The Science Behind Trauma and Healing - Episode 298

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now here's today's episode of the Gliden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome, everybody, to the Gliden Longevity Podcast. And we're here, here, as always, answering the big questions in life. How good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime? And how do we develop a 300-year-old mind? And today I'm going to be having a conversation with a physician, Dr. Amy Apogian. She resides in the San Diego area and she is elbow boarded in preventative and addiction medicine. She has a master's in biochemistry and public health, and she's been working in psychosomatic medicine, functional medicine, and mental health, along with nutrition and. Oh, my gosh, this was such an amazing conversation that we had about trauma. Understanding how trauma gets imprinted into the body, how to release it, how to heal it, how to overcome it. I learned some things here that were super helpful and I think you're really, really going to enjoy this podcast. It was a really, really fun conversation. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Glad Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm joined today by a woman that I'm just meeting for the first time. And I'm actually very interested to have a conversation with Amy Apogen. Apogeene. Yes. I hope I got that right. So, physician Amy, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to diving into this science. It's not too often that I get to geek out about this level of the science, so I'm really, really happy to be here.

Great. Well, great. It should be super fun. So just to kind of kick things off, tell us a little bit about how you got pulled into this area of medicine, really, where you're working with trauma and how the body holds it and things like that. And I think you have a daughter. No. You have a son or Miguel who might have been a nidus for kind of going down this path. I don't know. Why don't you walk us through that a little bit?

Absolutely. I was just finishing up My master's in biochemistry, Southern California, Loma Linda University. And as I was finishing up that master's, I had a few months before jumping back into the third year of medical school, and I decided to become a foster parent.

Okay. Well, that's. That's. You know, that's pretty bold move, right? I mean, that's. You're in the middle of a pretty. Pretty intense training scenario. Right? What. What prompted that?

There was the reason that I was aware of at the time, and then there's been the deeper reasons that I've uncovered as I've done my own trauma work over the years.

Okay.

At the time, I knew that I just wanted to make a difference with my life, and that seemed to me to be a resource that I had. I had a home, I had time. Why wouldn't I do this? And I had a soft heart for kids who were hurting. I didn't really understand why at the time. I have a better understanding of that now. And so it was just. It was just a door that I wanted to open. Not knowing. Having no idea, Jeff. Having no idea where that door would lead me in my own life.

Right. And probably not even fully comprehending what it meant. I can imagine. Right. I mean, when I became a parent for the first time, it's like, you know, there's your life before your parent, and then there's your life after your parent. That's, you know, that's all you can describe it as. Right. It's that big of a transition. So tell us a little bit about some of the reasons that you've uncovered about why you chose to bring Miguel into your life.

Well, I grew up with a father who was adopted himself.

Okay.

And he had been born to a teenage mother who had been forced to adopt him out, given the circumstances.

Yeah.

And being that I was the one closest to him, of my three sisters, I am the middle of two sisters. Then I. I felt like I could be the one to fix other people, that I could be the one to heal other people's pain, because that's the role that I had played with my father.

So you had. You had kind of a healing relationship with your father for your father. In other words, his relationship to you was healing to him. Is that. Is that how we understand that?

That is what I attempted to do, Jeff. I'm not sure that I was at all successful, but as a child, that's the role that I took.

I got it. I got it.

So you buffered his emotions.

Okay. So however he might have received it, the role that you took on was, I'm going to come in and try to help dad. Is that part of it? Yeah.

And so here comes another opportunity to repeat the same story. And I think that this is a common experience for many people in their life where they get into relationships, where they're actually trying to change the outcome of a previous relationship in their life.

Oh, a million percent. Or in my case, where you're trying to avoid what happened in a previous relationship. Right. With my mom. And so you end up choosing the wrong people because you're right. So it's the trauma. Trauma plays out. It has many ways to play out. It's kind of like a. What is it? The NBC rainbow of. Right. Peacock feathers. Of rainbow colors, the way it can show up. So. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So you didn't know that at the time. And how long did it take for you to figure that out?

When I took on Miguel, I was not intending to adopt him. And that happened over the next few months where I realized just how deeply his trauma had impacted him. To the point, Jeff, where his behaviors were so severe they were not ever going to be able to place him in another family that had children or pets.

Oh, wow.

And if he didn't make it with me, he'd already been through so many homes, they were going to place him in a group home at age 4.

Oh, wow. Okay. So. So you were. You took him on really as a foster parent, which is really kind of a. Let's call it a temporary assignment. Right. And then as you got to know him and you realize the depth of his trauma and the challenges he was facing, then either you could go many different directions from that point, but it sounds like your heart really opened up to him at that point. Is that is correct? Or how did you. How did that go?

I was in my mid-20s at that point. And so I look back and I have so much compassion on myself. Here's a 25 year old trying to make a life decision.

Yeah.

That neither, neither outcome was good. There wasn't a good outcome for him to stay in the system and it wasn't a good outcome for me to adopt him. But at that time in my life, chose to adopt because I wanted to get him out of a foster care system that had only continued to create trauma for him.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Now, did. Did Miguel have any other special needs per se, or was he just the trauma that he'd experienced since birth? Was the prior, you know, the major hurdle for him or were there other issues? He was dealing with as well.

The other challenges were all under that label of trauma. The only, like, true, if you want to call it disability that he had been assessed for was that he had a mannerism of speaking that sounded like what he would even call to it as baby talk. And he couldn't talk any other way.

Okay.

So we thought. And then there was one day where it slipped out of his mouth and he spoke normal, like, spoke like any other child. And that was when I realized this is just part of how the trauma is showing up for you, is that you. Don't you find it safer to talk like a baby.

