By Sieglinde W Alexander
Author of Haunting Shadows from the Past

Reclaiming Myself: Trauma, Survival, and the Biology of Becoming

In the mid-1970s, I first encountered the work of Konrad Lorenz—the ethologist famous for greylag geese who, upon hatching, decided that the first moving object they saw was Mother. Lorenz called this imprinting: a brief, critical developmental window during which attachment forms rapidly and, for all practical purposes, permanently. From an evolutionary perspective, it was elegant. Attach quickly, stay close, survive.

For decades, this idea shaped how scientists thought about bonding in animals and humans alike. But Lorenz’s version of imprinting was narrow. It emphasized attachment formed through proximity and nurture, stripped of social context, history, and—most conspicuously—harm. His worldview, shaped during the era of the Third Reich, leaned heavily toward biological determinism. What it largely ignored was what happens when the early environment is not protective or safe—when the nervous system is trained not for bonding, but for threat.

What if the most enduring imprint is not love, but fear?

Long before neuroscience offered a framework for answering that question, my own body already had. Trauma, neglect, and coercion imprint just as efficiently as care—often more so. The brain is biased toward remembering danger. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. A missed threat can be fatal; a missed moment of comfort rarely is. Natural selection votes accordingly.

These imprints do not live only in memory. They reshape the brain’s stress-response systems, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis—the HPA axis—the body’s central command loop for dealing with threat. When danger is detected, the hypothalamus signals the pituitary, which signals the adrenal glands to release cortisol and adrenaline. In the short term, this is adaptive. Heart rate increases. Energy is mobilized. Attention narrows. The organism prepares to survive.

The problem arises when the system never shuts off.

Chronic early stress teaches the HPA axis that the world is perpetually unsafe. Cortisol levels remain elevated or, over time, become dysregulated—sometimes blunted, sometimes chaotic. Gene expression shifts accordingly, altering immune function, metabolism, mood regulation, and energy availability. This recalibration can begin very early—sometimes even before birth—when maternal stress hormones cross the placenta and quietly instruct the developing fetal brain about what kind of world it should expect.

It wasn’t until around 2010, while watching Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on stress and neurobiology, that these mechanisms began to clarify my own history. Biology, culture, and early experience weren’t competing explanations. They were parts of the same feedback loop, reinforcing one another across decades.

Lorenz emphasized bonding through care. My own early development, by contrast, was shaped by violence, emotional neglect, and relentless cultural and familial demands. From childhood onward, I lived with persistent muscle weakness—something no one took the time to explain or properly investigate.

In 1997, I was diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency, a condition in which the adrenal glands fail to produce adequate cortisol. Only much later, in 2022, a fuller neurological picture began to emerge with the diagnosis of Post-Polio Syndrome. Yet uncertainty remains. Contemporary medical research suggests that muscle weakness may also result from herpes simplex infection, which I contracted in kindergarten, leaving open questions about the origins and progression of my symptoms.

By then, judgment had long preceded understanding. Instead of compassion, I was met with accusation. Weakness was reframed as laziness. Pain became a moral failing. From a physiological standpoint, this was almost cruelly ironic: a child with a compromised stress-hormone system was placed in an environment that demanded constant endurance, emotional suppression, and vigilance. Isolation followed as predictably as night after day.

There was no private space—no protected psychological territory where a self could safely form. Availability, obedience, and invisibility were the only acceptable states. Religious symbolism, rigid social norms, and pervasive family dysfunction delivered a consistent message: my thoughts, boundaries, and autonomy were irrelevant. Belonging was not something one discovered; it was something one earned through compliance.

Under such conditions, autonomy does not develop.
It is overridden.
The self is not found; it is engineered by others.

What took root instead was an epigenetic imprint of trauma—an operating system organized around threat detection rather than curiosity or choice. Chronic activation of the HPA axis alters how genes involved in fear processing, inflammation, and energy regulation are expressed. Over time, the nervous system recalibrates its definition of “normal.” Life becomes governed not by freedom, but by fear. Fear of being slapped, humiliated, beaten with a rubber hose, or raped was ever-present. Resistance was dangerous. Compliance was survival. The brain learned this lesson quickly and efficiently.

I adapted by disappearing—emotionally, psychologically, sometimes physically. This is not metaphor. In mammals exposed to inescapable threat, withdrawal and minimization are well-documented survival strategies. Outward obedience masked an inner resistance that had no safe outlet. I didn’t know who I was. I only knew who I needed to be to reduce the likelihood of harm.

Occasionally, I resisted consciously. Confronting my mother’s manipulative narcissism and my father’s self-aggrandizing, physically abusive behavior came at a significant physiological cost. Stress systems do not enjoy rebellion. Cortisol spikes, sleep disruption, and emotional collapse often followed. But those moments mattered. They preserved something essential—a core self that refused to be entirely erased.

Eventually, instinct did what insight could not yet manage. I left Germany in search of freedom, distancing myself from the cultural expectations and familial dynamics that had shaped me. From a biological standpoint, this was still survival behavior: removing the organism from a toxic environment. It was not yet self-actualization. I knew how to survive. I did not yet know how to live.

At 76, I can trace the long arc of a life shaped by childhood abuse, chronic depression, and a nervous system trained to believe I was responsible for regulating other people’s emotional stability. I spent decades in therapy—trauma work, EMDR, Gestalt therapy, and medical treatment—searching for relief and coherence. For much of that time, I remained emotionally frozen, governed by patterns I could not yet name and fears that felt like facts.

