Stored Trauma Is Making You Sick — Here's the Science with Dr. Aimie Apigian

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Welcome, Synergy listeners. Today on the Synergy Podcast, we are so honored to welcome Dr. Amy Apigian, a double board certified physician and the leading medical expert on how trauma gets stored in your body. Dr. Amy is the founder of the Biology of Trauma, a groundbreaking model that bridges the world of medicine, psychology and somatic therapies to accelerate trauma healing. Her work truly helps people understand that trauma isn't just in our minds. It leaves lasting biological imprints that shape our health, shape our behaviors, and shape our relationships. Her journey into this field is deeply personal. While in medical school, she fostered and adopted a young boy carrying the effects of early childhood trauma. That experience, along with her own history of attachment trauma, challenged everything she thought she knew about medicine. And it led her to pioneer a new way of approaching healing. Dr. Amy now leads programs for individuals and she trains practitioners worldwide, integrating tools from functional medicine, somatic experiencing, and neuroscience to help people restore health at the deepest level. Today we get the chance to dive into the biology of trauma, what it means for long term health, and how we can begin to shift from surviving to truly thriving. So sit back, take a listen and make sure you take great notes. You are going to enjoy this one.

So, Dr. Amy, we are thrilled to have you here. You know, I read your book. We met at Summit in September at the Mindshare Summit and you were so gracious to give me a copy of your book. I think I chased you down to get a copy. When Lori told me about the title, I was like, I've got to meet this person. Because I actually had started writing a book on healing from chronic illness earlier this year. Like early stages, right? Just kind of capturing thoughts and, you know, things that I'm walking through in trauma recovery. And when she told me the title of your book, I'm like, I gotta get a copy of this book. I've gotta meet this person. And so we met and I got a copy of her book and I read it on the airplane, literally all the way home. I finished it when we landed. I text Laurie. I'm like, oh my gosh, this book has rocked my world in a really good way. Just the things that the stories you told in your book just leapt off the page. Those are. I mean, I could cry thinking about it. Just the stories I hear in my clinic every day were in your book. My personal story was in your book. You don't even know me and you told my birth story and just how the trauma response gets wired into our physiology. And despite best efforts, despite all the work in the world, despite all the supplements, all the IV therapy, all the stem cells, all the things. If we don't honor that trauma response and connect with that trauma response and allow a space for healing in that way, we're going to always struggle. And so thank you so much for being here and sharing your time with us and our audience. I'm making this required reading for anybody in my practice that has a chronic illness, because I do think at the root of chronic illness, most of the time sits trauma and trauma response, even if it's not trauma that we're thinking about in the traditional sense. Right. Of trauma. And so I'm just so honored to have you here, and I can't wait for our audience to connect with you.

Well, I absolutely love what both of you do. I think you're making such a great impact in the world. You're such a force for good in the world. So it's a real honor for me to be here and share more on this topic with you and your audience.

Yep. We have so much to dig into. We're kind of giddy, to be honest. On this Friday afternoon, you're in the middle of this book launch, which is super exciting, and it's been so fun to watch you get it out there. And I know it took, from what I understand, several different editions or cert. I think you. How many times did you work on. Did I hear eight?

Did I hear eight?

Yeah. Rewrote it seven times. So this is the eighth iteration of this book. Because it was really hard for me. I thought that I knew how I wanted to present the material. And then when I actually sat down to write it and I was thinking of that person that I was writing it for, I realized, nope, that's not it. Nope, that's not it. No, no. It. No, no. And so it was truly an outpouring of my love and my heart and trying to walk that person through from the very beginning in a way that I would be able to kind of follow them into this inner world that we have and have it make sense to them and have the science still be accurate. We can't gloss over the science, but it also needs to be accessible.

Yeah.

So it was a lot of work to make it check all of those boxes for me that I. And just how I wanted to show up in the world with this book.

Yeah.

So I have to start with, you know, who. Who is Dr. Amy? Where did you start out? How did you land in, like, traditional medicine?