Right.

That was the only other thing that the social workers could tell me about, other than his extreme rage and aggressive behavior.

You know, this is such a profound topic, this idea of trauma. The listeners to the podcast know that, you know, in our life energy circle, and we talk about mental health, if you will, anxiety, depression, ptsd, trauma responses, things like that, that, you know, our primary understanding, and I'm sure there are more factors than this, is that, you know, all of us go through trauma and we. We end up. That trauma imprints itself in our nervous system, and we end up living in reaction to it. And it also imprints itself not only into the nervous system, but actually into the, you know, tissues of the body, fascial planes and, you know, other. Other areas. Right. So then the way that I kind of frame it up is that it's kind of our hero's journey to go in and actually resolve that trauma. Right. Heal it, and then eventually transcend it, become grateful for it in a way that, you know, we can understand that we're wiser and we're here, you know, with more empathy and more compassion for other people than we would have had, that sort of thing. Right. But it's. That's. That's the construct that. That we work with, that I'm working with. But it's. It's fascinating when somebody is so small and being damaged from multiple angles. Right. I mean, it's just like, really beat up and it sounds like just heartbreaking. Right?

It was for me at the time, which is why I chose to adopt him, though that would become a very challenging period of my life and not end up the way that I would have wanted it to. But at the same time, Jeff, I think that those were stories, stories like Miguel's that had led me to downplay my own childhood because I could look at Miguel's and I didn't feel like I had the right to use the word trauma when I talked about my childhood.

Hmm, interesting.

More that I lived with Miguel, the more that I recognized that I was doing some of the same things that he was doing. I was guarding my heart. I was pushing people away. I was afraid. I was deathly afraid that if people knew the real me, they wouldn't actually like me. And so I needed to be something else other people were around. And no, it didn't look like the rages or the, you know, trying to kill me like Miguel did. It didn't look like that. But I still recognized I have these patterns. And I hadn't ever been willing to use the word trauma for my own experience in my life.

You know, part of it is. That's really interesting point because I think humans in general tend to normalize their experience. Right. It's just like, well, this is normal. I had a normal childhood. Everything was normal. You know, it's just like, this is how it is. This is the world. And we tend to believe that how we think about things is actually true. Right. And so that's reinforced by that. And then the behaviors that we put out there reinforce it as well. Right. If we're. If we're guarding all the time, then, you know, people are going to be more standoffish and all this kind of thing. Right. So it's really becomes a very difficult thing to crack. But to your point, the first thing is to realize that. That there is trauma there and that we are living on tilt.

Right.

And I think a lot of it comes down to safety. You know, how do we actually feel safe?

Well, that's just it. A biology of fear creates inflammation. A biology of safety creates health and longevity.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. It's one of the reasons that we work on the life energy circle with our folks all the time, because it's really the ring that binds them all. I mean, you know, without that. And why are you even doing it, for that matter? Right. If you don't have a sense of purpose and other things like this. Right. So, yeah, that's. That's really interesting. Okay, so.

So if I can add to that the aspect around what qualifies as a trauma. When we were young, and as I started digging into the science and the research, I found something fascinating which helped me come to a better awareness of my own experience growing up and through my life and why my body was holding trauma, even though I didn't think that I had had trauma. When you look at this science, it seems that one of the primary mechanisms by which trauma becomes Our biology is through oxidative damage and shortening of telomeres.

Interesting.

Now, I know you're an expert at this, but when I look at the science, Jeff, they've done so many different correlations to try to figure out where. Where is the strongest correlation between the trauma and the telomere shortening? And naturally, they looked at the adverse childhood experiences. So that was a study that originated in the 90s with Dr. Vincent Felitti. And now they've added so much more to our understanding of what all is associated with adverse childhood experiences. And they found that it's generally negative on the telomeres, but it's a small effect and it's not always present. It's not the sure and fast you have this, it's going to shorten your telomeres. But, you know, what did you know, what did the strongest correlation with shortening of telomeres as an adult was that your mother experienced depression.

Experienced depression?

Yes.

Interesting. Yeah.

Your mother was depressed. And yet, Jeff, if I asked any of my patients over the years, did your mother have depression and was that a trauma for you? People would laugh at me. My patients would be like, well, yes, my mother struggled with depression, but was that a trauma to me? No, no, of course not. But yet that's not what the body says. The body says differently based on actual measurements of telomere shortening. Isn't that crazy?

That's fascinating, too. You know, there's kind of an epigenetic component to this as well as, you know, you can pass this down across generations. The way it's.

Generational trauma.

Right, Generational trauma into the epigenome, which is for the. For the audience, which is really these methyl groups that get attached or unattached from certain genes to activate or. Or deactivate them. And the patterns of that methylation can be associated with trauma, can be associated with other disorders, too. Right. And. And you know, there was a really interesting study done around World War II with women in. Who were pregnant, I think it was in the Netherlands during Nazi occupation. And the impact of the stress that they were under, probably, and anxiety and depression, those children all had higher health consequences and shorter life expectancies. Right, so.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And. And it's going to be a combination.

Right.

It's not going to be only what was passed on in their biology, but it's also going to be the emotional affect that would have developed the nervous system of those children in a different way, so that now they're responding to stress differently, simply because that's the environment in which they grew up in.

Exactly. You know, and there's been a lot of studies looking at the fact that different genetic makeups are more susceptible to trauma in general, and others are more resilient. Do you want to speak to that a little bit? I'm aware of several of the genes, but you probably know some things that be curious about.

