The Biology of Trauma: Why All the Right Things Aren’t Working in Menopause

If in spite of following all the rules, of doing all the things, changing your diet, checking your gut, doing the exercise, it's still not working, and you or your trainer, your physician, we all think it needs to be working, this might be an episode that would be valuable to you. And no matter what, if you are feeling physically you're at your wonderful self, you are a woman who influences 3 generations, I think you will still get some value out of this. So stay tuned.

I'm Debra Atkinson, and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness and menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols. While living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause-and-beyond fitness membership in the world, Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve.

So just to get a little personal in this one, I was at a women's retreat within the last year, and one of the sessions that the leaders brought to us was a sound healing. I'd never done one before. I really had no experience, no expectations, no concerns. But during the session, I experienced tears coming to my eyes, rolling down my cheeks. I came back to the circle with everyone after, mystified, actually realizing that my biological father had come into my mind during that session and thought about him over the years much at all. That was it. During the interview, actually at the end of the interview with Dr. Amy Apigian, my guest today, she shared with me that, you know, sometimes the body is just amazing and you never know what it is that might bring something up for you and help emotion run through you. So in my case here, might have been the music, the peace, the quiet, the safety that I felt in that room with women who bonded very quickly for a few days, were there together in a very safe place. And, you know, it was the tears and the way that it just needed to apparently come out. So is that stored trauma? You might be asking, is stored trauma something we all deal with on some level? And is it something that could be limiting our ability to reach a certain physical health goal or fitness goal? Is it related to what is blocking our ability to lose weight, to heal our gut, or on a bigger level, is it putting us at risk for more serious health issues? We're unpacking all of this today, and if all the right things aren't working in menopause for you, it may go beyond hormones and gut health. My guest is a returning favorite, Dr. Amy Apigian. She is a leading expert in trauma attachment and biology and the founder of The Biology of Trauma. As a double board certified physician in preventative medicine and addiction medicine with a PhD in biochemistry, Dr. Amy Debra Atkinson integrates her medical expertise with specialized training in trauma therapy to address biological patterns that maintain chronic health conditions. After her own health crisis led her to discover how stored trauma was blocking her recovery, she developed frameworks that bridge functional medicine with trauma science. Through her programs and her upcoming book, The Biology of Trauma: How the Body Experiences and Holds Pain, Fear, and Overwhelm, and how to heal. Dr. Amy helps people understand why common health issues persist despite perfect nutrition and lifestyle changes and provides practical tools for complete healing at the cellular level. If Dr. Amy sounds familiar, she was indeed a guest on the What, When, and Why to Exercise for Women Over 40 Summit in these past couple of years. She's a podcast favorite. She's always got something new and a new perspective to offer. If you're ready for it, it is here, and I can't wait to introduce you. Here we go. Dr. Amy Apigian is in the house. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here and to have this conversation.

All right, I— first of all, this is— I think I said this last time I interviewed you, and I've interviewed you, I think, for the podcast as well as for a summit. I think every time this is a little bit hard for women to grasp, but I think it's a hard topic to unpack. And I want to honor every listener who's with us right here, knowing that one reaction might very well be, well, this isn't me, like, I don't remember anything traumatic happening to me. So first, I guess I want to start there. So Everyone knows this may, this may be for you too. Do we have to remember something traumatic for it to actually have happened to us?

You know, what a great question. And it's true that there are so many reasons why we can think that this doesn't apply to us. And yet at the end of the day, what I have seen more women do is minimize what they have been through and sometimes just think that what they went through was something stressful. And they don't understand why they haven't been able to get over it, move on. Or they think that they have gotten over it and moved on and not realizing that, oh, when I, when I do that, when I go eat that chocolate, when I, when I just let loose on my husband, or I lose it with my grandkids, whatever it is, like that's actually this stored trauma talking. So we just haven't known how to, how to recognize it. But it's so true that when we look back, we do not need to remember an event to have had it impact us. And one of the fundamental truths about the body is that the body remembers everything. The body is like a history book. It's recording everything. And yes, this gets recorded even into our muscle memory, but also our immune memory, our neurological memory. Our body is a history book and it will remember things even if we don't consciously remember it.

So glad you said that. And I want to ask this as a follow-up: are both physical and emotional kinds of trauma— do they manifest in the same way in the body? And maybe as a follow-up or precursor in answer to that, we should define trauma. What is it?