Give it.

Give us a little bit of a background story. Here.

Yeah. So the background story is that since a little girl, I've been a people fixer. And so I love being able to save people and help people and fix people. So that was part of my trauma response that I never even knew that I had. And so medicine was a natural fit for me. Yes, I get to fix more people. And I also get a nerd out on the science. And I love science. Science. I remember in high school hearing about DNA and genetics and this double stranded helix for the first time, and I fell in love. I don't know how you can fall in love with a concept in science, but I was head over heels in love. And so it was this natural progression then to study medicine. And I actually was a researcher. So I studied and became a lab researcher in Larry Loeb's lab, which was in Seattle cancer research lab. And really throwing myself into what I thought was a lifelong career of academic research physician. And boy, did I have a surprise coming. And that surprise for me really started when I signed up to be a foster parent. That changed my whole entire world. Now I thought I was just making a decision to become a foster parent. What I didn't know is what it would turn into. And when they placed Miguel with me, he was four years old. And in the time that it had taken for me to sign up to be a fascia parent for when they actually had a child to place with me, I was already back in the third year of medical school on internal medicine rotation, no less. And so I remember the day that they're dropping him off and bringing him to me. And you would think that that would normally happen. They would bring the child to your home. Not for me. They're bringing the child to the hospital where I was just getting out of my lecture at the end of the day. And that's where we met in the parking lot at Loma Linda University Medical Center. So this was my life. I then became this medical student by day and this foster parent by night. And I was. I thought I was prepared, and I was not prepared.

I don't.

I. I have such a heart for foster parents now with them not really getting the education that they need in order to be prepared for whatever that child may come with. And what I found with Miguel was that he was bringing with him all of his past. It was almost like it was packed in the luggage that came with him. It wasn't that he was coming into my home, and it was a fresh slate. And this is a clean relationship. And let's give this a Go. It was all of his past coming with. And so that was his filter for his relationship with me. Talk about this in chapter 11 of my book. Where our attachment, our early life becomes the filter through which we experience everything in life. You can't take out that filter from a person. It's so deeply programmed into their very tissues and threads. So to realize then that he saw my love as dangerous, it was quite a conundrum because I thought my love was what was going to help him. I thought my love was the medicine.

Well, when you, when I read that part of your book, I. And I was on a walk because I did, I did not read it on the airplane and finish it at the beginning because I have this dear friend who is definitely an overachiever and I love her for that. But I listened on audible and I, I stopped in my tracks, no joke, and heard you say that. And I stopped it for a minute just to process that again. And it really struck a chord deep when you think about that, especially when.

You think about all the adverse childhood events, whether that's birth trauma, whether that's neglect, whether that's frank abuse, whether that's sexual abuse and how that really wires the whole physiology for a person. And we oftentimes think about traumas. Oh, that happened in the past. I dealt with that. Like that's no big deal. And we don't realize that our physiology is carrying it around. Right. Yeah. And how it's affecting us physically. You did a beautiful job in the book of explaining that and connecting with that. What a tremendous gift.

So you said Miguel said to you in that moment, if I remember, what was his response to like what, what did that. I think you said five year old. What did he say to you?

It was the moment when we were sitting in a rocking chair and it was August 2009. We had just come in from playing outside, which we were in Southern California. I mentioned Loma Linda University. So that's Southern California and it's the desert part of Southern California. So it is hot and we're just coming from it from an outside. So we're sweaty. We've got like that fresh cut, like itchiness on our skin. But I'm like, you know what? I've been told that I need to do this attachment and bonding stuff. So we're going to get in the rocking chair, I'm going to hold you and I'm just going to gaze into your eyes with lots of love and I'm going to give you all the love that you need. In order to heal. And not realizing that this was terrifying for him to the point where then he said, what I share in my book, which is, mommy, I'm going to kill you tomorrow. Not today. Tomorrow, Mommy. And he had a plan. He was going to start tomorrow by poking my eyes out with sticks. And at that point, I didn't share the details of this in the story, in the book, but he had already come at me with knives. He had already done things that showed me that this was not a joke for him. This was not just a whim. This was something that was consistently showing up for him, that it was his way of communicating. Your love is so scary to me. I have to annihilate you in order for me to feel safe.

