All rights reserved. ©Ewa Danuta Bialek
This book is protected by copyright and intellectual property laws. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the Author and/or Publisher.
The purpose of this guide is not to diagnose any medical condition or to recommend treatment for a specific disease. Rather, it reflects the author’s lifelong exploration of scientific research and clinical knowledge, together with her personal experience of seeking to better understand the functioning of the human body — both her own and that of others.
The views and observations presented in this guide represent the professional opinions of the author, based on more than fifty years of scientific study, clinical practice, and personal experience. Throughout these years, her work has focused on identifying evidence-informed approaches that may support health while remaining faithful to the Hippocratic principle: First, do no harm. This philosophy has also guided her broader vision of developing a model of education for the future — one that promotes the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and society.
This book offers information solely for educational purposes. The book does not intend to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Readers should consult appropriately licensed healthcare professionals about their individual medical needs and make healthcare decisions in partnership with qualified practitioners.
Introduction
This is another book on autoimmune diseases and their connection to causes rooted in our childhood history and traumatic experiences. On the one hand, it is intended to provide information for people who suffer from various persistent, often poorly defined ailments that recur over the years or evolve into different conditions. On the other hand, it serves as a warning to parents who, whenever their child repeatedly complains of a stomachache, rush to the doctor and give the child painkillers that, „in my day,” were prescribed only for adults.
When these parents are asked at the pharmacy whether they would like the larger package — which contains many more tablets and is also „more economical” — they often decide to buy it „just in case” their child has another stomachache. They do not realize that they are teaching their child to believe that every problem has a simple solution in the form of a pill. In doing so, they foster a pattern of dependency that may later manifest itself in many other forms of addiction.
Most importantly, they fail to understand that the child’s problem is often connected with the child’s experience of not receiving enough attention from them. The child gradually learns that pain — whatever its source — draws the parents” attention, and thus unconsciously learns how to „be ill” in order to receive love, care, and emotional connection.
What I write about is grounded in my own experience of a traumatic childhood and in years of struggling first with seemingly „innocent” stomachaches and later with serious health problems that eventually developed into autoimmune diseases. It is also based on my years of scientific work in medicine, during which I repeatedly asked myself, Why am I ill? Equally important are the experiences of hundreds of clients who sought my guidance over three decades while I was practicing Psychosynthesis.
Life itself, together with my personal experiences, taught me to look beyond symptoms and search for their underlying causes. It taught me to distinguish between causes and consequences — to understand that symptoms are the result of processes that often began many years earlier. For a long time, those symptoms did not respond to conventional drug treatment. Medication provided only temporary relief because it addressed the effects rather than the causes. Without releasing the underlying causes, lasting healing was impossible.
It is worth starting with the roots of trauma
I would like to begin with events taking place in the outside world in order to show that what I have been writing about in my books for at least the past twenty years is now being confirmed — not only by international publications but also by conferences and educational events held in many countries, bringing together specialists from various branches of medicine and related professions. As I present these developments, I will relate them to my own experiences and reflections to illustrate that ignoring something today may, years later, have consequences not only for an individual but also for society as a whole.
During an interview conducted as part of the Conscious Life event in January 2026, Dr. Avery Neal, an American psychotherapist with many years of clinical experience, spoke about the relationship between childhood trauma and its impact on an individual’s physical and emotional health, their functioning in the world, and their ability to build healthy relationships. According to her, these early experiences shape our present capacity to establish healthy boundaries. Childhood often becomes a period in which we develop survival skills — ways of coping with adversity and creating the safest environment possible for ourselves. Yet those survival skills are not always truly healthy. They are strategies that helped us endure circumstances in which our emotional or even physical existence felt threatened.
People often observe survival mechanisms in toxic relationships or dysfunctional family systems, where a child — or later an adult — develops coping methods simply to survive. In adulthood, these individuals frequently continue relying on the same patterns and coping mechanisms, even when their circumstances have changed. Although the environment may no longer be dangerous, they continue to use survival strategies that once protected them but may no longer serve them. Dr. Avery Neal, mentioned above, has directed a Women’s Therapy Clinic since 2012.