It sounds like where we need to go, right? What is the definition of trauma? Because actually, Debra, once we understand what trauma is, how the body experiences trauma, how it defines trauma. It clarifies that it doesn't matter whether it's emotional, psychological, or physical. There's one way in which the body decides this is a trauma. So what is that way? It really comes down to our capacity against the demands placed against us. It comes down to as simple as that. So let's take that example. If I have a ton of responsibilities on my plate, if I am trying to run a practice, if I'm also trying to work with my kids, but my weight has also been going up and I'm really scared about my weight because of how I look to other people, and maybe I'm afraid that my husband will leave me because maybe he did have an affair earlier, and I've just got that background fear of he's gonna leave me if I'm not pretty, like And all of that is demands that are placed on us. And we carry demands all the time. Unconsciously, they are demands that we are carrying. And so our body is constantly assessing, "Whew, look at all this stuff that I'm carrying. Do I have the capacity to carry this?" Even as a physical trauma. So I remember as a general surgery resident, I had a patient come in. This is actually a story that I share in my book, there. His name was Ken, and he came in and he had been to the gym and he had popped his muscle. So his biceps muscle had disconnected from the shoulder and was down in the middle of his arm. You teach fitness, right? Like, you teach capacity fitness. You can't push your body more than what is physically capable. And what Ken had done is that he had tried to lift a weight that was too heavy, and pop, his muscle was like, I don't have the capacity for that. And so rather than growing and stretching it breaks. And that's what can happen to us too. We break when we have too many demands on us than what we feel we have the capacity for. And so whether that is a physical capacity— and I have seen this happen in surgical patients, in car accidents, or in physical exercise, where we're pushing our body in some physical way beyond our capacity— it's the same internal experience as when we have an emotional experience where we feel that the emotions that we are having to confront and to feel feel too much for our capacity. And when something feels too much, there's two reasons for a trauma response: too much too fast, as in the case of Ken in the exercise room, too much too fast, right, and we break, or too little for too long. And this is where I think so many of your audience would fall into this category as well: too little for too long, where because I've had too little of something that I need for just too long, I don't have the capacity to continue to carry the same burdens that I've been carrying. I'm taking care of my mother. My, you know, daughter is on drugs. Like there's so many burdens that we carry. We only have a certain capacity. So it's fascinating to realize that the body considers psychological burdens, emotional burdens, and physical burdens in the same light. And it's always assessing, do I feel like I have the capacity for this or do I not?

Wow. So much here. So, you know, I think about like childhood trauma. Is the body keeping score? Like, is there— like, this is never like the game over, now we're starting again fresh, or it's just a cumulative effect? And so at any point we could reach tipping point.

That's a great question. And the body is the historical book, so it is keeping record of everything. And here's the challenge. We have not been taught how to— I want to use the word complete— how to complete a trauma response, which means that we're just accumulating more and more. I want you to think of it as taking a breath. So the body takes a breath in, it inhales, but then it has to complete that breath, and it completes the breath by exhaling. If we get stuck on the inhale, well, that's called COPD, that's called emphysema, and people have that disease where they're not able to actually get out all of the air that they breathed in, and it starts to get trapped. And then it starts to get scary, and it starts to be a life threat because I can't actually breathe anymore because I'm, I'm stuck. I didn't complete that breath to be ready for the next one. So our body works in rhythms. It works in cycles. It works in completing different responses. And the trauma response is a normal one. It's a natural one. Every single human being has had a trauma response because it's just what our body does to protect us under certain circumstances.. It's just, are we completing those so that we can return back to a sense of safety? Most people are not returning back to a sense of safety, Debra, which means that their body is stuck feeling that the danger is still there. And in that mode, their whole body, their whole physiology is still responding in survival mode rather than being able to, as you teach your people, right, after a physical exercise, you rest. You recover, you reset, and then that allows you to go into the next fitness exercise being resourced, being ready, and being at your best rather than going in feeling depleted because you never recovered from your last exercise workout.

Okay.

Wow. So I want to ask you this. So is this a multitude of things? Is this usually Is it an injury, like it's spot-specific potentially? Is it a condition? Is it all of the above? Is it inability to sleep? And, and then of course, all those questions I just asked you, you're talking to a bunch of midlife women who are dealing with that anyway. How do we sort through this?