Yeah.

Wow. Wow. And yet then it allowed that to be a window into my own heart and my own patterns of protection and how I guard my heart and how I keep people at an emotional distance. Why? Because deep down inside, I believe that if you really saw the real Amy, if I really was open and you saw all these different aspects of Amy, not just the ones that I'm proud of and are okay with you seeing, but even the ones that I've been ashamed of, that is so terrifying to me that I isolate, I guard, I protect myself. There is no way at that point in my life that I was letting people see all of me.

And in that moment that that happened, I can only imagine what immediately happened, but kind of give us an insight to what. What those next steps were for you. How did it change you?

Well, the next step for me was going into my own trauma response. Like, my. My whole heart just sinks in, you know, it just collapses. Yeah, right. Like, there's. There's that whole collapse of you're so discouraged because you've done your best and you have no idea what's wrong, what you're missing. So where to even go to try to figure it out? And it's a very awful, lonely, discouraging place to be, especially when it's your child and you feel that it's your responsibility to help them and to realize that I was at the end of my rope. Like, I was at the end of what I knew to do. And it obviously was not working, and if anything, only getting worse with time.

Yeah. Yeah.

And you mentioned it being, you know, lonely, too, because of. How do you share that with the people that.

How do you share that?

How do you share that with people you care about or care that. That care for you? And.

Yeah, and I would have to say Too. You were saying 2009. And at the time, in 2009, I had a child that was struggling. It was a bonus child. And I think it was a very similar situation where just that love was just too intense and too much. But there weren't any resources, there wasn't an online resource to go and look for help. Right. It was conventional really or no way as far as like institutionalization or you know, long term care. But there wasn't any real boots on the ground support for families in that way. So I can't even imagine what your, what your journey was in that regard.

Well, and Right. Like, yes. And then now looking back, I can see how that was the very situation that I needed in order to realize. I need something very different. I can't continue doing what I've done. I can't continue believing the way that I've believed. I can't continue with my same thought process for what's happening here and what I need to do. I've got a become open to other modalities, other resources that I never would have been open to before because I had judgments about them. Yeah. And now all of a sudden I am open, which is a great place to be.

Yeah.

And it's what changed me to allow myself to drop some of the judgments and truly just become curious. Oh, you're saying that this works? Well, tell me more about that as opposed to you're saying that works? Yeah. Right. That's not scientific. Where the double blind placebo studies that show that that works. As a mom, you're like, give it to me, like, tell me what, why you think this is working. And then I need practical tools right now. I don't need. Well, we're making a call for further studies that will come out in five years from now. It's not going to help me. I'm a mom. I've got a child right here in my arms in this rocking chair. I need to know what to do now. And so it really made a shift for me in still having a respect for the science. Don't get me wrong, I still love science and I have the respect for the accuracy of science. And at the same time it's got to be practical. If it's not practical, I have, I don't know what to do with it because I need to know how do I apply this in a way that is going to make a difference for someone's life?

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So can we back up and talk about like, your definition of trauma? I love the way that you explain trauma in your book. So for our listeners, explain to us your definition of trauma.

Yeah, and this is actually one of the most common questions that I'm getting because we've, we've had so many different words for stress that we've tended to talk about stress, even though technically what we're talking about is something so much more than stress.

Yeah.

