#249 What's HIDDEN in Your Body from Past Trauma? with Dr. Aimie Apigian

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists, and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson, and today I'm really excited to introduce you to Dr. Amy Apigian. She is the author of Biology of Trauma, and she does her work online and in programs helping people to recover from trauma. Thank you so much for joining us today.

I am so excited to be here.

I know. I love talking about trauma and stress and helping all of us to recover from it, because most all of us are exposed to some form of stress or trauma, whether we realize it or not.

You know, I was just having a conversation today with someone, and we were talking about just that, how the body holds memories from the past that we don't even remember logically. It's not even in our conscious mind, and yet our body holds the memories of all of that. So this is such an important topic.

Donni and I would love to start by. Because you really draw a distinction. Distinction between stress and trauma. So I would love your definition of. Because sometimes we talk about them as the same thing, but they're slightly. They have.

They.

I would say they're. They're a way of understanding the differences in how they impact our body. Right. In our bodies. But tell me, tell us more. What's the difference?

Yeah. So in chapter one of my book, I lay out the five steps that the body takes when it goes into a trauma response. And that really clarifies for us that there is a difference between a stress response and a trauma response. Now, I'm going to cut to the chase, and I'm going to tell you that the difference between the two is what I call the critical line of overwhelm. And if you and I were to go to the gym and we were to work out and lift weights, we would lift weights to the point where it was stretching and building our muscles, but we wouldn't want to break our muscles. As a surgery resident, I actually had a patient come in who had broken his muscle. His bicep tendon was here in the middle of his arm, because as he was lifting weights, he had lifted too much.

That's like the Definition of going. And we sometimes think we're like superhuman machines, and we don't realize we have a limit like that.

We don't like to think that we have limits, and we haven't known our limits. And so it's been very easy for us to push and push and push. And thinking that, oh, I've got reserves. Oh, I've got buffer. Not realizing that, no, we're right there at that edge. And then it doesn't take much for us to cross that line, and we go into overwhelm. So in the body, in our biology, overwhelm is the equivalent to the trauma response. Stress is going to be, wow, this is hard. But I think I can do it. I think I can overcome, and I'm going to give it my best. But the moment that a person starts to feel like, I can't do this, or they have the thought this is too much, that is how they will know in their body. They have crossed that line, and their body is in trauma biology, not a stress biology anymore.

And I. I mean, the thing based on that definition, it means that many more people are experiencing trauma than we ever realized.

So many more. And even as a physician, this was my story. I did not know that my body was holding so much trauma because I. I didn't know to call it trauma. I had just thought, well, I've just been stressed for a really long time. And it wasn't until I got very sick. And not only was it a burnout, but I developed chronic fatigue, autoimmunity. I was anxious, I was depressed, I was overweight. I was already on two mood medications. And even with all of that, as a physician, I was like, trauma, me had trauma. Right.

But that wasn't something that was designed, defined in the medical textbooks.

Right.

So we didn't learn about that.

Even today, we still have this mindset of we're looking for a past event in our life that qualifies us as having had trauma. Where what we really should be looking at, Donnie, is do I feel overwhelmed in my life today? Not in the past today. And if I had asked that question, do I often feel overwhelmed? It would have been hands down, yes. And I would have known to do something different with my body. But until I knew that, I kept trying to do stress management. I kept trying to do self care, not realizing that that's not going to touch it when it's trauma, because trauma is deeper than stress. Mm.

It's such a good distinction. And I think so many of us are getting, you know, we're we're in that zone of stress, and it goes beyond that and goes deeper, like you're saying. And we. And then it's like it requires a different way of recovery. And we're going to get into some of your tips for recovery, but I'd love, first, let's just talk through that trauma response in the body and the vagus nerve, because I love. I love hearing you talk about the vagus nerve. And it's so I think it's important for people to recognize how this is what's really happening when it, when it shifts from just a day to day stress to. Now your system is going into a trauma response.