Well, and this is the whole concept of the biology of trauma, Jeff, where I started looking at, okay, I need to do my own trauma work, but realizing that actually what was holding me back the most was my own biology.

In what sense?

In the sense that I. We each have different biological profiles. Some of us are under methylators. Some of us have detoxification snips that affect our ability to clear toxins. And realizing that each of those things are going to have an impact on my nervous system, and my nervous system is what decides whether something is a stress or a trauma for me. And there is stress biology, and then there's trauma biology. So I started referring to it more as just a trauma biology. And that allowed people, my patients, to stop kind of looking to the event as the trauma, but more of what's happening inside of my body. Is my body shifting into trauma biology that has very different consequences than stress biology.

So talk to us about the distinction and or confluence of stress and trauma in terms of the body.

It's one of my favorite things to talk about, Jeff. I'm so glad you asked.

Just so I throw that nice, big, fat pitch right in there.

This was one of the biggest shifts from my own understanding of my body and how to work with my body. And by this point, I had reached burnout and woke up one day unable to get out of bed.

Now, where were you in your life at that point? In medical school or afterwards or.

This is after medical school? I was in general surgery residency at this point, just finishing up my third year. In fact, it was on transplant surgery rotation.

Oh, wow. Well, that'll burn you out right there.

It was no coincidence.

That's right.

I thought that it was coming out of nowhere. It was not coming out of nowhere. It was very predictable. I just had been living so disconnected from myself that I didn't realize what was building underneath the surface. And so when I started studying my nervous system, I was doing this in light of, I need to get my life back. I need to get my health back. And I'm noticing that when I go to therapy, I am coming back, and I'm so depleted. I'm so exhausted. I'm back in Bed for three days, maybe I'm even on the couch eating a tub of ice cream, binge watching movies, because it just felt like so much to do trauma work. And this was when I started realizing that my biology was really holding me back. So I started to study, like, what is stress biology? What is trauma biology? And one of the most simple differences is stress biology is driven by adrenaline. Many people think that stress biology is driven by cortisol. It is not. Cortisol is not actually the main player in the stress response. It's adrenaline. Now, adrenaline is going to trigger that cortisol, but it's not the cortisol that's actually bad. It's the adrenaline that's bad. So when we have a startle response, because that's where it starts, it all starts with a startle response, which is the moment when our nervous system gathers a sense. So a sense being, did I taste something, do I see something, do I hear something, Did I feel something? That feels off. Something might be wrong. In that moment, our physiology starts to release all the noradrenaline that was released or pre stored in the tissues. That's what gives us that jolt and that fast energy. It turns on all of our senses. We become hyper vigilant, which we want in that moment.

So.

So we can identify what is the problem and is it actually a problem or was it just my grandkids jumping out from behind the corner to scare me and I'm going to tackle them and tickle them. I need to know very quickly. In fact, we have 15 seconds, Jeff, we have 15 seconds of that noradrenaline for our body to decide, am I going into a full stress biology or no, that was just a startle, and it isn't a real problem. And I can come back to a sense of safety and. But once our body makes that decision, and by body, I really mean autonomic nervous system, once it makes that decision, nope, we're gonna amp this up into stress biology. That's exactly what it is. It's an amping up. And we use adrenaline to do that. Adrenaline is now pumping through our blood and it's surrounding our cells so that it's giving them the message that our mitochondria need to be able to meet the demand of increased energy. So our mitochondria actually change shape. If you're looking at them under the microscope, you'll see the mitochondria change shape and they literally hunker down and make energy more efficiently. But as you can imagine, this is unsustainable it's like if you and I were on a full on high intensity interval training and we're sprinting. Well, it's a sprint because we can't sustain that sprint.

That's right.

A sprint is unsustainable. And so at the moment that our autonomic nervous system starts gathering information from our mitochondria, from our cells, from our immune system that say we're reaching the end of what we can do here and we haven't overcome that problem or that danger, we haven't outrun the tiger, well, then the body, the autonomic nervous system says this can no longer be our survival strategy. We're going to need to shut down to try to survive. And this is where we freeze and go into the trauma response as a way of surrendering in order to try to survive. Now we move into energy conservation. So now this is trauma biology. Trauma biology is all about energy conservation. Stress biology is about energy utilization.

That's a great distinction, actually. And I'm thinking that the nervous system, which also epinephrine, norepinephrine, are neurotransmitters as well as systemic hormones. Right. So those all get activated in the brain and if you're repeatedly exposed to the thing, you start to imprint this response into your brain to a stressor. Right.

Like that's exactly it.

Right.

Oh, Jeff, can I tell you about the psychology study that they did?

Yeah.

So, Dr. Seligman, psychologist, and he took dogs and he put them into a container that had two sides. Both sides were separated by a low barrier that the dogs could easily jump over. And one side had a mat where he could provide electrical shocks.

Sure.

Other side was just a normal floor with no shocks. So he took these dogs and he tied half of them to the wall so that when he turned on the shocks, they would not be able to successfully jump over the wall. Their harness would hold them back. So he does this, and the half of the group that is not tied up, they jump over and they're on the other side and they're feeling safe again. But here are these dogs and they're trying to jump over. They're trying and they're not able to, but they're watching their friends be able to.

So that's traumatic.

That is traumatic. And how do we know this, this is what he did next? He took those same dogs, the same group. He repeated the experiment, but this time, Jeff, he did not tie any of them up. I think you already know it's going to happen.

Yeah. This is pretty. This is Pretty profound, isn't it?