Family or relationship members often do not identify unhealthy patterns as traumatic. We have become accustomed to them and regard them as „normal.” Yet increasingly, subtle forms of psychological abuse erode a person’s self-esteem and self-confidence. It becomes extremely difficult to establish healthy boundaries when our sense of self weakens in this way.
Trauma from the past also becomes the basis for blaming ourselves whenever problems arise in a relationship, family, or workplace. Subtle patterns of abuse add fuel to the fire, encouraging the perpetrator to continue such behavior while pressuring the victim into submission. As a result, the victim gradually loses the ability to evaluate both the actions of others and their own inner emotional experience. Over time, this creates an environment in which gaslighting becomes accepted as something almost normal.
I discussed gaslighting in my previous book, describing its destructive influence on another person’s mind and emotions. It is an increasingly subtle form of psychological manipulation that undermines self-confidence while simultaneously creating the illusion of care and support. It throws us off balance and gradually erodes our sense of dignity and identity. Eventually, we no longer know what is really happening or what to believe. This leads to trauma and, consequently, to the violation of personal boundaries.
Whenever our boundaries are crossed, we usually experience trauma. Regardless of where it occurs, trauma prevents us from feeling safe — even when the setting is a marriage, a family, or a place where we sought professional help for a health problem. We lose what might be called healthy judgment and become unable to recognize manipulation or the toxic dynamics of a relationship. Our inner alarm system becomes distorted or eventually shuts down altogether.
When such situations are brief and occur only occasionally, the violation of our boundaries initially produces anxiety, often experienced as tightness in the stomach or chest. Some people become confused and wonder what is happening. Others blame themselves, believing they have misunderstood the situation. Still others remain silent „to keep the peace,” avoiding any reaction that might provoke the other person, while suppressing their own needs.
When healthy boundaries remain absent over a prolonged period, especially within toxic relationships, people begin to feel emotionally numb and disconnected from themselves and from their own feelings. They become shadows of who they once were, surrendering their autonomy to both the situation and the other person. They withdraw into themselves because every attempt to defend their position has proved futile. They experience helplessness, followed by hopelessness as the situation continues to deteriorate. Anxiety develops, dependency deepens, and eventually depression may emerge — not as a healthy coping strategy, but as a way of avoiding further harm by becoming invisible.
Under such circumstances, physical health also begins to deteriorate. Insomnia and other sleep disorders become common. Chronic pain syndromes appear, including cardiovascular symptoms and heart-related complaints. Women may develop menstrual disturbances and other gynecological problems. These, too, can be long-term consequences of prolonged exposure to trauma.
As time passes, the person stops asserting boundaries altogether because doing so may lead to punishment or an escalation of abuse. This strengthens the perpetrator’s sense of power while leaving the victim increasingly powerless and helpless. As intimidation intensifies, emotional withdrawal and various forms of emotional blackmail often follow.
Psychological abuse lies at the heart of all forms of violence. Its psychological dimension — especially in its subtle manifestations — is the most difficult to overcome. Women who have survived physical abuse often say that recovering from their bodily injuries was not the hardest part. What proved far more difficult was healing the invisible psychological wounds inflicted during those relationships.
Psychological abuse systematically undermines self-confidence and self-worth. It makes us more likely to remain in an abusive relationship because we begin to believe that we are not good enough. As a result, we become increasingly dependent on the abusive or toxic person, making it even less likely that we will leave the relationship. We must understand that this dependency develops gradually, recognize it for what it is, and break free from this vicious cycle of helplessness and the loss of faith in ourselves.
If you feel bad about yourself or believe that you do not deserve to be treated better, it is a sign that something either happened in your past or is happening in your present relationship that has led you to feel this way. In a healthy relationship, your partner should be a source of support, someone who genuinely wants what is best for you and encourages you to become the best version of yourself. If this is not the case — if your partner openly or subtly humiliates or belittles you — you need to pay close attention. It is also likely that once you begin confronting these issues and identifying what you truly need in order to move forward, you will encounter resistance or even an escalation of toxic behavior.
The same pattern can occur in healthcare. A healthcare professional may dismiss your inner experience, ridicule it, or deny its validity as though it did not exist. The same may happen when you report feeling unwell after taking a medication that has been prescribed for you. You may be told that it is „all in your head,” that such a reaction is impossible, or that no one has ever experienced anything like it before. Gradually, you begin to doubt the messages your body is sending you. You convince yourself that you must have misunderstood what you were feeling or that your symptoms were caused by something entirely different.
If your concerns are met with criticism, hostility, anger, or irritation, you may begin to feel like a child being scolded for doing something wrong. Instead of standing by your own experience, you retreat like a frightened, beaten dog, believing that everything is your fault, that you should never have spoken up, and that you must never do so again. You begin to fear that if you disagree with the other person, they will no longer want to see you. You feel ashamed to return and report any further problems because, after all, you know nothing, while they know better. Their display of superiority leaves you doubting yourself even more.
Fear and anxiety can become so overwhelming that developing self-confidence becomes secondary. You leave feeling small and defeated, like a beaten dog, blaming yourself simply for speaking honestly about what you feel. In doing so, you deny your own reality.
The first step toward healing is to work through the trauma itself, including some of the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At this stage, it is particularly important to work with your inner child, because in those moments you have felt exactly like a child being reprimanded. Deep inside, you know that not only your experience but your very self has been denied. You need to grieve everything you did not receive — being heard, believed, understood, and respected — and then begin rebuilding yourself from that point forward.
It is also worth asking yourself a simple but profound question: Do I truly love myself? If the answer is no, it may indicate that you never experienced genuine love from those who should have given it to you. Instead, you learned to put yourself aside, believing that you were unworthy of love, appreciation, recognition, or even simple acknowledgment.
Cultivating self-love in the present moment is one of the most powerful ways to begin transforming your life. It nurtures self-compassion and awakens the realization that I am worthy. Once this awareness begins to emerge, you can gradually expand your perception of yourself so that it aligns with this deeper sense of worth. You become more able to recognize whatever strengthens and supports you, encourages your continued growth, inspires greater optimism, and ultimately improves your quality of life.
This marks the beginning of the work that calls upon the spiritual dimension of healing. It is an individual journey, not a collective one, and people cannot reduce it to a fixed method or procedure. The spiritual dimension concerns reconnecting with ourselves and with a Higher Power. Every human being is capable of making this connection, although each person approaches it differently. There is no universal formula.
During therapeutic work with a counselor or coach, therapist and client explore these different dimensions together, observing where the client’s own inner process leads and discovering what helps integrate all the pieces into one coherent whole.
People who have experienced trauma or lived in toxic relationships often find it extremely difficult to accept help. They feel guilty for receiving it, and this guilt itself becomes another area requiring healing. Even after their circumstances have changed, they may find it impossible to believe that someone could genuinely want to support them. Offers of help seem unrealistic or even suspicious. They simply do not fit the person’s understanding of how relationships work. Yet accepting help is both healthy and essential if we are to find our way back to ourselves.
This negative response stems from trauma. It prevents us from making healthy choices and responding to life authentically. As long as trauma governs our reactions, we cannot truly live our own lives. Instead, we allow another person’s behavior to determine how we feel about ourselves, our relationships, and ultimately our lives.
One of the most important steps is to identify what we truly need in life and to allow ourselves to imagine what our lives would look like if our external circumstances reflected our deepest inner feelings and genuine desires. Let this vision become your guiding principle. When we establish healthy boundaries with the people in our lives, instead of worrying about how they will react, we need to observe their responses while remaining faithful to ourselves, protecting our dignity and caring for our own well-being.
In cases of psychological abuse, we often fail to recognize that abuse is taking place precisely because it is so subtle. Yet the underlying pattern remains the same whether the abuse is physical, emotional, or purely psychological. At some point, denial and withdrawal cease to be effective responses. What matters instead is learning to observe what is happening objectively, drawing appropriate conclusions, and taking the actions necessary to protect ourselves.
