Negative emotions can do a great deal of harm to your physical health, and there's no better evidence than patients who may have been physically or sexually abused as children, according to a study that monitored the health of some 1,000 New Zealand patients from birth to age 32.
Patients suffering from some kind of abuse or rejected by their parents when they were young were twice as likely to have inflammatory C-reactive proteins in their blood, a sure sign of heart disease and just as lethal as having high amounts of LDL cholesterol.
Psychological stress -- the anticipation of pain -- generates abnormal amounts of inflammation in kids that can impair their ability to produce glucocorticoid hormones that prevent inflammation, leading to incidence of heart disease and other illnesses as adults.
Again, this is merely further confirmation for something that any astute clinician can confirm. Nearly all serious autoimmune diseases -- multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and chronic fatigue syndrome -- have at one of their foundational roots sometime of severe emotional childhood trauma that was never fully compensated for.
Fortunately, there are newer psychological energy tools, like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), that can easily and successfully address this problem.
New Scientist January 15, 2007