Returning to the Poisoned Roots: A 75-Year Journey of Hope, Loss, and the Fight for Humanity

A work in progress:

Today, January 20th, 2025, marks a somber turning point—a day when a man known for manipulation and ruthless control ascends to the White House. His inability to respect others, his disregard for decency, and the chaos he sows promise to bring deep social destruction to the nation. Watching this unfold stirs a haunting sense of familiarity within me. It reminds me of the days of my childhood, where similar patterns of cruelty and control shaped my early years, and later, the oppressive forces I left behind before finding refuge in the United States at the age of 42. Today feels like a painful echo of a past I thought I had escaped—a reminder that history, no matter how far we run from it, has a way of finding us again.

Twenty-eight years of free expression, untouched by insult or animosity, came to an abrupt end when I returned to the land of my birth in march 2019. Even as I stood in the very town where my life began, the air felt just as poisoned as it did in my childhood. I was shocked to see that, despite the passing of two generations, the same anger, narcissism, and alcohol-fueled psychopathy had not diminished. If anything, they had multiplied, spreading like a sickness through the veins of the community. Entitlement and self-importance lingered in every corner—in grocery stores, in guesthouses, in the way people carried themselves. It was a sad confirmation of the very truths I had spent so many years trying to escape.

And now, at the age of 75, I find myself confronting the very thing I had avoided for so long. Not for my own sake, but because there is something bigger than me, something that I alone cannot fix, but something I still dare to hope might one day change. A return to humanity—that is my hope. A return to a sense of decency, to a world where others, too, might see the need for something better, something kinder.

I claim nothing, for nothing was given to me—save for those brief, tender years of my early childhood, when my grandmother’s kindness shielded me from the harshness of the world. But apart from that, there was no inheritance of love, no enduring gift to carry me forward. Not even in my own child did I find solace. He, too, has been burdened by the legacy of a psychopathic father’s genes, and the inherited search for dopamine and fleeting pleasures—a destructive pattern passed down like a curse from one generation to the next.

Still, I persist. Yes, I obey the law. But I will not remain silent. I will call out the lies, the manipulations, the dictators and oppressors who exploit and abuse children, who prey upon kind souls. That is my choice, my duty.

I do not know if this fight is mine to win, but I know it is mine to fight. And so, I speak—not out of entitlement or self-righteousness, but out of a desperate hope that someone, somewhere, might hear the call for something better. For kindness. For humanity.

Reading the words of Karl von Habsburg in his recent speech on the future of Europe, a flood of memories was triggered within me. His reflections on integrity, direction, and hope felt like echoes from a distant past, pulling me back to the conversations I once overheard as a child—conversations laden with disappointment and pain.

I recalled my grandparents’ voices, heavy with regret and disillusionment. My grandfather would recount the horrors of World War I, a war he was forced to fight in—a senseless, destructive conflict that left soldiers returning home broken, both in body and spirit. Some carried wounds that never healed, while others brought with them the shadow of the Spanish flu, spreading sickness in the wake of war’s devastation.

And then came the dark cloud of World War II, driven by the twisted ambition of a mediocre, intellectually hollow psychopath. His rise to power unleashed yet another wave of hardship and destruction, a firestorm that consumed not only lives but the very essence of hope.

Reading von Habsburg’s speech, I couldn’t help but reflect on these echoes of history—the cycles of human folly and resilience. They reminded me how easily history can repeat itself if we fail to learn from its lessons, and how vital it is to hold onto the ideals of integrity, direction, and hope.

The first time I asked my maternal grandfather if my father was evil, I was only six years old. He was carrying me up the seemingly endless steps to my school—steps I couldn’t walk up myself because of the weakness in my legs. His answer was subdued, measured. He simply said, “You don’t understand yet.”

The weakness in my legs, particularly on the left side, began five months before I started first grade, following nearly four weeks of fever that doctors dismissed as the flu. For decades, no one could explain what was wrong with me—least of all my indifferent parents. It wasn’t until I was 73 years old, after enduring countless misdiagnoses and even outright ridicule, that I was finally diagnosed with Post-Polio Syndrome (PPS). Yet, even with this long-awaited diagnosis, one deeper, more troubling question from my childhood remains unanswered: Who are my parents?

When I was seven, I no longer needed to ask if my father was evil—I knew. That certainty came the day he noticed my left foot turned slightly inward, by just one centimeter. To "correct" my "embarrassing" walk, he dragged me outside to the street to train me. Anytime my foot wasn’t perfectly straight, he hit me.
Not long after, I witnessed him savagely beating my grandfather—just months after my grandmother had died. My grandmother, who had raised me from birth, had been my only source of love and safety. When she passed, everything changed. I was forced to live with my parents.

Soon after, my grandfather moved out of the home he had built in 1948. As he left, I overheard my father laughing, saying, “Now I’m the king of the castle.” A castle my father did not build. A castle built by another man—a man he had brutalized. A father who, without my grandfather’s labor, was otherwise penniless.

Even now, at 75 years old, I find myself asking a grim and troubling question: Who was the bigger psychopath—my father or my mother?
Haunting Shadows from the Past  https://sieglindewalexander.com/haunting-shadows-from-the-past/

The Psychological Evidence of a Family Curse

The scars my parents left on me are deep and enduring, carving a legacy of permanent alertness and a constant awareness of impending danger into the fabric of my life. This toxic inheritance manifested not only emotionally but physically, taking form as adrenal insufficiency, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus.

My three younger brothers, raised entirely under my parents’ influence without the care and refuge I found in my grandmother, became exact replicas of them: violent, manipulative, deceitful, and pathological liars.

Studying psychology for two years In my quest to understand, I turned to books, research papers, and seminars and caring for “Adults Abused in Childhood” worldwide from 1994 to 2016, research was both illuminating and deeply haunting for me. It unraveled the layers of my family’s dysfunction—shedding light on why my parents became who they were and why my brothers grew into their mirror images. My parents’ violence, manipulation, lies, and lack of empathy were not merely personality flaws; they were manifestations of something far deeper, rooted in their biology and magnified by the toxic environment they fostered. 

By then, after reading emails and listening to childhood abuse victims share their experiences and related illnesses, I was convinced that childhood abuse causes not only psychological but also physical and organic damage. In 1999, I wrote to President Clinton about this very issue.
Here is his response: https://sieglindewalexander.com/letters/letter-from-bill-clinton/

 

© 2000-2025 Sieglinde W. Alexander. All writings by Sieglinde W. Alexander have a fife year copy right. Library of Congress Card Number: LCN 00-192742 ISBN: 0-9703195-0-9