So this has been a big game changer and a conversation changer with this book, which I love. So the way that I look at trauma is did it create a physiological trauma response? If it created a physiological trauma response, those are the five steps I cover in chapter one. Then that's the definition of a trauma. If it didn't create those five physiological steps, well, then that was a stress. And we can talk about stress and we can talk about what are the tools for stress. But once it crosses a line and it's trauma, because it created a trauma response, that's a very different tool set that we need to apply for trauma. And I think of my patient, Kenneth. I know both of you read the story of Kenneth, who was a veteran and he was in the Gym lifting weights one morning, and he lifted more weight than what his muscle could endure. And so rather than grow his muscle, it broke his muscle. And he came into the emergency room with his bicep literally in the middle of his arm instead of attached to his shoulder where it should have been. Why? Because when we exceed our capacity, our body is designed to short circuit the system. And it knows that if it tries to do more, if it tries to stay with it, it's going to create more damage that would be more life threatening. So it's better for us just to break the tendon then to try to continue to lift this weight. That is clearly more than what we can handle. So applying that then to anything. And you know this from reading the book, my definition of trauma is anything, anything, anything that for any reason at that time was more than what we could handle. And rather than being able to grow us, it broke us in some way. And then that's why there's these lasting effects on our body, is because it wasn't just a stress that we can rest and recover from. It broke something, and once it breaks that, it needs a specific repair. I needed to go in and do a surgical repair of that tendon. I wasn't going to be able to send him home with an ice pack and directions to rest. That's not gonna. That's not gonna help him because it had crossed a line. And so many of us are crossing that line all the time. And we haven't had the language to know that that's actually a physiological trauma response, which means that we're still applying tools for stress stress management, stress reduction, self care. And it's like, those are great, but not for trauma. Like, for trauma, we gotta go into surgery, We've gotta do a deeper level of repair so that we're not still 20 years later with our bicep in the middle of our arm because we didn't do the right repair.

So why are people so averse to the word trauma?

Why are people averse to the word trauma? What do you think, Lori?

You know, I think, well, there's a couple things that come to mind, but it's almost become like a curse word. It has become very difficult to open the door for conversation. And I'd like to understand it better because I feel like as a practitioner, if I. It's the tools in the toolbox to open the door to conversations that need to be had in a shorter period of time. Because you want to do it with love, caring, and compassion. Right. I think your book is going to do that. I just want you to know right now, I think that is going to be a tool in the toolbox, obviously that we can give. Right. But. But it is. It's a really, really hard conversation and it's a. It's almost a bowing up for some, a tucking down and a head down for others as if they did something wrong.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

As I've been having more conversations with people around the book, something interesting has come up and I'm so curious what you're going to think about this. I think that there's also an element of if I say that I've had trauma, that means that someone else did something or didn't do something that they should have and I have become such a people pleaser. What would they think if I said that experience was a trauma for me? It's oh, you know what, they might be my parents, they might be my coach, they might be my friend, they might be my spouse, they might, they might be my children. And what would it do to the relationship that I have with them or if they've passed the relationship that I want to maintain with them, the perspective that I want to continue to have of them and their role in my life? If I admit that experience with them was a trauma for me, I think some of it might go into that level of people pleasing and our need to maintain attachment with people that we feel that if we use that word, it might rupture our attachment with them.

And I would imagine that emotional intelligence is a skill that many don't have. And it's a skill that has to be worked on a lot. And when you have had hurts, you've tucked so long, sometimes you just don't know how to talk about it. Right. So it's just easier to not talk about it.

Absolutely. You know, I think of being a surgery resident and how much people want to avoid surgery because it's opening up your body and then you have to recover. And that's what this trauma work is like. It's something that has been so packed down, stuffed down, and then also numbed and avoided that it's an opening up that we just don't want to do. We'd like to be able to continue functioning in life without having to touch that at all possible. And so we develop all of these coping mechanisms.

Right.

Whether that's emotional eating when the emotions just get a little too strong, or the drink of alcohol when, wow, we just don't want to feel that. So let's just take off the intensity of it or whatever it is. I mean, nowadays it can be avoidance through overworking, over exercising, movies, social media. I mean, the options are endless. And it's this idea that I somehow believe that if I could only keep stuffing it down, I. I won't have to deal with it and it won't affect me.

