lived deep inside me, often without a clear source.
When my husband died in 2013, after 21 years of marriage, it marked the beginning of something I hadn’t anticipated: freedom. The love, support, freedom and respect he gave me during our years together became the foundation for the person I allow myself to be today. His presence made space for my becoming—and his absence, in a strange way, gave me permission to continue it.
For the first time in my life, I was no longer responsible for another person’s emotional needs. I was alone—but not lonely. I found space to breathe, to feel, and to reflect. I realized I had never truly known myself. Now, for the first time, I was curious about who I might become—if I stopped surviving and started living.
A Life Shaped by Trauma
My early life was marked by terrifying and disorienting abuse. These experiences imprinted themselves in my body and brain in ways I didn’t understand for most of my life.
Even after years of treatment, flashbacks—not just memories but full-body responses—would pull me back into that helpless state of childhood. I couldn’t simply think or talk my way out of them.
I’ve since learned this isn’t a moral failing or emotional weakness. It’s neuroscience.
The part of the brain responsible for detecting danger—the amygdala—becomes hyper-reactive in survivors of early trauma. It’s the brain’s alarm system. And in trauma survivors, it often goes off without warning, triggered by smells, sounds, or subtle cues that resemble past danger.
The amygdala doesn’t recognize time. It responds as if the trauma is happening right now. That’s why flashbacks feel so real. That’s why fear lingers even when life is finally safe. Understanding this changed everything for me. I was not broken. My brain had simply been trying to protect me for decades.
Therapy Helped Me Survive. Writing Helped Me Reclaim Myself.
Though therapy gave me language for my pain, it didn’t always reach the deepest parts of me—the preverbal, frozen places that held onto fear like oxygen. What finally brought those parts forward was writing.
Twenty five years ago, I published my book, Haunting Shadows from the Past. It was my way of putting into words what had long been unspeakable. I told the truth about what happened to me. I told the truth about how it shaped me. And for the first time, I stopped feeling ashamed of simply surviving.
But now, with deeper understanding—especially about the brain, trauma, and healing—I’ve decided to rewrite the book.
This new version will include the science behind what I experienced for so long: how trauma reshapes the nervous system, how the amygdala stores fear, and how even decades later, the body can remain trapped in the past. I want readers to know that if they’re still suffering, it’s not because they failed to heal. It’s because trauma is complex—and so is recovery.
Letting Go of Emotional Responsibility
Another lasting impact of my trauma was a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for others. I spent most of my life believing it was my job to keep people happy, safe, and emotionally stable.
This, too, is common among trauma survivors—especially those who learned early on that love and safety had to be earned through compliance and caretaking. I became hyper-attuned to others’ moods. I sacrificed my own needs in the name of peace. And for many years, I didn’t even question it.
Now, in this later stage of life, I finally can.
I no longer feel obligated to manage the emotions of those around me. I no longer say “yes” when my body says “no.” I no longer believe that my worth is measured by how much I give away.
And what I’ve found in this shift is not emptiness, but relief. I can care without carrying. I can love without losing myself.
What Healing Looks Like in My Seventies
Healing at 76 doesn’t mean I’m free of flashbacks. It doesn’t mean the fear is gone. It means I understand it now. I can talk to it. I can soothe it. I can say to myself, That was then. This is now.
Healing, for me, means:
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Embracing solitude as a gift, not a punishment
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Letting go of the pressure to “get over” the past
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Learning how the brain works, and using that knowledge to be kinder to myself
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Creating a life that is mine—unfiltered, unburdened, and unapologetic
I am not the same woman I was even a decade ago. I am unlearning the pattern imprinted in childhood. Alexithymia: The Early Learning of Emotional Denial
A Message to Fellow Survivors
If you carry trauma into your later years, if you feel stuck or unfinished, if you still experience fear that makes no sense to the people around you—please hear this:
You are not too old to heal. You are not broken.
Trauma changes us, but it does not erase us. There is always time to discover who we are beneath what we had to survive.
I’m rewriting my book, not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the narrative—and to include the truths I’ve only recently come to understand about trauma, the brain, and the quiet power of survival. My hope is that it will speak to others who, like me, are still becoming—still healing—even now.
Because it’s never too late to come out from the shadows.