Yeah. Let's talk about those five steps. So the first step, the body always does, is a startle response. Now everyone is familiar with the startle. Someone jumps out of them and they jump. It's an uncontrollable response. You don't have control over startling. It's like going into the doctor and the doctor tapping your knee with the reflex, you know, hammer, your knee is going to jump. You can't control it. So that's what the start of response is. And that's always the first step. Now, what's important to know is that if we're going to go all the way into the trauma response, it's really helpful when we come back to process these events that we understand what was it that startled me? And the. The question that we asked to determine that is when was the first moment that I felt that something might be wrong? That was our startle moment. And for so many of us, we have a pretty good gut intuition that tells us something's off here, Something is wrong in this situation. This person is going to hurt me. And we can often look back and say, I knew it and I still didn't do anything. So we want to just be able to identify that the startle response is part of the steps that eventually lead us into trauma. But what happens next is that when we're startled, then our body is going to move into a stress response. And the stress response is taking action. Stress means action. And so this is where I already mentioned it, where we think, oh, my goodness, this is a big problem. This is a big challenge. This is a big danger. I need to do something. And we take action. And our whole biology is changing to help us take action. Our blood is being moved from our gut over to our muscles and our brain so that we can move and we can think. All of our mitochondria and our cells are making more Energy. And it happens instantaneously because of how our nervous system is designed. And our startle and our stress responses are communicated through the sympathetic nervous system. That is a chain of nerves that runs down the sides of your spine, actually. And it's such a fast communicating system that it immediately can turn us into moving in response to a danger, like getting out of the way of an oncoming car, even before our brain can consciously recognize there's an oncoming car. That's how fast that sympathetic nervous system is. But here's where it can turn into trauma.

And the next step is what I call the wall. And it's hitting the wall. And so imagine if we were driving a car and we are trying to outrun a tornado or a hurricane. And so we're racing. I mean, we're driving pedal to the metal. And then we hit a wall, and there's no possible escape around the wall. We look for a way out, we look for a way over, we look for a way through, and there's no way around. We've come to a wall, but the danger is still there. And now what this wall does is this wall traps us. And we feel powerless. That is the moment that our body, our nervous system makes the decision. We need a different survival strategy. Because if I can't outrun this, if I can't out fight this, if I can't outsmart this, then I need a different survival strategy. And the survival strategy is the trauma response. And it's the response to shut down, which may seem counterintuitive to shut down in order to survive. But let me walk you to it, because there's two more steps. The first step after hitting that wall is what we call the freeze response. Now, many people may be familiar with the freeze. They may have heard it in terms of fight, flight, or freeze. It's actually not true. Because as we've talked about, fight or flight is in the sympathetic. High energy stress response happens first. If your body responds with a freeze, you are going into the trauma response. There's no way to freeze and then come back out to stress. Like that is where you've crossed that critical line of overwhelm and there's no turning back once you've crossed that line. You're going to need different strategies to come out and heal and recover after a trauma response than a stress response. So the freeze response. Why would we freeze when we most need to move and do something? Why would we freeze? Here's the reason. It's the shock of realizing we're trapped and Powerless.

And it hits us like a shock. It's a heart shock. And it stops us in our tracks as we realize I'm.

I'm at the mercy of whatever this is against me, there's nothing I can do. And that's where the shame starts to hit because we start to have this internal message of, well, clearly I'm not good enough. Clearly I'm not enough. Because I couldn't respond. I wasn't big enough, I wasn't strong enough, I wasn't smart enough. And as I think of that feeling of feeling trapped and powerless, Donnie, I think of so many people who feel that way in their life, in their marriage, in their work, in their relationships, with their life responsibilities.

Absolutely.

They're not equating that with trauma. They're still calling that stress, but that is not stress. And the impact that that has had on us is that there are things happening in our biology with trauma that unless we recognize that it's trauma and not just stress, we don't know to support our bodies in that way. And you may not see it overnight, you may not even see it next week, but a year from now, 10 years from now, that's when you're going to get diagnosed with the autoimmunity. That's when you're going to get diagnosed with an inflammation based condition. That's when you're going to. Your body just can't keep up anymore. It may develop HPV or it may have a flare up of HPV because it can't hold all that stress and it's shutting down.

And so this is this, this is, this key is recognizing when we find ourselves in this freeze response.

Yes. And feeling powerless. Feeling powerless, sometimes even just getting a diagnosis makes us feel trapped and powerless. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. So once we feel trapped and powerless and we have that freeze step, the last step, the fifth step of the trauma response is the shutdown. And this is when we will feel our energy literally just deflate. It can feel like someone's pulled out the batteries from our backpack. It just is this heaviness that settles over our body and it's so uncomfortable. And so this is where many people will find themselves. Fighting this with caffeine, fighting this with emotional eating, or finding this with trying to exercise more because they feel lazy, they feel tired, they feel exhausted, and it must be that I need to exercise more and lose more weight. And so we have all these strategies that we develop to deal and live with basically being in a chronic trauma response and being shut down, not Realizing that our body needs very specific things to come out of that shutdown. And, and then it will be able to engage its own healing strategies, and we won't need all of these other strategies just to try to function.