Yes.

Meanwhile, we're carrying it around, Right.

And then that's when it becomes like this abscess, this abscess that is causing us fever, making us sick. And we're like, well, let me just take Tylenol. Maybe I can continue to avoid it.

Feeling completely unfulfilled.

We've lost our joy for life. We don't even like who we've become. We don't even recognize who we've become. But somehow this is better. This feels safer than actually opening that up. Yeah. Because I don't even know what I'm gonna find. It's been so long that I've been packing things down, I'm not even sure what all would come up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in small communities, I would think too, is there's that concern about, you know, I am so and so in this community I'm attached with, you know, this name or this position and the fear of what. What will come with that. And I do think in the end, you know, when you get around the right people and get the right help, what you find is all of that, that we make up in our heads.

Right.

Is there untruths that just supported the irrational. It was just irrational thinking, truly. But anyway, I don't know. You know, that first step to change, I would just ask the question is when you're. When we're faced with that person in front of us as practitioners, and we know that that's an area for them, they've made so much progress. Right. We see it all the time, but we just know that they haven't reached their optimal because there's just an area they haven't worked on just yet. What's the best way to open the.

Door very safely, very gently, with lots of care? And again, I kind of think back to surgery. I wouldn't take someone to surgery and open them up unless we had done all the preparation to make that surgery safe for them. So what if they need surgery but the anesthesiologist isn't ready yet? Well, I'm going to wait for the anesthesiologist because that's how we do it, safely. Otherwise, even though it's a good thing, even though they need opening up and to clean out that abscess. The process, the how we do it, can actually make it more dangerous. Yeah. And there is preparation work that we can do. And that's where I start, people. And so I even tell them, let's not start with your story. Let's not start with going into the past and digging up things and processing things and talking about these stories. Why? Because we're not ready for that yet. You're not prepared for the wave of emotions that is going to come when we open that up. Instead, we've got to prepare you with skills so that when an emotional wave comes, you've got the skills now to ride that wave. Because if you don't know how to ride that wave all the way through to the end, what ends up happening is that you relive that experience rather than resolve the experience.

So oftentimes people think that trauma or overwhelm is just a psychological issue. Right. But how does that live in the body? Like, explain to our listeners how does that affect physiology day to day and lead to chronic disease states? Right.

Yeah. So I had this conversation with several ladies last night, and it was interesting how one of them had been adopted two days after she was born, but she was never told until she was 35. Do you think that she had a sense 100% right. Like, we know this, we know, we.

Know this, we know this, we know.

Yes. But yet her mind was like, no, these are my parents. They say that they're my parents. This is my family. Even though I don't feel like I belong, even though I feel like there's something about me that's different, logically I don't see that. But there's just this sense that I have in my body.

Yeah.

Going back to your story, even though there's no way that you have an explicit memory of your birthday, no one can remember their birth. But yet you described having this sense in your body that something. I don't know, was. Was different. Was hard. What. How would you describe that?

Yeah. So what I would do, I would ask my mom, I would ask my mom, was I adopted? Right. All the time she got so annoyed that I would ask her this question. Right. It was just a feeling. It was just a very feeling. Like, it was just a feeling that something wasn't right. And I don't know how else to describe it, but I was born prematurely. I was in the hospital for three weeks without being touched by my mom. And I was a poor feeder. Yeah. And so, you know, I just always felt like something was I didn't even know that story. I had never been told that. And it wasn't until I started doing my trauma work that it came up. Someone asked the question about the birth story, and I went back to my mom, like, tell me about my birth. Because they were like, this is birth trauma. And I was like, birth trauma? What are you talking about? And I went back to my mom. I like, tell me about my birth. Like, I want to know, like, what was going on. And she told me the story and I was like, oh, my gosh, that's crazy. I had that intuition all along, but I just had no, I didn't know, like, I'd never been told the story. And so I just had no clue that that was part of my birth story and how it had affected me physically. Yeah.