Yeah, I. Well, let me. Let me just finish the story so your audience knows what happens right now. The dogs are there. None of them are tied up. He turns on the shocks. The group who had previously jumped over, they knew what to do, Jeff. It didn't even stress them out. Why did it not even stress them out? Because they knew how to get to safety. It was an inconvenience for them now, but it wasn't a stress like it was before of, oh, my goodness, what's happening? How do I escape? Okay, I'm glad I escaped. They. They knew what to do.

Yeah. It was a predictable stress in a way at that point.

Yes, exactly. The dogs who had been tied up before, did they even try to jump over this time?

Yeah. That's so sad, isn't it?

They did not.

They did not even try to jump over it. That's really so profound. And you see that that trauma gets imprinted into abused children or abused people in general. Right? Abused spouses or abused kids or whomever. Right.

Well, yeah, and I share that story because you had brought up the neural pathways that get formed. These are the neural pathways that get formed. And our. Our responses to stress, we don't realize how programmed they are. We don't realize how patterned they are. And if we could see the neural pathways, we would see that we're just doing the same thing over and over again. Jeff. We're not trying to do anything new.

You know, the interesting thing about that is that when we're confronted with a stressful situation and we haven't successfully navigated it previously, we tend to stew in it. Right. Rather than finding another way out or reframing it or looking for an alternative explanation or an alternative solution. The nervous system in this trauma response, we end up. Wallet. We can end up wallowing in it. Right. And. And that's really so incapacitating to anything else you want to do in life. Right.

So response, the trauma response is to think and believe that there's nothing I can do. And that's because we've been programmed to believe that we are not capable, even if we are.

Right.

Even if we have to believe or not.

That's right. Well, it's. Yeah, exactly. And this is where we tend to think that all of life comes down to one thing, which is, you know, the nervous system. Right. How you. What you believe is possible, true. What you believe about yourself, others, you know, all this, how you move through space, all of it is the nervous system. So then what about the imprinting of this into the tissues of the body. We see about the nervous system and the incapacity that it has. Talk to us about that.

Absolutely. And before I do that, I want to make sure that your audience understands that I'm making a clear distinction between the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system.

Okay.

I'm not talking about the central nervous system or our mind where we can think logically or we can think that we're thinking logically.

Yeah, that's. That's a. Yeah. Anyway, I would. I tend to think that. That even the. The frontal lobes are impacted by this. Certainly the autonomic system. Right. That's where you wallow. Right. Because you're not able to absolutely think your way out of it.

These programs are not something that we consciously choose. They are wired into our autonomic nervous system, which has made them just a habit and our default through neuroplasticity over time. Which is why then when we look at the healing journey and what it's going to take to rewire, it's going to take us utilizing and leveraging neuroplasticity in a positive direction. Because all we've had is neuroplasticity in a negative direction. Literally making our trauma responses become our habits.

That's right. Yeah. It's a reprogramming, right? It's really a reprogramming.

Yes. And at the tissue level, like you mentioned. So the next part of this study with the dogs is my favorite because it actually shows the tissue level that is required. Now, I grew up and as I went through conventional medical training, Jeff, I poo pooed so much of this because it wasn't hard science. I was one of those physicians that made fun of it. I'm sad to say that now.

Interesting.

So I have literally come full circle after experiencing things myself. And one of those experiences for myself was realizing how much my muscle memory, and that's what I'll call it, I'll call it a muscle memory. There was a muscle memory of panic and powerlessness after an experience that I had when I was 12, when someone broke into the room where I was sleeping and threatened to kill me, saying if I moved or made a sound, they would kill me. I didn't realize that by going along with it. I believed him at the time. I went along with it. So I paralyzed that. That had been a muscle memory that had formed in my tissues.

Yeah.

But what I finally realized was that as I would wake up at night sometimes and I would be in that same position that I had been in. When that person had approached me, I would panic. And it was just that muscle memory of when I'm laying on my right side and I'm just at this angle and it's all dark. Then this is what happens next. Someone threatens.

So it was postural for you. It's like when you're in that position. Okay. Wow.

For other people, it can be when they drive the same segment of the road where they had a car accident.

Right.

It's a very situational based on our senses because that's how our nervous system gathers information. So it's based on our senses, what we see, what we feel, all of that that it then associates. I know what this means. And it creates a muscle memory that we don't have logical control over. And so what I needed to do is once I started my own somatic experiencing training, I realized, oh, this is the stuff that I can reprogram now. I waited until I was confident enough in my skills that I could bring my body back to a sense of safety if I lost my sense of safety in this experiment. But I laid in that same position. I made sure that there were enough things that were different, Jeff, that my body would know, okay, I think we're not there anymore. I think that we're not the 12 year old girl who's laying in that bed.

So, like, the lights were on or.

The lights were on. It was during the day, I was not dressed in my pajamas. Like, I had changed enough factors that I felt like I could work on the story without going into the story.

Gotcha. Yeah, that's really interesting.

A lot of people go into the story to try to work on it and only re traumatize themselves in the process. And so what I did for the level is as soon as I started to feel that activation or what would lead to anxiety and panic, as soon as I started to feel that I. I was able to pause the story, be like, okay, Amy, what would you have wanted to do? What do you want to do right now? Oh, I want to turn over and I want to punch, I want to kick, I want to run away. And I did the movements that I would have wanted to do.

Okay.

And Jeff, that was what stopped all of those nighttime panics moving forward.

That's really interesting. Yeah. So it was actually taking action in an alternative direction.

