Sometimes life sends us unlikely mirrors — people we’ve never met in person, yet with whom we share a rare honesty. One of my readers is one of those mirrors to me. She lives in Augsburg, Germany, a city I once assumed was large simply because of how vividly she described it. But Augsburg isn’t a big city at all. It’s a charming, historic town in Bavaria — the kind where every street, bridge, bakery, and corner has a story. And my reader has been writing to me from there since 2011 with a sincerity that is increasingly rare in today’s world.
Years ago, I sent her a YouTube video made by a young Briton who films cities across Europe. By pure chance, he chose her neighborhood — the old town of Augsburg — the little bridges with love-locks, the bakery at the end of her street, the cascades of water flowing under the wooden walkways, the “puppet on strings” theater, even the sign for the hair shop next to the place where she works. The whole video was essentially filmed in the few blocks around her daily life.
Her delight was childlike and beautiful:
“You won’t imagine how near to my home and workspace this guy has brought you.
I know all these places so well. I pass them almost daily.”
For a moment, I felt like I was right there with her — walking across those bridges, feeling the old stones under my feet, smelling the bread as she described the bakery near her home. Human connection, when real, doesn’t need physical proximity.
But the universe has a cruel way of placing beauty and tragedy side-by-side.
The day after writing me about the YouTube video, my reader witnessed a horror.
A young man climbed to the top of the Augsburg Rathaus — about 50 meters high. Police gathered below, trying to negotiate with him, trying to reach him. My reader watched from nearby as he stood beside the statue crowning the tower. And then, in the middle of a Christmas-market day filled with lights, laughter, and holiday shopping, he jumped.
Someone heard that he screamed something about Jesus and Mary before falling.
The police closed the street for 15 hours. Videos of the scene appeared online for the world to consume — because even tragedy becomes entertainment for the emotionally numb.
My reader wrote to me:
“The human race is so far from freedom and consciousness and nature,
that we turned into monsters.”
And she is right.
Humanity everywhere is filled with monsters — not the supernatural kind, but the ones created through generations of emotional repression, violence, and unresolved childhood trauma.
We are all responsible for what we see unfolding in the world.
Nothing happens in a vacuum.
As I responded to my reader, I echoed what I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:
“If we all start out as innocent little babies, why do some of us become psychotic killers?
Why are so many self-destructive, insecure, addicted, suicidal?Is it in the genes, or is it, as Alice Miller insisted, the result of early trauma?”
Modern neuroscience confirms what Miller understood decades ago:
The brain is shaped by early experiences.
Trauma rewires neural pathways.
The absence of an emotionally attuned caregiver damages the very circuits responsible for empathy, self-regulation, and the capacity to love.
Children who grow up in chronic fear lose the neurological architecture that prevents violence.
Dr. Bruce Perry, Dr. Gabor Maté, and the full depth of the ACE Study have all validated this truth:
violence is not a mystery — it is the predictable outcome of unhealed childhood trauma.
And my reader, with all her self-awareness, sees this too. She identifies herself as a “self-aware narcissist.” Unlike the malignant ones who cling to their false selves, she at least recognizes the prison she inhabits. Her honesty has always stood out. She never projected onto me. She speaks from her own woundedness rather than making me responsible for it.
Our correspondence has carried a quiet sincerity for more than a decade.
Sometimes I imagine visiting Augsburg one day — perhaps when I eventually live in Spain. I picture walking through the old town, having coffee with my reader in one of those small bakeries she described, seeing the narrow river that threads between the houses, and feeling the weight and the beauty of the place she calls home.
But until then, we meet in the only place where humanity can become real:
in the honesty of words unshielded by illusion.
Because my reader is right — and Alice Miller was right:
The monsters of humanity are not born; they are made.
And unless we face the roots of our pain, we will keep reenacting it — in our homes, our cities, and the world at large.
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