And this is, this is, um, I want to say it can be a curse. Right? Because in midlife, the hormone changes that are happening are exaggerating what is inside of us already. And, Debra, it can also be the best time to do our trauma work because the hormones— say more.

Yeah, exactly.

They're surfacing things, and it allows us to see aspects of ourselves, patterns that we do that we haven't seen before. And so, so it's a great opportunity if we want to take it to, um, learn more about ourselves in a way to actually do something about it. So the way that this manifests is all of that. And when we think of the body getting stuck in survival mode, always thinking that there's a danger, then we look at, well, how do I live my life? Do I live my life in a way that I'm always anxious? I'm always feeling like I'm behind. I'm always feeling like I'm not enough. I'm always feeling like there's There's more to do. I can't rest. Is that how I'm living my life? Am I living my life that suggests that I am always in a state of danger? And for most women, yes.

Oof.

Wow. Is this more true of women than men?

You know, it's, um, I'm going to say yes and no. Women seem to be more aware of what they're doing, and they don't like being this anxious. They don't like emotional eating. They don't like exercising to just manage their stress and to try to be thin enough, to be— to feel like they're good enough. Men don't always, always struggle with those beliefs about themselves to the same degree that women do. But I will tell you that in my experience, they still are dealing with an internal sense of, am I good enough? Am I enough? Am I strong enough? Am I smart enough? Am I, am I going to make it? So they do have their own challenges. And what is different for men is that they also tend to not express things as much. Now, this can be for a variety of reasons. Oftentimes it just comes down to their upbringing. But we know that emotions need motion. Emotions need motion. Emotions need physical motion. So when we are not as physically active, we are not going to be able to move through our emotions as effectively either. And this is where sometimes men can have the advantage because they tend to be more athletic. They tend to be more active. And so us women can sit and worry, whereas men are out doing something. And that even that can help move through a lot of the adrenaline that their danger mode is creating, minimizing some of that impact on their body.

I'm so glad you said that, and I love that. And I think a mutual friend of ours, Dr. Sharon, also says, you know, it's moving can just really help move that emotion through you. Like big emotions, you can, you could purge them a little bit or let them kind of accelerate the life that they're going to have, but maybe express it in a bit more positive way. Although I'm sure that that could backfire too. I mean, yes, you know, I mean, it's like overeating versus overexercise, you know, can land on someone very differently too, which maybe should be my next question. There are a lot of women in our membership who shall remain nameless, by the way, but we begin to realize there's a pattern here. That we'd provide 12-week programs, and there are more than a dozen inside the membership. But what I would hear is someone saying, you know, that was so hard, I had to, had to rest on the couch like for 3 days before I could do it again. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's back up a minute. Let's talk about what we're doing here together, you know. And we realized we put some reset programs right there where these are at the bottom. 'If you ever need them, I want you to go here right now. I don't want you to have to raise your hand and get help. I want you just to have access to them.' But I realized that women will push through and they will assume that's what they're supposed to do. So talk a bit about that. And, and with trauma, you know, if we are experiencing it but maybe still even not acknowledging like, I need help to get through this. And the only way I know to deal with my emotion is— women will often say, I negate my stress by exercise. And if you're in this, what could happen? What's, what's the risk here for a woman? And I hate to point, you know, a scary, dramatic picture, but there's— something's got to break at some point.

And that's exactly it. The body does reach a breaking point. And you're telling my story, by the way. Okay. That person that shall remain nameless who has done this. So in 2014, that's exactly what happened to me. I had gone from running 5 marathons and easily biking 100 miles a day. I was constantly moving and exercising. I didn't even know that I was using exercise to manage my emotions. Until one day I couldn't. And what happened is that I had an accident where I broke my collarbone and I couldn't move because they put me into this brace for 6 weeks and I couldn't exercise. And I started to go crazy, Debra. The anxiety and the overwhelm and the loneliness and the grief. And I was just like, "I've got to move," but I couldn't. So that's when I really started to then overeat, right? Because like, "Well, I gotta do something with these other than feel." That's that's not an option. So let me do something to, to quiet this noise because I don't know how to function otherwise. And then that was when I developed the chronic fatigue and I started gaining a lot of weight. I was already on 2 mood medications for anxiety, depression, was being told I was burnt out, and then labs discovered autoimmunity. So this is what happens to the body when we neglect the stored emotions. It turns into disease. It's not a, well, only for some people. Like, this is what the body does. The body will do incredible things to help us survive. And one of those things is, sure, I will absorb all of these negative emotions that you don't want to feel, but I'm gonna have to adapt in order to do that for you. And those adaptations show up in our immune system, in our digestive system. So many women have digestive issues, whether IBS, stomach ulcers, SIBO. I mean, that's long list of digestive issues that ultimately all come down to what is the state of your nervous system. If your inner state is one of safety and security, you are not going to develop those issues. But if it's one of survival and danger, you are going to develop those issues because that's what the body does. It's doing that in order to help us survive. So it's not to get frustrated at our body. It's just being able to recognize there is a breaking point, and I can only do this for so long. This is not a long-term strategy for living life.

