A Lifelong Pursuit of Understanding
Trauma, Science, and Personal Transformation
In 1991, I left Germany for California, and with that move, my life shifted in a way I had never experienced before. I was already long divorced, and my son—then 22—chose to remain in Germany. For the first time, I felt something unfamiliar but unmistakable: agency. Not the fragile illusion of choice constrained by fear, but a genuine sense of authorship over my own life.
From a biological perspective, this mattered. Chronic trauma narrows behavioral repertoires; safety expands them. Once removed from a constant field of threat—social, familial, cultural—the nervous system can finally redirect energy from vigilance toward exploration. I began, slowly, to experience intrinsic self-worth rather than worth measured by usefulness.
That same year, I met a man with whom I felt an immediate and enduring sense of safety. I did what trauma survivors often do: I observed. Carefully. Over time, it became clear that he showed no signs of narcissism, no psychopathic traits, no covert hunger for control. When he proposed—three times—I eventually said yes. In July 1992, I chose partnership not as survival, but as consent.
By the end of 1993, I had filled stacks of handwritten pages documenting my childhood. What began as personal reckoning evolved into scientific curiosity. In 1994, I began investigating the long-term physiological and neurological consequences of childhood abuse—at a time when the topic remained largely invisible in mainstream medicine. Trauma was still treated as metaphor rather than mechanism.
Driven by urgency, I wrote to President Bill Clinton, urging federal support for research into childhood trauma. To my surprise, he responded positively, and concrete steps followed. Within a few years, the field began to shift. Large-scale studies emerged—what we now recognize most prominently in the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research—demonstrating that early trauma alters stress physiology, immune function, cardiovascular health, and lifespan itself.
The body, it turns out, keeps score.
In 1998, I fulfilled a dream that had been denied to me in postwar Germany. As a child, academic paths were closed off. I was told, bluntly, “The country needs workers, not scholars,” and forced into a tailoring apprenticeship chosen for me. Years later, living in Sacramento, I enrolled in college. I earned a 4.0 GPA in Journalism and Writing for Publication at California State University, Sacramento, and pursued additional studies in psychology, computer science, and ESL. Eventually, logistical realities—distance, finances—forced me to stop. But something crucial had already happened: the question “Am I capable?” had been answered.
I began working as a content creator, translating complex medical and scientific research into accessible language—work that mirrored my own learning process. Precision mattered. Ethics mattered. Clarity mattered. When science is distorted, people suffer.
In 2004, my health collapsed. I contracted Clostridioides difficile from contaminated well water—a diagnosis later confirmed by testing. The illness forced a permanent move, and in 2005 my husband and I relocated to New Mexico. Shortly thereafter, he suffered a stroke. I became his full-time caregiver.
From a stress-biology standpoint, this was familiar territory. Caregiving under chronic threat reactivates the same neural circuits as early trauma: sustained activation of the HPA axis, cortisol dysregulation, immune compromise. College became impossible. Instead, I turned to open-access science—most notably Dr. Kevin Ahern’s biochemistry lectures from Oregon State University. His encouragement eventually led me to genetic testing through 23andMe, which deepened my fascination with the interface between genes, environment, and behavior.
In 2010, I discovered Robert Sapolsky’s Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology. For the first time, I encountered a framework that did not reduce human behavior to either moral failure or genetic destiny. Stress, development, culture, hormones, and time all mattered—layered, recursive, inseparable. Later, Behave and Determined would further anchor what I had sensed intuitively for decades: biology explains behavior, but it does not excuse cruelty.
A turning point came with James Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside. His self-analysis—combining brain imaging, genetics, and family history—offered a model for understanding how traits cluster without becoming fate. Through this lens, long-standing patterns in my own family came into focus. My mother’s behavior aligned with narcissistic personality traits; my father matched the profile of a primary, or Type 1, psychopath.
This was not revelation as blame. It was revelation as clarity.
My medical history reinforced my scientific curiosity. I had undergone nine major surgeries—including treatment for Chiari malformation and spinal disease—despite inherited bleeding disorders (von Willebrand disease and Factor V Leiden). In 2016, spinal surgery led to catastrophic sepsis from contaminated hardware, followed by prolonged infections requiring IV antibiotics. Recovery was slow, nonlinear, and neurologically costly.
After my husband’s death in 2013, I focused increasingly on genetics and epigenetics, particularly the MAOA gene and trauma-associated DNA methylation. The evidence was clear: severe early stress leaves molecular marks that alter emotion regulation, impulse control, and vulnerability to illness across a lifetime.
In 2019, at age 70, I returned to Germany to be closer to my son, believing I had resolved my past.
I was wrong.
The COVID-19 pandemic, infection, vaccination injury consistent with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, and subsequent diagnoses—thrombosis, lupus, antiphospholipid syndrome, rare forms of VWD—collapsed that illusion. Once again, I had to advocate for my own care.
What struck me most was not just medical failure, but cultural continuity. The same dismissiveness. The same moral rigidity. The same reflexive avoidance of uncomfortable facts. Scientific evidence was often met not with inquiry, but with minimization or hostility.
I could not help but ask whether Konrad Lorenz’s imprint still lingered—not merely his work on bonding, but his ideological commitments. In 1940, Lorenz explicitly aligned applied biology with Nazi racial doctrine, arguing that “biologically inferior” people should not reproduce. That mindset—hierarchical, moralized, conformity-driven—did not vanish with the Reich. It merely went underground.
Imprinting, in this sense, is not just about geese. It is about how societies teach obedience, suppress dissent, and reproduce trauma across generations.
And so this story—my story—is not merely personal. It is biological, cultural, and historical. It is about how nervous systems adapt to threat, how myths and ideologies colonize identity, and how understanding—real understanding—can interrupt inheritance.
Throughout it all, my commitment has remained unchanged: to learn, to question, and to insist that truth—scientific, psychological, historical—is not negotiable.
Step away from what holds you back,
and move toward a new place to land.
Sometimes, the farther you are from home,
the closer you come to yourself.
Both organisation formed by Sieglinde W. Alexander while living in the USA:
AAaCWorld – Adults Abused as Children Worldwide in 1994
and
EMaK – Erwachsene Misshandelt als Kinder formed 2000 are closed in 2016.
The website has been renamed and is now accessible.
https://misshandeltenachkriegskinder.com/
sieglindewalexander.com was established by Sieglinde W. Alexander, USA in 2000 to introduce “Haunting Shadows from the Past”, Library of Congress Card Number: LCN 00-192742, ISBN: 0-9703195-0-9 and all other writings by Sieglinde W. Alexander.