Yeah, it's such a good point. It's true. I think when we look, we realize this and we look around, we see how much we're. We're relying on other substances and activities just to try to keep us going. And because it's almost like, first of all, we didn't realize that that could be trauma. Second of all, it's not being addressed in the standard doctor's appointment. And third, because sometimes these things that help almost seem too simple. You know, it almost seems too simple to just realize, oh, and you're going to teach us this, but how to reconnect with my body and help my body. Because that's the key, is we need to process the trauma. Right. How do we process the trauma to get out of that state?

Yeah. And the key is actually being able to give our body the direct message that the danger is over. And the problem is, is that we live in a world, in a society. We've created our lives to constantly give messages that we're still in danger, not that the danger is over. We are safe and our bodies can relax, rest, and recover. I call this the reset. I know that you talk about this in your. In your book. Right. With the reset, with your health. And our nervous system needs a reset when it's gone into a trauma response. It needs specific things to know that the danger is over. And if it doesn't get that message, it stays in that loop. And it loops between stress and trauma, stress and overwhelm. So high anxiety, high energy, and then the collapse. And we've got to be able to get our body out of that loop. But the only way to do that is to give it these direct messages of safety. Now, there's different levels that it needs, this message of safety. So there are three levels in which trauma impacts us, and so three levels that need a specific message of safety. One would be our mind. We know this, right? And so we can look at the thoughts that we have. Am I allowing thoughts that tell myself that I'm not safe?

Now, the thoughts are never going to be enough, though, because our thoughts are actually fed by our body sensations. They are created by our nervous system. But that is one piece. And even some of the narrative work that I help people do to process works around that, explaining the story of what happened. And when we went into the trauma response in a very.

Specific, tangible ways that our brain knows, oh, there's an ending to the story. Otherwise if there was no ending to the story, Even as adults, we can still feel like a small child who's trapped and powerless by an older adult who's hurting them. So there actually needs to be a clear, let me tell you the end of the story. So that's the mind and then there is the body. And now with the body, I'm actually talking about our muscles and our self defense movements. Because when we're in a stress response and we're supposed to be moving, I'm supposed to be doing self defense movements that will help me overcome a danger. But if for whatever reason I was unable to overcome, then some of my movements got blocked. And our body remembers that. And this is why, if we have had a car accident that we haven't actually processed and healed, we can be driving along the same road and we can feel our body having a response because it's our body and our body's somatic memory and the tissues that's responding to that. So we actually do need to still work with our movement and specific self defense movements. Breathing is never going to be enough because we actually need to engage in the self defense movements that were blocked and ineffective at that time. But here's the piece that most people miss. They miss the biology piece. Donnie and I know that you know how important the cellular piece is. Because when our body has had trauma and it hasn't had that reset to safety, our biology stays in a state of fear.

It does, it just keeps on repeat, repeat, repeat.

Exactly. And I say, you know, we got to resolve or we're going to just repeat. We've got to rewire or we've got to repeat. And so looking at, well, what is the impact still on my biology? Are my cells getting the message that the danger is over, or for them is the danger not over? Maybe they're still depleted with essential nutrients, maybe their mitochondria still has compromise and toxins, even just oxidative stress. It's built up from past stress and trauma that is impacting its ability to make energy and all of those. Our own biology is a message to our nervous system that we're still in danger because we don't have the nourishment and the reserves that we need. And that will be another reason why we just can't overcome our past. And our biology stays in the state of fear, which means that our thoughts will stay in a state of fear, our Emotions will be ones of insecurity and. And we will find ourselves doing things that we don't want to do anymore, like stress eating and not be able to stop ourselves because our body is literally saying, I know you don't want to do this anymore, but I need this to survive. And our survival patterns will always override any logic that we try to throw at it.

Having optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels is essential for health and longevity. And yet the stress in the present and in the past can affect our cortisol and adrenaline levels, causing them to be too high or too low. The thing is that we're not all affected by stress in the same way. So over the past two decades, I've been researching and discovering how to help my patients recover from stress. And I've identified the five stress types, which are the five common patterns of disruption in cortisol and adrenaline levels. The reason why this is so important is because the treatment is different. When cortisol is too high, we use different herbs, nutrients and other modalities to bring levels back to optimal than if the levels are too low. So that's why I, through research, developed the Stressed Type quiz, which allows you, in under two minutes to discover what likely your cortisol and adrenaline levels are. So then you can make decisions about which herbs, nutrients and other healing activities to choose to help optimize your cortisol and adrenaline again and improve your health now and into the future. Just go to stresstypequiz.com where you can, can take the quiz and take it from there.

