Are you doomed by long-ago traumas? No, says a prominent psychiatrist, who shows you how to rewrite your life story so that it has a happy ending.

Diana* knew she was a walking time bomb. On any checklist of risk factors for heart disease and other killers, she ranked alarmingly high. Thirty pounds overweight, she had high blood pressure and soaring cholesterol. Her only exercise was walking to her car. She was also prone to depression, had chronic stress-related gastritis, and was a two-pack-a-day smoker. She knew she had to change her health habits.

"But I just couldn't do it," she says. "Every time I made some progress, I'd lose control and end up back where I started in no time."

What turned things around was an insightful physician who linked Diana's physical condition to her traumatic childhood. When Diana was 4 years old, her father died before her eyes. Two years later, her mother married a violent alcoholic. Diana was forced to watch him beat her mother and brother on a regular basis. She also witnessed her mother's suicide attempt.

"I couldn't really work on improving my health until I came to terms with all the pain and anger I'd suppressed as a child," Diana explains. "It was eating away at me."

* not her real name

What do early traumas have to do with health decades later? "Adverse childhood experiences underlie the most common causes of death in the US," says Vincent J. Felitti, MD, an internist at the Southern California Permanente Medical Group in San Diego.

In a survey of more than 20,000 adults, Dr. Felitti and his colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that those who suffered physical, psychological, or emotional abuse as children, or were raised in households marked by violence, substance abuse, mental illness, or criminal behavior, were far more likely to develop serious illnesses as adults-everything from diabetes and bronchitis to cancer and heart disease.

"Adverse childhood experiences are likely to produce anger, anxiety, and depression," says Dr. Felitti. "To the degree that behavior such as overeating, smoking, and substance abuse are found to be effective coping devices, they would tend to be used chronically." Not exactly a recipe for wellness.

But that's only one way that traumatic experiences can destroy your health. "The chronic stress of unresolved emotional pain wreaks havoc on your immune and circulatory systems, cardiac function, hormone levels, and other physical functions," says psychiatrist Harold H. Bloomfield, MD, author of Making Peace with Your Past (HarperCollins, 2000). And it's not just childhood adversity that does the damage, he notes. The upheavals of adolescence and the losses and letdowns of adulthood also eat away at the body's resistance.

"We must make peace with our past," asserts Dr. Bloomfield, "because our life may literally depend on it."

The good news is that our body and brain are remarkably resilient; we are fully capable of healing old wounds and reversing the damage of past adversity.

Here are 10 ways to rewrite your life story: