avoid conflict, even verbal disputes, at all costs. Some women wo n't trust people easily, if at all, and wo n't be able to handle even normal expressions of anger. Visit CNNHealth.com, your connection to better living What they need to do when they get out of the relationship is make sure they 're aware of their own anger, and then they can learn how to freely express it in a healthy, normal way, he said. If somebody's still having issues 10 years later, they just have n't worked through it. They have n't healed; they need to do that. New research shows that abuse victims feel the impact of violence long after it occurred. A recent study in the Journal of Women's Health found that older African-American women who were exposed to high levels of family violence at some point in their lifetimes -- whether by a partner or family member -- are at a greater risk of poor mental and physical health status. Not just ongoing violence, which everybody thinks about, but even when it's over, there's something about what happens that seems to have a lingering effect that we do n't quite understand yet, said Dr. Anuradha Paranjape, co-author of the study and associate professor at Temple University School of Medicine. It makes sense that abused women would report worse health, given that people in stressful situations have higher levels of stress hormones, which interfere with immune