Reflections on my own history and the need to take responsibility for our health and quality of life
Many years ago, when I began my observations and research into psychosomatic and, later, autoimmune diseases, studies in these areas were still relatively scarce, both in Poland and worldwide. This was a period in my adult life when I was also experiencing an increasing number of symptoms that failed to respond to pharmacological treatment prescribed by numerous specialists. At the same time, my body began reacting adversely to medications, developing drug intolerances and allergic reactions. I interpreted this as an inner signal that this approach was not working for me and that the time had come to look more deeply into what was actually happening.
During that period, I actively participated in the Symposia on Somatotherapy and Psychosomatic Education held in Kraków in association with the Jagiellonian University. By then, I had already left my scientific positions at the Medical Academy in Warsaw and at the Medical Centre of Postgraduate Education, where I had worked in the fields of immunology and clinical diagnostics. I had experienced professional burnout, while my increasingly severe symptoms had brought me neither effective treatment nor, more importantly, an answer to the question that continued to trouble me: Why am I ill?
These conferences, where I presented the Psychosynthesis approach to education and healing, also provided me with a wealth of information that allowed me to begin assembling the pieces of a puzzle concerning the underlying causes of many illnesses with psychological components. In particular, conference presentations by the team led by Professor Zdzisław Ryn of the Jagiellonian University pointed me toward a new direction in my search and helped me begin finding answers within the traumatic experiences of my own childhood.
My dramatic childhood, followed by many years of ineffective pharmacological treatment and symptoms affecting multiple systems of my body, became a constant motivation to search for the underlying causes of these problems and discover meaningful solutions. I felt like a scientist, explorer, and traveler venturing into the unknown territories of my own soul, unwilling to rest until I had uncovered the roots of my difficulties so that I could heal them and bear witness to the truth of what I had discovered.
My father was a political prisoner who was brutally tortured in Poland under the post-war communist regime, while my family remained under constant surveillance and was subjected to repression for almost ten years.
I was two years old when these events changed my family forever and, in a profound sense, took my father away from me. I never truly got him back. After spending time in numerous prisons, my father became a shadow of the man he had once been, emotionally absent and deeply affected by what he had endured. My mother, initially without employment as she spent two years caring for her children, lived under relentless stress. This contributed to severe health problems that remained with her for the rest of her life.
Growing up amid various forms of repression, aggression, and violence, I suffered from numerous ailments that proved difficult both to diagnose and to treat. My own interests gradually led me to search for a „prescription” for health. After completing my university studies, I devoted twenty-five years of my life to scientific research in immunology and clinical diagnostics. Unfortunately, I did not find the answers I was looking for there. Instead, I experienced professional burnout, which coincided with a profound crisis in both my health and my personal life.
In the early 1990s, I discovered Psychosynthesis — a „psychology with a soul,” which integrates the meaning inherent in our life experiences. It showed me a path toward understanding the causes of my difficulties and healing them at their roots. This exploration helped me develop educational programs that I began conducting in 1997 and continued for the following eight years while leading the „Education for the Future” Association. From that time until the present day, I have devoted myself to in-depth study, practice, and writing, producing dozens of articles and more than fifty books devoted to these subjects.
My own story became the solid foundation upon which I could build, while drawing upon arguments, evidence, and references from other sources. Although it took many years before everything became clear, like a multidimensional puzzle finally coming together, I do not consider those years of unsuccessful attempts to have been wasted. They taught me what did not work and why. Only then could I begin to understand what did work and what meaning these experiences revealed when viewed from a broader perspective.
As early as the 1960s, researchers at the Jagiellonian University recognized that it was not only victims of persecution who needed help and therapy, but their families as well. Unfortunately, patients themselves often found it difficult to recognize the connection between the persecution experienced by their loved ones and health problems emerging in subsequent generations.
