YOUR CHILDHOOD AND TEEN YEARS IMPACT YOUR LATER HEALTH(Extract from Dr Mercola’s website)

Once you reach your childhood and teen years, your body is still rapidly absorbing the emotional experiences you go through. If those experiences are traumatic, it can negatively imprint you for life.

Women who were sexually or physically abused as children, for instance, may have alterations in their brain chemistry that make them prone to depression and anxiety. Researchers have also identified at least four abnormalities in the brain that are much more prevalent in adults who had been abused and neglected as children.

But as a recent study shows, it doesn’t take serious physical or sexual abuse to cause these changes. Even normal “everyday” emotional experiences, like fighting with your parents or peers or being teased at school, can shape your future health.

Teens who reported more of these types of stressful events -- the type nearly everyone goes through -- had higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker for inflammation that’s linked to an increased risk of heart disease.

Still, the more serious the trauma, the greater your risk as an adult becomes.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, which is perhaps the largest scientific study to examine the relationship between childhood trauma and health, found that both the prevalence and risk increased for severe obesity, physical inactivity, depressed mood, and suicide attempts as the number of childhood exposures to trauma increased.

The study also found a significant relationship between the number of childhood trauma exposures and serious disease conditions in adults,

Timing also plays a role, and the earlier the abuse occurs the more likely it is to have a negative impact on your health. 

How to Resolve Your Emotional Traumas

Just because you had an emotionally trying childhood, or had some emotionally turbulent years as a teen, it does not mean your health is destined to fail. It does, however, highlight the importance of regularly dealing with, and healing, your emotions.

Your first instinct to resolve childhood trauma may be to see a conventional psychotherapist, but in my experience, while the therapists clearly mean well, most of the time they are not able to facilitate complete resolution of the deep wounding.

Doing this requires dealing with your emotions on a deeper energetic level, and actually repairing the damage that’s been done.

There are a number of very effective options that you can choose from. In my experience, though, one of the most effective techniques for doing this is called the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which is an emotional version of acupuncture, without the needles. Continued next column……..

How EFT Works

Instead, you stimulate well established meridian points on your body by tapping on them with your fingertips, while being tuned into your painful experiences and feelings.

The idea is that negative emotions are caused by imbalances in your body's subtle energies (the Chinese call it Chi) and this tapping serves to restore that balance. Properly done, even the heaviest trauma becomes "just something else that happened.”

In minor cases, you can actually perform EFT on yourself, but in severe cases I would highly recommend you seek out a trained EFT professional.

One of the major benefits to EFT is that once you learn it, you can use it daily, even multiple times a day, to handle any stress that comes you way. You can even teach your children to use it.

This way, you’re addressing your emotional stress head-on, instead of letting it linger and fester, and managing your stress regularly and often is one of the most important factors of optimal health.

Dr Mercola’s website is a great resource for information and insight into health issues as well as products and alternative health strategies that empower you.  Check out www.mercola.com .