Exactly. So now going back to this dog study, that's what they did with the dogs. And when I read this, Jeff, like, I jumped up excited because, like, here is the solution for this tissue level that so many people are living with and don't know that there's a solution. They took those dogs and they tried to figure out, okay, how do we get them reprogrammed back to be normal dogs?

Right.

And they used treats at first. They put all kinds of treats over on the other side. All they had to do is jump over the barrier, and they'd get their treats. Did the dogs jump over for treats?

No.

And every parent should hear that.

Yeah.

Are not the motivation. When I feel like my life is in threat.

Yeah.

When my life is not under threat. Okay, maybe that's a different story. But no, survival. Like, I don't know if I'm gonna make it. And so what they ended up realizing is what they had to do to successfully get these dogs back to jumping over walls and escaping danger was they had to move. Move their legs for them in the jumping movement. I mean, we're talking about trauma. Gets embedded as a muscle memory of powerlessness.

Yeah. It's in the nervous system. Right. Because the nervous system's moving the muscles, but it's. Yes, right. But it's imprinted in there, and it's. That's fascinating. You know, kind of going through the motions is what you're saying.

You actually have to do the.

You have to go through the motions. Right.

And this is why, Jeff, I get frustrated at how long we've had the emphasis on talk therapy.

Yeah.

Talk therapy is ineffective. I'm not saying that, but I am definitely saying that it is not going to be enough, and it's not going to be as effective as actually working with the body to create new muscle memories and neural pathways. Talking about it is not going to change how my body is programmed to respond when another stress comes.

I think the talk therapy helps us identify what needs to be addressed, and then we can talk through the strategies of how we're going to do it. But it doesn't get it done. It's actually in the movement. Right.

Exactly.

You know, that's really interesting. There are other people, too, that have spoken and written about how the fascial plane holds trauma and it can cause contractions of, you know, this hip doesn't work properly or it's rotated or that kind of thing, which over time, of course, can create wear and tear issues on the hip joint or the knee or the, you know, the back or whatever it is. And there are trauma release techniques, some using energy medicine and some using manual manipulation of the fascial tissues. But what I'm hearing from you is it sounds like Even those things need to be accompanied by the person actually doing the motion that they wanted to take when the trauma occurred. Right. Like whether it was to get up and run. Well, they need to actually get up and run.

Yes.

As part of the healing. Right. Maybe even after the massage or the energy work is done. Let's get up and run, right. To kind of reprogram that.

Exactly. We actually program with movement and action.

You know, it's interesting. I had a. I was in an automobile accident about 30 years ago. Coming up to an intersection, there was a semi truck in the. In the left turn lane. And so, you know, it was a big truck, and I had a green light and I couldn't see the intersection. I couldn't see the other side of the road, right. Because of this large moving van, but I had a green light. So I'm just going along at a normal speed. In fact, I was. I was extra good. I. I'm a fast driver in general, but I was actually driving back from a driver's education course that I had to take because of a speeding ticket. Right. So I'm. I'm basically. I just.

Irony of it, right?

I just went to Sunday school and I'm being a good boy. So I'm driving home, right? And a guy in a large Cadillac turns without a signal on his side, apparently, and turns right in front of me. It was impossible. It was impossible to miss him, right? The airbag went off, you know, the whole nine yards, right? And I. I steered the car and hit the back of his car, which spun this thing around and all of that. But I remember being fascinated by the airbag, right? It was like, wow, that was like the softest pillow in the middle of all this chaos, right? And then also the feeling the next time I drove through that intersection, feeling myself tense up and I had to, right? I felt myself tense up again. Not so much driving in general, although a little bit, but at that intersection in particular. And I had to kind of go through the motions of, no, I'm going to relax, I'm going to. This is not. This is not how I'm going to live my life, you know, and it was in that that I was actually able to, you know, after three or four passes through the intersection over a week or two, kind of move that out of my system. But there was actually a reprogramming, you know, even from something like that, you know, let alone a psychological trauma or some of other things that happen to people. So, yeah, I'm. I'm tracking what you're saying. And I think this insight about movement is really, really instructive in the reprogramming. Because I think a lot of therapies stop short of that. Right. Or therapeutic approaches stop short of that. So they don't really get the job done.

Well, you look at where that came from.

Right.

You look at Freud or Carl Jung, and they were all about analysis.

Yeah.

Let's just analyze you.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Which is. It's useful up to a point, but.

It'S very useful up to a point. Exactly.

That's it. So very interesting. What about.

I can take your car accident as an example of what are the two qualities that make a trauma be a trauma for our body?

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah. You had mentioned that you were just coming out of driver's ed, Right. So this idea of Sunday school, I'm being a good boy. So if I'm. If I'm being a good boy, the rules of life are that nothing bad happens to me.

There you go. Sure.

And so part of what makes a trauma a trauma is something that we can't believe is happening. It's unbelievable. This is not supposed to happen.

That's right.

We're supposed to happen. Well, I would have predicted it, and I would have been like, okay, all right. But there has to be. For something to be a trauma for our body, it has to be something that is unbelievable. I can't believe this is happening. The other aspect of it's unbearable. Meaning the sensations that it creates, the fear, the terror, maybe the physical pain, there's some type of sensations that it creates that makes those sensations unbearable. And. And it makes my mind want to escape. So trauma, how we survive. Really, how we survive. What feels unsurvivable is through a mental escape, which is why then people develop addictions or emotional eating or overworking or over exercising. They can be all ways of just trying to escape the inner world and its painful sensations.

Yeah. I think that's really interesting that it's. It has to be unbelievable. You know, you think about repetitive trauma that people experience. I suppose that it's kind of unbelievable initially. Does the unbelievable element of it sort of start to fade away when it's repetitive on some level, but you're still kind of locked into it?