Literature from both Poland and Chile, including studies related to the period of Pinochet’s rule, indicates that traumatic events may have lasting physical and psychological consequences and that their effects may continue to be observed by physicians in the second and even third generations when the trauma remains unresolved. Psychologists are increasingly recognizing this phenomenon, encouraging closer examination of the quality of human relationships and their wider social consequences.
It is worth recalling the book published by Cambridge University Press entitled Collective Violence and Trauma: Culture Under Siege (2000). Its authors examine perpetrators, victims, and society through the lens of individual human experience, revealing the darker side of human nature in which anger and fear may be discharged onto relatives and other people close to us. In this way, violence extends beyond the individual and becomes a social phenomenon. Its effects may continue through victims for many years after the original trauma. Without conscious awareness of this process, once a particular pattern has taken root, it may be be reproduced across generations. I addressed this phenomenon, among other places, in my book Mirrors Across Generations.
It is worth educating society about the many dimensions of violence whose effects cannot simply be „released from the body” through pharmacological treatment. Trauma remains stored in the body as body memory, as described by D. Grossman in his accounts of the experiences of war veterans from Vietnam and Afghanistan.
At numerous international forums devoted to families and to victims who have lived for years in a state of „frozen” trauma, specialists discuss the profound impact this has on people’s identity and humanity. Physicians often first diagnose these patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and later with fibromyalgia. These observations correspond with earlier descriptions of survivors of wartime concentration camps and Polish political prisoners from more than seventy years ago. As a result, a new level of understanding is emerging regarding the challenges now faced by subsequent generations.
Stress, trauma, and their intergenerational consequences for health and quality of life
It has been demonstrated that stress can directly affect the functioning of the immune system. This relationship is the focus of a relatively new scientific discipline — psychoneuroimmunology. Among other things, it examines how psychological processes influence physical changes and disease within the human body. Many classify today’s disorders within the spectrum of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which traumatic experiences like war cause. Examples include studies involving American veterans of the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. Professor Zdzisław Ryn and his colleagues in Poland conducted research during the 1970s and 1980s. Their research demonstrated that the consequences of such trauma may transmit to the second and even third generations, as they observed among survivors of concentration camps, political persecution, and their families.
This deserves particular attention because physicians are often unaware of the long-term, intergenerational effects that prolonged stress may have on health. Research of this kind, together with the many living examples that still exist today, enables us to connect causes with consequences and to apply treatment approaches that truly promote healing rather than merely suppress symptoms.
Negative emotions, which arise in response to stressful experiences, also generate internal stress whenever the body is forced to endure circumstances that violate its natural balance. They disturb the body’s energetic system. Emotions such as anxiety, anger, rage, fear, phobias, guilt, sadness, complex trauma, limiting beliefs, and both physical and emotional pain influence the body’s electrical system, disrupting its normal functioning. In this sense, they act as toxins that gradually poison the organism.
Behind every painful symptom there is often a specific emotion and the life situation that gave rise to it. When these emotions are not expressed, they accumulate within the body, creating increasing tension whenever later experiences resemble the original event and trigger the same emotional response. Symptoms, beliefs, and emotions are all connected to the pain stored within the body, and that pain becomes a pathway toward understanding and releasing them. Eliminating symptoms solely through pharmacological treatment removes from view the deeper cause that lies beneath them.
Decades of research have shown that stress produces chronic tension — including muscular rigidity — which consumes the body’s energy reserves and forces the continuous release of adrenaline. Persistent activation of this stress response gradually contributes to physical deterioration, including disturbances of the immune system that may play a role in autoimmune diseases. This, in turn, generates pain and suffering. As the body’s energy reserves become depleted, the immune system weakens, increasing susceptibility to infections. Other consequences of chronic adrenaline overload also become apparent, including rapid or shallow breathing, heart palpitations, digestive disorders, anxiety attacks, and memory impairment.
Anger provides a good example of how emotions influence the body. It stimulates the release of neurotransmitters in the brain, accelerates the heartbeat, raises blood pressure, causes flushing of the face, neck, or chest, and reduces the ability to concentrate. When anger becomes chronic, it produces persistent muscular tension that may develop into chronic headaches, digestive disorders, and an exaggerated fight-or-flight response.