So it's like these mixed signals that end up keep on going. So that's why it's, you know, some. If someone's tried and they're like, I've been trying to do breath work or meditation and I. Or I've been trying to shift my mindset or, you know, maybe you tried a couple things. But what you're saying is if we don't address the mind, the body and the biology, then we're not, we can't really expect that we're going to create real change and real healing from trauma.

Exactly right. It goes in layers and just addressing the superficial layer is not going to address the actual pattern and the root that's driving that. So we've got to go to all the levels and then Donnie. And then that's when, like, we really become a new person. It's not that we're, we've. We've developed new habits. New habits still require thought and energy to happen.

It's kind of just in a superficial level.

Yeah, but it takes so much energy. What we really want is we want new ways of responding to problems and change. We want a new way of navigating life to become our default where we don't have to think about it. It just is who we are now. And I think of so many people who come to work with me and what they say is that I don't recognize who I am anymore. I don't like who I am anymore. I, I need to find a way back to my authentic self. And I'm not even sure that I've ever been that authentic self can help me. And it's this process, Donnie, of learning how to get out of our mind, out of our thoughts that create more fear and more anxiety and actually create a true sense of safety which does require that we also address the biology. And so we, we come back to. It's going to take a whole body approach. It. You know, we used to talk about mind, body. Well, mind and body are not going to be enough anymore. We've got to also bring in the biology for us to truly create that inner felt sense of safety where when you sit with yourself and you're still.

You feel safe in your body. That's what we're going towards. We're not looking for. Well, I've said my mantras. I've told myself that I'm safe today. But is that how your body feels? Because how our nervous system perceives ourselves, others and the world is how it's going to be driving our health. Not what you tell yourself.

And it's not something that just shifts overnight. It's something that we need to like come back to each and every day. Right. That's why you, in your processes that you guide people through and a lot of your, you this you offer online so people could access from anywhere.

Right.

It's like step by step, little by little, creating these shifts.

Yes, you bring up a really important point because as we're working with the nervous system, one of the principles of neuroscience is consistency. That's why there's data around. How long does it take to change a habit? It doesn't overnight because that's not how the nervous system works. The nervous system thrives on consistency. And anything that we do consistently, our brain, our nervous system is like, oh, I guess this is our new way of living life. Okay, well let me make that a habit. Let me make that my default. So we can't just do something overnight. And I will say that there are exercises that are body Based that will still shift your nervous system under two minutes. But here's the thing, Donnie. I can teach you those, and that's what I teach in my courses. But unless you do that every day, it's going to keep reverting back to your fear place because that's your default. And so, yes, I can teach you an exercise. And in under two minutes, I guarantee you your nervous system will shift to a sense of safer. Safer. But it won't stay there.

It won't stay there because all the.

Other mechanisms are flipping the switch back on again. The light switch just goes.

So you need both. You need both. You need something that you can do in the moment when you start to feel like you're losing your cool, but you also need something that you can come back to and do several times a day and every day to build that consistency that your nervous system needs to make this your new default. And then once you have those exercises, then we bring in some of the biology. We may need to bring in magnesium, we may need to bring in zinc and B6 selenium, antioxidants. I don't know. Depends on your past, depends on your health conditions. There's a lot that we can leverage in our biology, though, to shift it to one of safety. And then we are eventually going to need to do some work around the narrative that we tell ourselves about ourselves. I know this is one of your specialties. You are so be able to tell someone, hey, did you hear what you just said about yourself? Are you sure that that's what you want to be telling yourself? And being able to work with the mind level so that at the end of the day, we're able to then use all of those skills and actually process an event from our past that maybe was really traumatic. And once we can do that, then we have an ending to the story. But what I see happening, Donnie, is that people are trying to process events from their past without doing this foundational work first. And what happens is that they dive into those stories, and the stories are traumatizing, and we end up re experiencing the same emotions as we did back then and not having a way to. To change the end of the story. And so anyone who's walking out of their therapy sessions exhausted, maybe stopping at the store and buying alcohol, wine, or sweets because they need to kind of take the edge off after a therapy session, you're doing it too much, too fast. You're putting your body, your nervous system back into overwhelm, actually reinforcing the very same responses of shutdown that you're trying to change. Instead, what we need to do is we need to learn these basic skills for ourselves of how do I shift my state right now? Oh, I'm starting to feel stressed. How can I bring myself back to a sense of safety? Oh, I'm crossing that line of overwhelm. How do I bring myself back so that my inner state is one of safety? And then when, with those skills, then we can use those skills when we go to process a story, because if the story starts to become too much, we can pull ourselves back and say, that's enough for today. My body has had enough for today. And when we honor that, when we know how to work with our body, befriend our body and understand its messages, we're able to actually do so much more in therapy because we're not overwhelming ourselves and then dealing with the collapse and the shutdown that comes afterwards.