Well. And I would. I would argue that the repetitive nature of it is partly what makes it unbelievable. I can't believe that this is still going on.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's. That's. Yeah. And that makes sense too. Yeah. Okay, Got it. But interesting.

Something like the Holocaust. Right? I see that in order for them, for the Jews to have survived a concentration camp for how long that those went on, you can see it in the pictures, they. They had to surrender, they had to submit because they thought they would have been killed.

That's right.

So their bodies took them into a trauma response because that is how our body helps us survive. The unsurvivable.

Yeah.

So the trauma response is not bad. It actually is what helps us survive the hardest things that we've gone through in our life. Yeah, it just comes at a cost. Comes at a cost to our mitochondria, comes at a cost to our telomeres, comes at a cost to our immune system. It comes at a cost. But it did allow us to survive.

You know, there's also brings to mind the idea of Victor Frankl, and I don't know if you ever saw a movie called I Think It's a Beautiful Life. Yeah, it was an Italian film.

Yes.

Where this father was actually coaching his little boy through being abducted by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp and all these other things. Right. And. And what was. What was beautiful about that film was the reframing that occurred. And even in Viktor Frankl's mindset, there was a reframing that was occurring. Yeah. So the ability to reframe, even in the moment, seems to also be an adaptive response. Right. To maintain your. Your sovereignty, your own agency, your own identity, in a way, even even though the external circumstances are telling you other. I think there's a mental skill that can be developed to help you do that. I remember doing it in soccer camp when the coaches were running us to death as freshmen. Right. And we laid back on this grassy knoll and they handed out popsicles. And I'm sitting there eating this Popsicle, and I thought, you know what? I don't care what they do to me. They can't ever take away my enjoyment of laying here in the sun and tasting this Popsicle, that you can never take this from me. Right. You could. You could kill me, but you could never take it from me. And so there was a sense of kind of transcending the moment in reclaiming my own agency and my own identity, if you will. So I don't know how that factors into this, but.

And I think this is where, like, what you bring to the world and especially how you lead your audience is so profound, because most people don't or can't get to that place. They are still stuck in that. No, there's no lessons for me to be learned. No there's no reframing that is possible. And why would I want to? And this idea that by reframing it, it doesn't mean that we're trying to just put on the rosy colored glasses and.

No, that's not it.

That is not reframing. But if I. When I'm going through something where I am being forced to do something that I would not want to be forced to do, do whether. Whatever that is. Let's just take the worst case scenario. Maybe we can say a worst case scenario would be sexual abuse and we actually reframe sexual abuse, where if I am trapped, I am pinned down and there's nothing that I can do. I've done my best and my best was not good enough. What if I could reframe even in that moment, Jeff, And I could say, you know what? I'm going to allow you to do this to me. Me, I don't like it and I will fight you when I can. But in this moment, rather than take away my power, I'm going to reframe and I'm going to say I will allow you to hurt me in this way.

Yeah.

And just that it helps me still maintain my sense of agency.

That's right.

And then it becomes a stress, but not a trauma that damages and follows me for the rest of my life.

Yeah. I think that's a really massive insight right there. This reframing, even in the. Even in the moment. You know, one of the things that I've cultivated in my own thinking is that absolutely everything that ever happens is an opportunity. Everything that happens, it's never a trauma, it's never a challenge. It's never a bad thing. In fact, nothing bad has ever happened to me. I've only had lots of different opportunities. Opportunities. Right. And. And so when you kind of get to that point, you're able to. It's not that you're denying what happened. You're. You're basically just reframing in a way that gives you agency and power over it to see, okay, well, what can I learn here? How could I do this? How would I have kept myself out of that situation had I had the opportunity to do it again? But there's no. There's no self flagellation. There's no shaming. There's nothing. There's just a sense of. Of opportunity. And do you want to talk a little bit about that? I think trauma victims feel a lot of shame and guilt many times. Right. That they were part of the. They were the reason for it on Some level. Right. This comes up all the time as well, I think. Yeah, well.

And the challenging aspect about trauma biology is that it does come with shame. You can't separate the two. And so trauma biology will create a sensation of shame, and shame will create trauma biology. So I have now been able to separate myself from that in a sense of when I start to feel shame, I don't identify with it. I just say, oh, isn't that interesting? My body has just gone into a trauma response, and then that allows me to work with it in a different way rather than just wallow in it like we talked about before. But you even started this session, Jeff, with this idea of, you know, what. What is. What is the purpose of life?

That's right.

And what if the purpose of life was for us to become our most authentic selves and even to learn what that is and who that is?

That's right.

And so we're all given experiences that will help us figure that out and become that. And so what I would. The words that I've used is being able to now look back at my life, at the hard experiences, and reframe them to. I chose that even to the point of. I chose the family that I was born into. I chose those parents because I needed them in order for me to even learn who I was, who I wanted to be, and to have the.

The.

The experiences that I needed in order to become my best and truest self.

Yep, I agree with that. I think it's kind of our karmic path. I think we do choose the circumstances we come into. And I think one of the concepts that I have kind of latched onto is that I think being born onto planet Earth is a little like being. A little bit like being born into an escape room. It totally is. Right. And it's. It's our goal to. Basically, because we are going to be imprinted with traumas and with joys. We're going to be imprinted with both. Right. Traumas and joys. And then our hero's journey, if you will, is to actually solve those traumas to where we can not only heal them, but transcend them and become grateful for them and then start to see them as the opportunities that they were and translate that into other things that we have yet to experience. Right. That's kind of how I think a.