During therapy, many people recall growing up in families where expressing anger was forbidden. Parents or caregivers, wishing to avoid conflict, prohibited displays of anger, carefully controlled emotional expression, or punished such behavior. As a result, children learned to suppress these emotions, creating chronic internal tension and stress.
Dr. Johnson explains that the mind attempts to protect itself from psychological destruction by producing physical pain in response to oxygen deprivation resulting from suppressed anger. In this way, pain becomes a protective mechanism against overwhelming negative emotions and excessive stress. The pain manifests itself in the body while simultaneously pointing toward the blocked expression of anger. The body’s response to stress involves excessive adrenaline production, leading to constant muscular tension and, consequently, pain. Thus, when the mind suppresses the expression of anger, the body expresses it through pain, reflecting the long-term consequences of keeping those emotions imprisoned within.
Becoming aware of negative emotions, identifying their origins, and observing our emotional reactions when other people „push our buttons” helps us discover their source. It enables us to recognize what we truly feel when these situations occur, to understand the energy that has remained trapped within us, and ultimately to release it. In this sense, negative emotions become invaluable teachers, guiding us toward the resolution of traumatic experiences.
Many people go through life feeling like victims of circumstances or of other people’s actions, believing they have been used or exploited. These reactions often originate in childhood trauma, and when such memories begin to surface, they reveal multiple layers of remembered emotional injury. Each layer is profoundly destructive, particularly the longer it has remained locked within the body, continuing to cause harm.
The original event usually leaves behind a lasting sense of inadequacy, low self-worth, emotional wounding, and even damage to one’s deepest sense of identity — to the essence of who we are. Any later event that resembles the original experience or evokes the same emotional response becomes retraumatizing, continually reminding the individual of the unjust judgments once received from parents or other significant caregivers. Every situation that touches this original wound repeats the traumatic experience, as though the wound were being uncovered and irritated over and over again, intensifying its effects.
Only when individuals begin noticing these recurring patterns do they realize that genuine healing requires looking beneath the surface to identify and release the original pattern — the first trauma, which in many cases was inflicted, consciously or unconsciously, by the very people they loved most: their mother or father, often at the cost of abandoning their own authentic selves.
This is one of the most difficult decisions and one of the deepest processes of healing because these experiences are often hidden behind culturally accepted beliefs about loyalty and moral obligations toward one’s parents and family. When we examine these beliefs more closely, we may recognize that they sometimes serve to justify harm inflicted upon defenseless children through aggression or emotional injury, whether intentional or unintentional, without awareness of its lifelong consequences.
Similarly, concealing the abuse of children — whether by family members, institutions, or society itself — or governments that establish totalitarian or oppressive laws, or fail to enact legislation protecting the most vulnerable, including children, also contributes to perpetuating harm and shares responsibility for the suffering inflicted upon others.
The same applies to emotional abuse by an intimate partner, unfair judgment by another person, medical errors, or situations in which healthcare professionals discharge their own frustration onto patients, especially children — for example, by frightening a child into wearing glasses with statements such as, „If you don’t wear them, you’ll go blind,” delivered with anger and intimidation. Such experiences become deeply embedded within the body, in its cellular memory, in the pain a person continues to carry, and in the trauma that remains hidden beneath conscious awareness. I know of one woman who wore glasses for thirty years simply because she had once heard exactly such a frightening statement — not because she actually needed them.
Releasing our personal traumas and speaking openly about them is not merely a call for justice or an attempt to proclaim the truth. Rather, it is a process of decoding trauma from within the body itself, reducing the symptoms that have fueled years of suffering. Above all, it is a way of increasing our sensitivity toward other human beings and the often-unrecognized harm that people unintentionally inflict upon one another every day. Such harm may become implanted for a lifetime, contributing to future emotional problems and physical illness. At the same time, recognizing these patterns reveals pathways toward healing — both for ourselves and for those closest to us — so that we may truly do no harm to ourselves or to others, across generations.
Further international reports on the impact of traumatic experiences on quality of life and disease
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