It's such a, it's such an important thing that you're talking about here to just say, to recognize we need just like anything we do, really, if you're, you're not going to just go run a marathon, you're gonna, you're gonna train, you're gonna do, you're gonna get, you know, do your basic, you know, foundational support first. And then when you, you know, when, like you're saying when you go into, then the trauma work, you have these tools to help you. Why go in and do trauma work when you don't have that? Because then you're going to re. Traumatize and not get anywhere. And I think that a lot of times, I mean, like you mentioned of a lot, little bit. There's so many tools out there. Like, there's different types of therapy, there's different types of somatic work, there's different types of. We can find. Thank goodness. I'm glad there's so many different opportunities for people to do emotional and trauma healing now. However I want, I'm glad for us to say, hey, because a lot of patients will say to me, where do I start? And I've. Or I've tried this and I wasn't getting anywhere. So to be able to say, hey, this might be why you felt like you weren't getting anywhere because you didn't have a foundation and you didn't, you hadn't started, started to learn your how to listen to your body's limits.

Is that what you're saying?

That is exactly what I'm saying. And one of the most helpful masterclasses that I teach is called the essential sequence. And that's what you're talking about right now, Donnie, where we don't just jump in. There's a process. When we follow the process, we end up being able to do it safely. And we actually heal rather than re. Traumatize ourselves. And there's three steps to this essential sequence. And the third step is this step of expansion where we've built our foundation and now we're able to start expanding, expanding our capacity. That's the phase in which we start processing things because we have the capacity for it. But so many people are going in and trying to live in a house that doesn't have a foundation. It's gonna collapse in on you. Yeah. Yep.

And. And talk us through. Like, what does that mean? Because I know you use some of internal family systems, like what's sometimes called parts work, sometimes what's called somatic therapy, you know. So would you say you're. You're. You've studied all of these and you're kind of integrating and drawing from them to see how you can use all these tools together?

Yes. And when you say that, it takes me back to my story. So this is what I learned in order to first help my son. I adopted a son during medical school and then myself. And this is not normal medical school training to also do these trauma therapy trainings. But what happened is that as I decided to become a mom to a son who was very traumatized in the foster care system, and before being placed in the. In the foster care system, I saw that the traditional therapies were only making him worse, really activating stuff. It's like going in and stirring the story, but no resolution. And at 4, at 5, he was already talking and trying to kill me. That's how. That's the degree of reactivity that we're talking about here. And so I felt it was a necessary step for me to go learn. What am I missing? What am I not understanding about trauma and therapy? So I can help him. Because the practitioners don't seem to. To know the missing piece for him. What is the missing piece for him.

Versus just giving him something that's sedating. Right. Like that's the thing. So often it's a medication that's gonna just to date the person, but not really understand what's. What needs healing.

That was also offered. You are right. Medication was offered. And I said, no, that's not a problem for him. He doesn't have a medication deficiency. He has a trauma problem. And I'm looking for the missing piece for his trauma healing. And it took me a long time and I wish that I would have known now then because it would have saved him so much time and heartache. So at the very end, the last piece that he needed was this parts work and was so powerful for him that it shifted within five days. And he went from still being very reactive, not able to look me in the eyes. Anytime that I would get close, he would punch me, he would kick me, he would bite me, to reaching out to hold my hand and look in my eyes and tell me, thank you, I love you. And that was due to the parts work combined with this narrative work that I'm talking to you about, where we're actually drawing in like the startle response and the stress response and the freeze and the wall and the shutdown, the actual trauma steps that the body goes into. And so the combination of those was the final piece for him. When I saw how powerful it was for him, I went and got trained myself. I'm like, I need to know, like, what, what did you do? Why is it so powerful for the nervous system that it was able to shift someone who was so stuck into just uncovering his beautiful heart? And then when I got sick myself and I discovered, oh, he's not the only one with trauma. I actually also have been holding trauma. I just didn't know it then that's when I needed some other pieces that he had not needed as much of. It really needed the somatic piece. And as I started getting trained in somatic experiencing and other somatic work, what I found was that my biology was holding me back, meaning the brain fog, the mental fatigue. I would be getting flare ups of, you know, joint pain and my gut issues. And it was so bad and I was so. It was so hard to even get through the training. And then I, oh, like I'm actually getting triggered by my patients sometimes too. And my body is responding. It's not just my thoughts, it's not just my emotionals. Like my body is physically responding with sensations and symptoms. So that's when I really had to start learning this biology piece because I need to be able to do this kind of therapy. I need to be able to do this kind of training and have my body not shut down.