So this is what I like to ask people when they, when they don't know. How is it that trauma gets stored in the body and not just the mind? Because I guarantee you that you've had beliefs about yourself and others and the world that are part of the psychological changes that happen after an early trauma like that. You probably have had a belief that you can't trust anyone else, that you've got to do it all yourself. You're nodding your head as.

Very much. So I'm going to figure it out, right? Yeah, very much.

Predictable, right? Like, this is. This is for me. Like, when it was for me, it was like a. A relief to realize that, oh, these beliefs about myself, there's a reason for them. I didn't just create them in my mind. I had a very specific experience that informed me of that at that time. And it was true at that time. My software hasn't been updated with the new information, so I'm still running on that old programming. But the programming makes sense. And so I don't have to shame myself or think that that's a bad belief to have. It was truth at that time. And so we can see how it does affect our psychology. But then you're describing this sense that your body has, and that is one aspect in which the body is impacted as well. I call that the somatic level, which is why eventually we're going to need to actually work on the somatic movement piece to that birth story so that your body can resolve it. Because if our body doesn't resolve something, even though we can try to change our thoughts and our beliefs, the body will continue to create those same beliefs. And so we need to repair the body or the somatic level. And one of the Things that we do for that is we recreate the scenario and we just ask you, what would you have wanted to do?

Yeah.

When you were laying in that bed in the nicu, what would you have wanted to do? Of course you couldn't do it, right, because you were a premature baby, but what would you have wanted to do? And then we do those movements and it helps the body at the somatic level resolve that experience. But as you've mentioned, there's still a deeper level in which the body holds onto things. And that's the biology. And so it did change our physiology. And it actually made that trauma response or that flow into overwhelm, a habit for your nervous system, which means that any hard thing and your nervous system is programmed to give up and to say, this is too hard for me, and go into overwhelm.

Yeah, it was interesting in. In the whole trauma story is early. Well, I would say, especially young adult, I can't go back to childhood so much, but young adult time. I was invincible physically. Runner, marathon runner, sentry, rider, like, hardcore, like, nothing's gonna stop me. Kind of hardcore to my detriment. Right. Not eating well, over training, working really hard, raising four kids, all the things. Right. And then the crash. And I would say since the crash, that has been the story. Like, that's where I go, like reclusiveness, like go to safety, cocoon, self care, all the things. Right. Just to make it through the next day.

And this is what. This is what happens to everyone. Right. And so this is what I wanted to communicate in my book is just to normalize all of this. Yeah. Because initially, when we have these stored experiences of our past, it creates stress. So stored trauma is the biggest source of stress in our life. It creates stress. Now stress, now that you've read my book, you know that stress is a high energy state, which means we're going to be channeling that stress into exercise, into work, into. We're going to have to channel it somewhere because it's got to go somewhere.

It's energy somewhere.

And so we do that until our body's like, I need more gas in the tank and you're not giving me what I need. So you're not giving me the magnesium and the B6. And we've kind of run through all of that stuff, and I need more support if I'm going to sustain this stress response. Of course, we don't know that. So we don't give it what it needs to sustain the stress response. And that's when it starts Becoming more and more overwhelmed. And we spend more time in overwhelm than what we used to, simply because our body cannot sustain that stress. And so now it's dipping into that overwhelm and crossing the line.

Or do we, in the attempt to do that, we do more of what?

Oh, of course. We definitely try that first.

Yeah.

The.

More of what we used to do because it works. And then we figure out that's not working. And then, you know, friends and practitioners say you need to breathe more and you meditate more and you need to take more yoga classes, which, to your point, they're all helpful, but to what extent?

Yeah.

And I would say to our listeners that are listening to this, this is a very common sense story. You know, I think we have a point of vulnerability, especially for females. I think men do, too. But I think females, especially because we go through so many hormonal transitions that there's so many opportunities to fall off the cliff physically. Right. And I think that we get into caretaking and we're taking care of everyone else around us and not really listening to our body. I learned to disconnect from the physical very. I mean, running taught me that, like, I. I could feel pain one minute, and the next minute have a euphoria. So just keep going.

