All my life, I dreamed of living in a warm climate. I was about ten years old when I told my brother Nigg, “One day I’ll move to a country where it’s always warm.” He laughed and, in his usual cruel, sarcastic way, replied, “A stupid girl like you goes nowhere.”
That dream came true in 1991 when I moved to California. Almost immediately, Nigg contacted me. He predicted I wouldn’t last and insisted I would soon crawl back to Germany. Even as adults—12,000 miles apart—I felt the sting of his old rage. I realized then that he had become a replica of our psychopathic parents. It was the same contempt I had endured as a child, now merely cloaked in adult language. When his attempts to intimidate me failed, he accused me of being the reason our family had never worked. Once again, I was thrust back into shame and blame I thought I had long escaped.
Flashbacks of childhood flooded in. I remembered being both his emotional punching bag and a substitute for the mother he resented. By the age of nine, Nigg had already mastered cruelty and control. From our parents, he had learned how to inflict pain, assert dominance, and humiliate the vulnerable. His greatest pleasure was laughing when others were afraid or in pain.
That same dynamic—humiliation and emotional violence—followed me across continents, from Germany to California. Yet I had first begun to uncover these buried feelings years earlier, in 1986, during a quiet and unexpected moment of revelation.
I was lying nude on a beach in Italy, seeking relief from severe psoriasis that had spread across my body. The sun felt warm and comforting against my chronically cold skin, and for the first time, I did not hate my body. Wrapped in that rare sense of peace, I drifted into sleep. What followed was not an ordinary dream. I awoke, yet the dream continued—vivid and insistent, as though it were trying to recover something I had forgotten.
Only years later did I understand that this was a kind of daydream, triggered by the Mediterranean warmth—a return to a memory of safety and heat I had known only briefly, long ago.
My grandmother Kunzmann, who lived next door to us, once told me that the day I was born was a bitterly cold but sunny Sunday morning. Other family members later revealed a disturbing pattern: my mother became “conveniently” pregnant whenever my father threatened to leave—a cycle that resulted in six children. I began to understand that I had been conceived as part of that manipulation. The chain my mother placed around my father’s neck became my own: an infancy and childhood without love.
At the time of that dreamlike experience on the Italian beach, I had not yet connected it to my birth. That insight came in 1993 while I was finishing my manuscript, Haunting Shadows from the Past. I suddenly remembered a conversation with my mother from 1972. With a grin, she had said, “You were ten days late. It took seventy hours to give birth to you because you didn’t want to be born. The labor was unbearable—I sweated terribly and finally asked the midwife to open the window.” Laughing, she continued, “You were born into the fresh air of a freezing Sunday morning. Nine pounds. A long, hard birth. The midwife and Dr. Fuchs were getting impatient. I think the midwife even gave you an extra slap for taking so long and told you it was about time you came out.”
That image stayed with me. It became one of many “video-tape memories,” replayed and reactivated by emotional triggers throughout my life.
At sixteen, while confined to four weeks of solitary isolation in a Lutheran institution for girls near Weiher and Hersbruck, Germany, I again experienced a faint version of that same birth memory. By the third week, I was so depressed that suicide felt like the only escape. During one of those darkest moments, the fetal memory returned—unclear but persistent. I still couldn’t connect it to my adult behavior, but its presence was undeniable.
Years later, while driving to see my editor in Grass Valley, the full birth scene returned once more, like a waking dream. I was completely alert behind the wheel, yet fully immersed in the memory. I could feel the icy room, see the open window, and suddenly understood why I had always felt physically cold.
That ancient knowledge was still alive within me: I had wanted to live, even if that meant surviving without love or warmth. I finally understood why I bundled up at the first hint of cold, why my body temperature was consistently below normal—a parasympathetic response to a traumatic birth. My heart rate, too, rarely rose, even under extreme stress. My body had lived its entire life in survival mode.
As the scattered pieces of my history finally came together, something broke open. A deep physical pain began in my foot and traveled slowly upward through my body. It ended in a cathartic eruption of sound as I pulled over on Highway 49 North. Alone in the car, I screamed—again and again—until the pain released its grip.
At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was dissociating or drifting into an unusually vivid daydream. It wasn’t until 1998, when I read J. Konrad Stettbacher’s Wenn Leiden einen Sinn haben soll (Making Sense of Suffering), that I discovered there was a name for this experience: primal therapy.
All those years, I had been reliving early trauma through my body and emotions—long before I understood what it was, or why it had never let me go.