So much. I learned about the brain inflammation and how it's connected with the trauma response. I learned about the leaky gut and the gut inflammation and the immune system and the mast cells and the histamine and the biochemical imbalances. I mean, I learned and I Had all of them, by the way. I literally had all of these biology factors. And it gives me so much compassion for how I lived, just with so much burden. No wonder I was having to push so hard just to function and survive. And so knowing that and now having the tools to start kind of addressing each of these biology pieces, the mitochondrial compromise, the oxidative stress, all of these pieces, one by one, each. As I addressed each one, another layer of my trauma healing would open up. Donnie. Because I need to go deeper.

So they kind of like go. You know, it's like this, right? It's like, okay, I do this, and then this comes up. And it comes up when your system's ready. Right. I always remind patients, just like, if it's coming up now, it's because now your system's ready.

Exactly. And that's the beauty of being able to integrate these pieces. And so that's why I do that for people, is we've got to integrate the parts work, because the more parts work we do, the more. The more that it opens up the body and what it needs. And guess what? The more somatic and body work we do, the more it opens up parts work, and the more it opens up the biology, and the more biology work we do, the more capacity we have for the somatic work and the parts work so that they end up feeding each other in a positive cycle that she creates momentum for our healing rather than the downward spiral that they are now when they're all stuck in that biology of fear.

Absolutely. I. I can. I. You know, I've. I've been researching this and writing about it for. For over a decade, more than that. And I. I'm so excited to get to talk with you about it because it's. It is. It's. I get so excited, too. Like, now we're like, oh, my gosh, we're not. Just. Because sometimes we talk about trauma as if it's like a rock that's just going to be a boulder that's sitting there forever, and it's just set in stone, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I think a lot of people have been even told that or had the perception of that. And now we're saying, actually there's things we can do, there's things you can do that are actually working to help people heal. And it's not that it's a overnight fix or a single pill or something. It's a. It's a. It's a complex process. But the fact that we can actually Heal from trauma is the exciting part.

It is the exciting part. There are so many things that we can do, and when we're stuck, there are specific reasons why we're stuck, and we can find those reasons and resolve those reasons. And so that's what brings me back to the essential sequence that I teach. The essential sequence is what allows us to know, where am I in this sequence? When I know where I am, it allows me to know what is my next best step. Is my next best step to process some stuff from the past or. No, that is not my next step. My next step is just this. But it allows us to be able to know what to do and in what order that will allow our body to start to unblock these things that have been keeping us stuck.

So I'm going to make sure we have the link to your book, the Biology of Trauma, and also your program because. Because you have also free challenges that you lead online and also group programs that you lead. So I'll make sure that we have that below. So anyone who's like, okay, I want to go Learn more from Dr. Amy that you have that information. Is there anything that, I mean, I know we're short on time, but is there anything that you might share that people can either do or know that get them started in this process?

Yes. And actually, given. Given that we're running short on time, I'm going to say that I have things over on my YouTube channel and my Biology of Trauma podcast, and they will find different, different elements. So if they want to learn about parts work, I have that. If they want to learn more about the somatic, I've got that. If they've never heard about the biology piece and they want that, then they can find those things specific. So I've got resources there on my YouTube channel and my podcast that they can go and find.

Okay, awesome. So we'll put that information as well. Thank you so much for joining us today at How Humans Heal. I'm so excited about the work you're doing and sharing with the world, and I'm so glad that everyone listening is going to get to learn more from you. So thanks again and thanks everyone for joining us here at How Humans Heal. Make sure to subscribe and leave your comments and join me for the next episode.

Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdani.com.