Paradoxically, the most destabilizing experience came from Gestalt therapy. By forcing buried memories abruptly into consciousness, it overwhelmed a nervous system already shaped by chronic stress. Instead of integration and healing, those memories triggered a major depressive episode. The brain, after all, prefers the familiar—even when the familiar is harmful—and sudden exposure without sufficient safety can reinforce threat rather than resolve it.

Then, in 2013, my husband died after eight years of illness. Grief arrived, as expected. Liberation did too—unexpectedly. For 21 years, he had loved me with kindness, patience, and respect. With him, I experienced something biologically rare in my life: a sustained state of safety. Safety is not an emotion; it is a nervous-system condition. In his presence, my stress hormones finally had permission to stand down.

After his death, a startling realization surfaced. I was no longer responsible for anyone else’s emotional or physical needs. For the first time, I was truly alone—but not lonely. There was room to breathe.

To reflect. To ask a question that had been buried beneath decades of HPA-axis hypervigilance: Who am I, beyond my trauma?

The Science of Fear and Survival

Trauma is not merely psychological. It is hormonal, neurological, and systemic.

At the center of this story is the amygdala—the brain’s alarm system—and its intimate relationship with the HPA axis. The amygdala does not care about nuance or chronology. Its mandate is speed. In trauma survivors, it becomes exquisitely sensitive, triggering cortisol release at whispers of threat. To this system, danger is always now.

I have lived this biology. A smell, a tone of voice, a single word could initiate a full stress response—heart racing, muscles tightening, cortisol flooding my bloodstream as if the original danger had returned. These were not memories in the narrative sense. They were physiological reenactments.

This is not weakness. It is adaptation.

The traumatized brain is not broken; it is over-trained. It learned its lessons thoroughly, in an environment where those lessons were necessary. Understanding this reframed my life. What I had interpreted as personal failure was, in fact, a nervous system doing exactly what it had been shaped to do: keep me alive.

Healing, then, was not about erasing the past. It was about retraining the stress-response system—slowly, patiently, repeatedly—so that cortisol no longer had to be the dominant narrator of my life, and survival no longer required disappearance.

Reading and Writing as a Lifeline

Therapy helped me find language for my pain, but it was writing that allowed me to reach the preverbal places where trauma lived—experiences held in the body long before I had words to describe them. Twenty-five years ago, I published Haunting Shadows from the Past, an act of courage that enabled me to begin articulating what had once seemed unspeakable.

Now, with a deeper understanding of trauma and its impact on the brain, body, and nervous system, I am rewriting that book. This time, I will integrate insights from neuroscience to help readers understand why healing is neither linear nor quick—and why persistent suffering should never be mistaken for failure. Trauma can alter the way the nervous system perceives and responds to threat. Healing, therefore, requires more than willpower. It requires understanding, compassion, patience, and time.

Letting Go of Responsibility

One of the most enduring consequences of my trauma was a compulsive sense of responsibility for others. Like many survivors, I learned early—through the influence of my narcissistic mother and psychopathic father—that love had to be earned through self-sacrifice. I became hyper-attuned to the emotions and behavior of those around me, constantly scanning for danger, manipulation, rejection, or signs that my perception of reality was being undermined.

Since moving to the U.S., I have gradually begun to unlearn that pattern. I am learning not to prioritize the needs of others at the expense of my own and no longer to believe that my safety depends upon their approval.

I have begun to release a burden I carried for most of my life. I no longer say “yes” when my body is telling me “no.” I no longer confuse caretaking with love, nor do I automatically assume responsibility for another person’s emotional state. I now understand that I can care deeply about others without carrying their emotional weight.

This shift has not created emptiness. It has created freedom.

It has allowed me to connect with myself in a way that feels both authentic and sustaining. With that self-connection has come another realization—one that puzzled me for many years. I now recognize that I am, indeed, an introvert. I am drawn toward information, knowledge, reflection, and understanding rather than external rewards or stimulation.

I do not respond particularly well to loud mass gatherings driven by opinion and assumption, nor do I place much value on glorifying praise or the fleeting gratification of compliments. I find far greater satisfaction in quiet reflection, meaningful and sustained discovery, and the simple fulfillment of seeing my efforts bear fruit. What I once may have interpreted as withdrawal, I can now recognize as something quite different: an authentic preference for depth over noise, substance over approval, and understanding over attention.

What Healing Looks Like at 76

Healing at my age does not mean that I am free from flashbacks or fear. It means that I understand them differently. I can recognize when my nervous system is responding to a danger that belongs to the past rather than the present. I can soothe the alarm system that once seemed to dictate every response. Increasingly, I can remain present even when the past tries to pull me back into it.

That distinction is profound.

For the first time, I am not merely surviving. I am living. I am discovering who I am beneath the imprint of trauma—what belongs to my history and what belongs to me.

At seventy-six, I am learning that healing is not the erasure of the past. It is the gradual loosening of its authority over the present.

And that, at seventy-six, is a life reclaimed.

Each original chapter of Haunting Shadows from the Past will undergo comprehensive revision and expansion. Drawing on what I have learned in the twenty-five years since its publication, I will revisit my earlier experiences through a more informed understanding of trauma, neuroscience, the nervous system, and recovery. The story itself remains true. What has changed is my understanding of what happened to me—and, perhaps most importantly, my understanding of what it means to heal.

For the first time, I am not merely surviving—I am living. I am discovering who I am beneath the imprint of trauma.

And that, at 76, is a life reclaimed.

Each original chapter will undergo comprehensive revision and be further developed with additional content.