Marker of health is our ability to hold both. Can we hold the hard and the joy?

That's right.

Can we hold the trauma and the beauty of life? Because there is both. Life is both. But the more trauma that a person is holding on to, the less joy they're going to be able to hold. The less beauty they're going to be able to hold. Their nervous system now has a filter that sees everything as potentially dangerous.

That's right.

Even if nothing is going wrong right now. But it might happen.

It certainly could. Oh, my gosh.

Just around the corner.

I know, corner, right. It's a sunny day, but oh, my gosh, there's a tornado coming. So, yeah, it's. It's really. It's really fascinating. I. I do think that getting to this place of. Place of being able to claim agency over the entire process is also really part of the healing in conjunction with the movement. And I don't think that's typically spoken of. I think it's mostly talked about, you know, kind of making peace with things or forgiving people or whatever, which is also part of the process. But it's falls far short of this conversation we're having about agency and really claiming your own identity and. And, you know, even claiming the fact that you have chosen this or you're going to allow it or whatever, as part of your own education, if you will. Right. So, yeah.

So let me share then, where our connection between agency and movement first happens in our life and where most people start to experience a trauma response and don't even know it. This is actually in our neurodevelopment. In our neurodevelopment. When you watch babies, the first movement that they're able to make on their own in terms of, like, I was here and now I'm over here. That movement happens as a belly crawl.

Yep.

And the way that they do that, thrusting forward on their belly because they can't even crawl on their hands and knees yet they put their big toe into the ground and they push with all of their might. And that big toe is actually where our sense of agency comes from. But, Jeff, based on our social. Social changes, I'll call them, babies are spending less and less time on their tummies.

Yeah, right, That's. And they're spending less time in the dirt, and they're spending less time where they need to be. Right in the grass and the dirt.

And this is where they experience that sense of agency. And so from very early on, they're already being programmed in their nervous system to think that, well, I can't do that. I can't do hard things because they're not getting enough time on their belly moving themselves. And this is also where their nervous system becomes coordinated and Balanced so that they can direct and be intentional about their forward movement. And I would argue that some of the younger generation, they're all over the place. They don't know how to focus. They don't know what they want to do. They're all over the place. And how much of this is. Because that's what their nervous system is like. Their internal nervous system never got the neurodevelopment that it needed to actually be organized in its agency and movement. And this is just an expression of their inner nervous system state.

Yeah. Two things come to mind. One is how important it is in that environment, as a parent, to be encouraging. When somebody's trying to crawl, it's like not helping them, but it's like, oh, great, wow, come over here. You know what's over here, Right? And you know, all those kinds of encouragement sort of stuff to let them.

Crawl as long as possible.

Absolutely.

Early walkers are not the smartest ones.

Yeah, there you go.

It's actually the longer crawlers that have the more balanced, centered, healthy nervous system development.

That's interesting. My kids walked at different ages, so that's fascinating. Yeah. And then this idea of agency, encouraging it. But I wonder if there's. If there's some sort of a test that can actually measure a person's agency. Is there something you're familiar with, like, you know, not a Gad7, but some sort of profile that gives. Or a personality profile or something that gives you an idea of how much agency somebody has or has developed or whatever?

So the way that I measure that is twofold. One is I look at the different areas in their life in which there are decisions to be made and are they moving forward? So in their personal life, do they get projects done? Do they have a sense of agency with being able to start and complete something? What about their career and their professional life? Are they showing that sense of agency? What about in their relationships? Do they avoid conflict? Do they. People, please, like, what's the relationships? Or are they showing. Able to show agency in their relationships of speaking up to say, hey, I'm feeling disconnected from you. Can we connect? So I'm looking for specific things, but here's what I also do, Jeff. I get them down on their tummy. Even as adults, I get them on their tummy because if I can analyze. Right now we're back to Freud and Carl Jung. If I can analyze their belly crawl, I can know their nervous system and their sense of agency.

Oh, that's interesting.

Most adults that I'm measuring their nervous system, did not have that time on their belly that the agency is wired in naturally. So I have them do those belly crawl exercises. They've rewired their nervous system.

Oh, wow.

Digging their big toe into the ground. And I want to see both big toes, because when a baby first starts out, they're homo lateral, so they only. You tend to use one side of their body.

Right, right.

And we've got to get it balanced, because that's what.

Ambidextrous. Yeah.

And so I have the adults on the floor doing tummy crawl exercises. Jeff.

Right. Like mud.

Easy to do trauma work.

If you come work with me, it's like mud wrestling. So.

Yes. But it's amazing to see how that tummy crawl. I can see the progression over time, and it is directly correlated with the progression of their sense of agency in the other areas of their life.

That is really fascinating because we talked about movement as part of the solution, and I was kind of thinking about movement, kind of like you were articulating when you would lay in bed during the day on your right side, you know, in a fetal position or curled up or whatever it was, and being able to kind of navigate from that. And I suppose that's part of it too. But do you think that you're getting down on the floor and crawling would have also helped? Or maybe it did help solve your trauma that you experienced when you were 12? Is that all true?

I see that how that probably played a role was me even feeling capable to do the rewiring.

So which part, the lane on your side in the daylight or the crawling belly crawl?

The belly crawl is what gives us that sense of agency.

Did you do the belly crawl before you tried getting on the. In the bed during the day? You did. Okay, so that was the initial therapeutic intervention.

Was the belly crawl one of the first for me? One of the first, yes.

Right. And do people ever get to a point where they progress to, you know, running or, you know, like, you would run away from something or, you know that. Yeah, yeah.