Okay, so there are some women here over 40, over 50, maybe over 60 and 70 that they discover old traumas that they've maybe never consciously processed. Is there a— is there a too late when it comes to healing the body from these experiences?

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That's a great question and one that actually started my whole journey into the biology of trauma. So my story started with adopting. I started as a foster parent and then adopted. So I started working with attachment and I started then a nonprofit, worked with over 100 adopted children from all over the world. I got really good at working with some of the hardest cases for children with attachment trauma and trust issues. But then when I got sick, and I'm now a physician and I'm seeing patients, I'm realizing that all of us, like all of us have some degree of stored trauma. And what can we do about it? Is it too late by the time that we have a sickness or chronic health symptom? And in my process, being able to realize there is so much that we can do if we know what to do. There is so much that we can do, and it doesn't take as much time as one would think. It's when we don't know what to do and we go over here for this. Well, let's go try that. I don't know, let's try a little bit of this. That we're not being strategic about exactly what our body needs. So to cut to the chase, what to do— there are 3 levels that need repair. One, we need to repair the level of the mind, because when our body held on to these experiences of overwhelm, pain, and fear, we formed beliefs to help us survive in the future. Beliefs around ourselves. I'm defective. I'm broken. I am unlovable. I have to be perfect to be worth anything. We formed beliefs that even though we can logically say that, well, that's not technically true, it's what we hold as a truth inside of ourselves. So our mind does need a certain level of repair in order to repair those beliefs that we've formed about ourselves. But we've also formed beliefs about the world in general. The world is dangerous. The world must be, you know, guarded against. We can't open up to people. So the mind needs repair, but the body also needs repair because the body has formed these memories. They're called somatic implicit memories, where we have memories, muscle memories of not speaking up for ourselves. We have memory of not defending ourselves. We have memory of abandoning ourselves so that someone else won't abandon us. And these become programmed muscle memory so that the next time something hard happens in our life, we automatically just go into shutdown because, well, I'm just not strong enough for those kinds of hard things. We have a programmed helplessness the more trauma that our body has stored. But there's still one more level that we need to repair. So this is mind, that's body, And now we talk about biology. And I've mentioned it several times how our body adapts to help us survive very hard experiences, and those get programmed into our immune system. And so there are changes in our immune system, there are changes in our mitochondria and our metabolism. This is why many people have problems with their metabolism when they have stored trauma.

Trauma.

And then that affects hormones. And so now even our hormones are imbalanced as a result of our nervous system contributing to those hormonal imbalances. So now the very biology that trauma created now creates a feedback cycle to continue to keep us in a place of deficiency, feeling depleted, and actually giving signals of danger to our nervous system to say, as we started this conversation, Oh, we don't have enough estrogen to handle that problem. We don't have enough serotonin to work with that person who's difficult. We don't have enough ATP, energy production, to be able to feel this grief of this loss that I just had in my life. We, we, we don't have the biological capacity, and that will be another reason for us to just store more trauma rather than being able to move through it, and return back to a sense of safety.

Wow, so much there. And one of those I really want to come back to because I think this is hard to grasp, you know, the, the mitochondrial, you know, and I think it's because of— and metabolism, you know, looking at those two things, it's so easy to compartmentalize. It's like, but no, that has to do with activity and burning calories and, and moving. And emotions are over here in this little silo, you know. And it's also so neat when I think of it that way, you know. But for somebody to really grasp that the reason they may be weight loss resistant, the reason you may be doing all the things, but those things, even though they are the right thing, they're not working because, because there is this what, mask that is there that is not letting you unlock the gate. So what, what would be the first steps if someone was willing to say, you know, I have been doing all the right things, even my trainer says I deserve to get results, my doctor says I deserve to get results, but I'm not. You know, what would be first steps that somebody would take who's willing to open that door?