Right.

And so I learned that emotions are transient. Don't listen to them.

They're not.

They don't direct your path. You direct your path.

Right.

And so just overriding all of the messages that were coming in, not paying attention until all I could do was pay attention. Right.

Well. And what I was taught. I'll be curious if this is the same for you. What I was taught was that it only matters what you do.

Yeah.

It only matters your actions, your behavior. So I don't care what you feel. It only matters what you do. So it then programmed me to not. Not care what I feel, but only focus on what am I doing, how am I behaving?

And I have to apologize to my kids because I've taught them that. I taught them to ignore all that stuff. That stuff's gonna be there. Just. Just keep on going.

Right.

And so we have to reteach, even our adult children, that, hey, listen, this is not in your best interest to do this this way.

No.

Because what really, what trauma is, is that experience of being all alone in something overwhelming. And yet in the process of avoiding our feelings, downplaying them, or saying, no, I'm not going to allow myself to feel that grief, that loneliness, it makes our body have the experience of Being all alone again. And so we create more trauma for ourselves than anybody else creates for us because we are abandoning ourselves all the time.

So what I hear you say in that is what we can do is connect with ourselves. The biggest tool that we have for repair is actually connecting with ourselves, really understanding ourselves, listening and responding. Not just listening, but responding, Doing some somatic work, touching and talking to yourself. If that works, I think that there's power in that.

Yes. And I'm so glad that you got that. And I'm assuming that you knew that before you read the book, but that was a big, important piece for me to communicate in the book was that it's not just connecting with our body. We actually have to respond. It actually has to become a relationship where we can talk to our body and our body can talk to us. And I can do something for my body and then my body does something for me. Like it needs to be a relationship. Just connecting with my body is not going to be enough.

I'll have to say, with the trauma work that I've done, I had been told that, but until I read it in your book, it did not click. You know how you hear things and you hear them and you hear them. But because I didn't know, really, I'm a science person too, and so I didn't really understand the physiology behind that. I just thought it was another tool. It's just something you could try, you know, it's just another tool. It wasn't the thing. And so it wasn't until I read your book that I really realized that that was the missing piece. That was the thing of really connecting back. Not just being aware of, but actually connecting back and getting more in tune with that relationship part. So, yeah, I think you did exactly.

Like I. I think of. I think of a mother with her baby and when her baby cries, is it going to be enough for the mother to come and just be like, oh, sweetie, I hear you. I'm not going to give you what you need, not going to give you what you asked for, but I hear you. I'm connecting with you. Right. Of course that's not enough. Like, we know that, but yet that's what we try to do just with ourselves. Oh, I hear you. But I'm not actually going to give you support. I'm not actually going to give you what you need in order to feel safe right now with what you're feeling and experiencing. And so I think that the connecting the messages in the world right now around, hey, let's connect with our body are an important first step. It's just not the last step. And I don't want people to just feel that they can only connect with their body. And that is enough for this deeper level of relationship that allows the deeper healing.

So I would love to go all the way back if you would do this for our listeners who haven't read the book yet, who are going to read the book and go through the actual. What it feels like and what those steps are, what the body goes through in that moment of trauma and on.

The process is actually quite simple. And when I learned this, it was part of the pieces that I found for Miguel. When I learned this, it was almost like this startle moment for me of like this is it. Like, why wasn't I taught this? How have I not known this? Of course this is the trauma response. And of course it's the instinctual universal trauma response, Meaning it's the same response that we'll have to a car accident, as we do to a betrayal, as we do to a whatever it is. The body only has one trauma response.

That was profound for me, I have to say, and I've read a ton of books and I've listened to a ton of things, but that caught me. And that's why I want you to go back to it, because I do think that people need to hear this.