These are. These are the group exercises that I do with people.

Okay, cool. Very cool. Very cool.

Powerful.

Yeah, it sounds powerful. Sounds very powerful. Wow. All right, so let's see. I think we've covered most of the things that we were going to chat about here. Are there other things that you'd like to share with us that.

I think if I could just share one more thing with your audience, it would be this idea that really the trauma response and trauma biology is an energy problem.

All right, break that down for us.

Well, If I'm going to respond to a stress, and my ability to overcome that stress and stay out of the trauma response is based on my ability to respond, which means my ability to make energy. And so if I can't make energy, if I've got a toxin burden, if I've got mitochondrial compromise, I am low on nad. If, for whatever reason, if I can't generate the energy I need, my body's going into a trauma response. So when I recognize that for myself, I. One of the primary focuses on my biology for how do I improve my energy as a resource for myself. And so this is why I do a lot of things now for just energy. And for me, this is part of my mental health. This is part of me being my best self. This is part of me being trauma worked. I still do nad. For example, like, right now, I've got an IV in my arm because I'm still doing some home IV NAD treatments.

Okay.

For you, I know that. Right? Like, for you, that's longevity. For me, NAD is my trauma response.

I can give you a better way to do it than iv, actually.

What do you use?

We use oral precursors and an ozone sauna.

Okay.

To oxidize the NADH back to nad, and we load up on the precursors, and we also block CD38, which breaks down NAD. And we also upregulate NAMPT, which is the enzyme that recycles NAD. So when you do all that simultaneously and you jump in the ozone sauna, you're like Superman for about four days, and then you jump in again. So it's pretty cool. Yeah.

I have not done the ozone sauna before. I've done ozone, and I get actually regular treatments of ozone, but that's okay. Blood, ozone. I'm not an ozone sauna. This sounds like I should try this.

Yeah, you should. You should. It's good stuff.

It is good stuff. And I can see how that would uplevel my energy.

Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it works great. That and molecular hydrogen. And there's lots of tricks for energy. There's also products from a company called nes, which is now called Energy for Success. And we put their energy into our hydrogen tablets, which are pretty phenomenal. And then they have another product called Rejuve, that's also amazing. So it's R, E, J, U, V. But the interesting thing is you combine those. Like this morning, I was a little tired for some reason, and I drank a hydrogen and dropped some rejuven to a glass of water and drank it. Oh, my gosh. It was like two minutes later. It's like, oh, you know what? I think I'm going to go work out now. So it's. It's crazy. It's really. I mean, it's really crazy. And I think. I think some people are more sensitive in the sense that they sort of feel what's happening in their bodies more than other people. People. Right. Some people could be an atrial fibrillation and not even know it. And other people, it's like they feel a palpitation. So. But it's. Yeah, so there's that element, of course. But, yeah, this. This energy thing is for real. I think one of the other things that happens in depression is that the body really shuts down energy production. And I don't know if it's a chicken or an egg. It's probably a reinforcing positive feedback loop in a negative direction. Right. So. But that's a piece of it, too, I would think. Yeah.

Well, here's what we know, is that the vagus nerve, when it goes into the trauma response, it shuts down metabolism.

Yeah, yeah. You know what else happens when telomeres get short? They shut down mitochondrial function.

Look at that. Of course they did. Right. Like, that's. That is how the body is going to conserve itself.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

60 has been another great tool for me. I call them repair tools. Another great tool for me to be able to address the oxidative stress that accumulates.

So what is that? What's the tool?

Carbon 60.

Oh, carbon 60. Yeah, yeah, we like carbon 60. Yeah, yeah.

No, that's good for me, like, that's. That's where all this hope comes in. Right. So for me, trauma is not a heavy topic at all. It used to be because I didn't know what to do with it, and now I'm seeing that, like, this is the body, and we just are working with the body and its natural design. The trauma response is not bad. It's just what the body does to conserve energy. When it feels like my life is under threat, whether that's a threat because my telomeres are shortening or because I'm in a car accident and I might die, whatever the threat is, it's still the same threat to ourselves, and it's still the same response. And to be able to know that there's so much available to us to repair and that this doesn't need to be a life sentence for us, we can still very much be our best selves, even after some very hard life experiences.

Yeah. And that's. That's. That's the hope right there. If you're listening to this, that is not only the hope, it's the reality.

The reality.

It is possible to scale that ladder, climb that mountain, and actually pull yourself out of that valley of wallowing in it, so to speak. Yeah, Very cool.

No longer be that dog on the electrical mat.

That's right.

Everyone else jump over. But believing that you can't. You're not good enough. You don't deserve better.

Oh, my gosh. Right? All the stories we tell ourselves.

All the stories we tell ourselves.

Part of the hero's journey is actually dying. Dying to those stories. Right. So, yeah. So we become our unencumbered, fully expressed selves. That's how I stated. Yeah. Very cool. So how do people get a hold of you if they want to crawl around on the floor with you?

Biologyoftrauma.com is the best way to find me. I've got my new book there that they can find. I've got my programs, my professional training program.

Okay.

Biologyoftrauma.com is where they can also find my podcast.

Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, maybe I'll be a guest on your podcast.

I would absolutely love that.

Yeah, that'd be fun. Amy, thank you so much. I really appreciate all your wisdom and insight. And congratulations on your own hero's journey here. Right. So that's beautiful. Yeah.

Well, thank you. Like, I really respect you for the work that you're doing in the world and what you've brought to the world.

Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. We're trying to. We're trying to make a difference, and I think we are. So that's good stuff. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you.

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