Hmm. Yeah. You know, I think of the analogy of someone who has maybe, maybe been so neglected, maybe been so depleted that they are holding on to the one thing that they have. And even though that one thing is unhealthy for them, even though that one thing is not actually going to be the solution, they're holding on to it for dear life because it's better to have something than to have them. But yet here you and I are, and we're offering them something better. We're offering them something incredibly better, but they're not willing to let go of that one thing that they have because they don't know, like, are we really going to give them that thing, or are we just trying to bluff them? Are they, are they really going to be able to handle this new thing? So this is the same thing with the body, where the body has to actually feel safe to let go of something, even if that thing is unhealthy. It has to feel safe. And when our body has been neglected, when we have pushed our body, when we have created disconnection with our own body, our body doesn't trust us. And so even if we were to say, oh, well, I'm going to start treating you nice, our body's like, "Yeah, well, I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not going to let go of this fat because I don't believe that you have anything better for me. You've never given me anything better. So even though this fat is unhealthy and it's causing inflammation and it's causing all these other problems, I'd rather hold on to this because at least I have something than to have nothing at all." This is often the case that happens with the emotional eating as well. It's so hard for us to feel It is so hard for us to feel empty. And so when we feel emotionally empty, when we have been giving and giving and giving and not getting in return, it's so easy to then fill that emptiness with something, even if it's unhealthy, because at least we aren't feeling empty. At least we have something, even if that something is unhealthy.

Wow.

So the first step has to be, can I create the safety for my body? And if not, then there's not going to be anything that changes for us. Hmm. And that's where I see a lot of women hit the wall because we are so used to using our mind to try to analyze our, our way through. Well, what do I do next? What's the best strategy? How do I balance the calories with the exercise to get just the right, you know, account so that I'm losing the weight? It's all so much in our heads, and we don't realize that actually what I need to do, the most important thing for me to do every single day make my body feel safe.

To that note— my dog even agreed with you there— to that note, you know, I do think that there are a lot of women who both— they're a bit— I think our egos, or identity maybe is a better word. So identities are kind of tied to, but that's who I am, I'm somebody who pushes through, I'm, you know, that's just who I am. And, and I will often hear that common denominator. And, you know, it's, I just have to work a little harder. Very often I hear that repeated. I just have to work a little harder. And I'm like, what if it wasn't hard? What if it could be easier? You know, and it's very hard. I don't know if this is a generational thing, like, will it be easier for today's 20-something things to, to take that or not. But I know that for women 50 and 60— and I often blame it on our parents, like our post-Depression parents raised us to hard work gets rewards, like you should work harder, that's what you should do. And I think we, we all took that in and learned it because that's where we got our praise at one point. But speak into that a little bit.

These are the trauma patterns. When I hear myself thinking, life is hard, it, it, it shouldn't— it's, it's not going to be easy, everything is hard, life is hard— that's a trauma pattern. That's a belief that my mind made from a certain experience that I had in life. Or maybe it's the fact that, well, I don't deserve things to be easy. Well, that's also another trauma pattern. What do you mean you don't deserve things to be easy? So when I hear those kinds of thoughts, this is very normal, and I go back to the 6 attachment pains that I've laid out in my book. There are 6 attachment pains. Each has their own belief set that they— that we form. And the love-me attachment pain is the latest one that we develop between the ages 5 and 7. In. And that is the specific attachment pain where we feel that I have to work to deserve love. And so many times this comes down to, well then, no, like, it's not safe for me to even rest because if I'm not productive, I'm not worth being loved.

Wow.

But then I also think of the first attachment pain. The first attachment pain is hold me, where we would not have been held enough when we were first born. So this one develops in the first month of life. And if we were not held enough, then we feel like we have to fight for our survival. Whereas those who were held enough, they know that their best resilience is in rest. I rest in someone's embrace. People around me are here to support me because that was their early experience. For those of us who didn't get that, We're still fighting to survive because that's what we had to do from the moment that we were born because we didn't get all of what we needed to have those needs met.

Okay. So that little girl between 5 and 7 whose parents got a divorce just prior to that, mother got remarried during that period of time, how does she go back and not have to prove herself Yeah.

You just gave me goosebumps, right? Because this is, this is a common story. The details may be different. Yeah. But it's the same kind of thing. And this is where this girl would have grown up to be the one to always bring A's home on her report card. She pushes herself more than anybody else could ever push her. And so what needs to happen now is that we repair. We repair on all 3 levels: mind, What are those beliefs that that little girl formed about herself? And let's gently start to challenge those. Is that really true now? Now, now that, now that we're grown up? I will tell you that that little girl doesn't know that she's grown up. She still thinks that she's right there in that situation. So part of the repair that needs to happen is to go back to work with that part of us and to actually let her know You did it, girl. You did it. You actually survived. And now things can be different because you figured out how to survive. So that's going to be the mind level. But then we got to repair the body because her body went through that experience. She would have been laying in bed feeling like it was her fault that her parents divorced. Her body would have felt all of those emotions and it would have been too hard for her to feel. The kids aren't supposed to feel those kinds of emotions, and she likely was not able to talk about them with her mother or with her parent or a teacher, right? She would have held them all inside. So her body has the memory of those unprocessed feelings and that feeling of, "I just want to curl up into a ball, pull the covers over my head, and shut the world out," which means that now, even as an adult, that will be what we would like to do When something hard comes, our default is, "I just want to crawl into a ball, just go into a fetal position." I won't let myself, but that is what I have to force and push myself through because it's my natural pull and tendency to do that. And then there's going to be the biology, because if she experienced that at age 5 to 7, think of the internal stress that she's been through. Through that causes magnesium deficiency, zinc deficiency, B6 deficiency. Her cells don't even have the nutrients that it needs to be making good energy. So of course her metabolism is slow. Her immune system absorbed all of that. And because she started to see herself as the problem, her immune system likely started to attack herself. She likely has some autoimmune markers going on. She should test her ANA. She should test her rheumatoid factor, these things that would indicate that her immune system has also adapted by seeing herself as the problem and attacking herself. And we need to repair that because as long as that is going on, her body will remain in a state of danger. Literally, her immune system is attacking herself. On a biological level, she will be stuck in that state of survival and danger. And we need to repair all of that so that mind, body, and biology can truly have the repair and the return to safety. And that's when things dramatically change for her. And that can happen at age 40, 70, 80. There's— yeah, like the body is so adaptable. And so when the body says, oh, we're supposed to live in safety now, okay, well, let me, let me do, let me do that. We just need to create the conditions for that to happen. And our body does adapt. To our environment. Internal environment, not external, our internal environment. Are we creating the internal safety for ourselves or are we perpetuating the danger mode that we've always lived in?

So fascinating.

So fascinating. Okay.

So if you could, if you could tell every 50-something woman, and I know we're missing you 40s and 60s, but not really. So every 50-something woman, if you could tell her one thing about the link between her past and her future vitality, what would it be?

You know what I would say, Debra? The best could still happen. The best could still be ahead. Your best years could be ahead. Amazing. The best is not over. The best is yet to come.

Amazing way to finish. Where can everyone get their hands on this new book? We've kind of teased it and teased it and teased it. So The Biology of Trauma, when is it officially out? They can get their hands on it, or can they pre-order?

They can pre-order. It is on Amazon. They can pre-order it. It officially comes out September 23rd. And yes, like, I go into all of these details from the attachment pain to our patterns, to how to identify stored trauma in the body. It's— get ready for a ride.

So good. And I think to this, not to open up a brand new question, but I'm going to— you know, we're talking to a generation of women who also influences their daughters, their daughter-in-laws, who are now having small children, who— they're seeing it all. They are potentially just sitting at a point where they can have perspective and, and give perspective and be supportive of what else is happening around them as well.

And this is where I see so much hope, Debra. Others may look at the topic of trauma and get discouraged, and I have so much hope because if, if the women of this generation, right, the '50s, the '40s, '50s, '60s, and beyond, if they can start to do the hard work that they weren't taught how to do, they weren't modeled how to do that, then they're the ones that can break the cycle. They're the ones that can pass on resilience and hope and wisdom, as opposed to just passing on more trauma patterns.

So beautiful. Thank you so much for the work that you do.

Oh, thank you, Debra. Thank you for the work that you do.

Okay, everybody, so everything— links that you need will be in the show notes. Biology of Trauma on Amazon, that one you can remember, I'm sure, but just in case, that'll be there too. And other ways to connect with Dr. Amy Apigian.

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