Yes. And we have been taught around the fight, flight or freeze. And so those are terms that most people are familiar with. But let's break that down to see what exactly is happening inside of the body that makes something be a trauma and makes it be different than a stress. Then, as we are looking at this, we're going to look at it in terms of the different aspects of the nervous system and how it can respond in order to help us survive anything. It's like shifting the gears in our car. There is an appropriate gear for every situation. If you are driving through snow and ice, you likely want to be in first gear because that's where you will have the most traction. You don't want to go too fast, and so your car will stall if you are trying to drive in fifth gear. So every gear has a very distinct purpose. And it's like our nervous system just shifts gears for every escalation of threat. So let's start when we are having just an ordinary day. It's an ordinary morning. You don't expect anything to happen. And so you are in this ventral vagal parasympathetic rest and digest. There's a number of words that have been used to describe it. But for your nervous system, this is where your energy is just. It's middle ground. You're calm, you're creative, you're connected, you feel safe, you feel secure, you're coming from that place. If there's going to be a threat, there is going to be a very distinct moment in which you first sense that something is off. And it would be the moment that if the news is going to come across a phone call, you look at that phone as it's ringing and you see who it is and you're like, something's wrong. That person should not be calling me at this time of the day. Something's off. And so there's always. There's always. Even if it's only a split second, there's always a moment where our nervous system has that startle response and it primes the system for what's going to come next, which is just the escalation of the gears. But the startle response is a gear shifter and it's going to put you into that state of is it a real problem? And you can feel your energy come up and it's getting you ready to fight or run away if you need to. You. You want a running start. And that's what the startle does for us. So we've shifted into second gear, probably in the third gear. And then in this story, we're going to say, it is definitely a danger. This is a confirmed threat. In chapter one, I invite you to join me in a car accident with my patient Elena. And that moment where she has the startle, when she hears the tires skidding, and then when she looks up and sees the car coming towards her, that's going to be another shifting of the gears into a higher level. Because now it's confirmed, not only is there a danger, it's coming towards me like, this is a danger for me personally. And so now we're in this gear where we are actively responding. It's the highest energy that we have. It's fueled by adrenaline. And it is when we become superhuman, we become super thinkers. We become. We have the most focused thinking we will ever have. We are the strongest that we will ever be because our only intention right now is to make energy and to use up that energy to overcome the danger. And we do that either by running or by fighting. But it's a very active response. And what happens next is where that is no longer an option. And it's called hitting the wall. So this is step number three and step Number three is that moment, split second moment, where you realize there's nothing else that I can do that will make this bad thing stop happening. There's nothing else I can do. And even as I say that, I notice my own energy just like, drop. This is the equivalent of throwing the emergency brake on in the car. It doesn't matter which gear you're in, the emergency brake is on. And it's our body's way of saying, if there's nothing else that I can do, then not only should I not do anything else, it's dangerous to keep trying. It's dangerous to now be alive. It's dangerous now to be seen. It's dangerous to make noise. It's dangerous to be a problem. I need to go along with things. I need to just give in and give up. It feels like depression, it feels like heaviness, it feels like shame. And that's all part of this trauma response to keep us from doing something. And it's broken up into two steps. In my book, I say it's the freeze, and then it's the shutdown. And the freeze is that momentary shock realizing that there's nothing else I can do. And it's the moment in which what's happened and what's happening feels unbelievable, unbearable and overwhelming. And that combination is a shock to our heart and to our nervous system. It's literally. It stuns us, which is why there's that momentary paralysis of I can't. I can't do anything. And then that's when our body says, I can't sustain that physiology. So we're just going to go all the way into I can't do anything and make you feel slow and heavy and brain foggy and have you searching for words and have you just playing along, meaning whatever someone tells you do, you're going to do it. They ask you to hand over your bag and your purse and you're just going to do it. You're not going to fight them anymore. You're just going to do whatever they tell you to do. And that's how we survive anything. So our body literally goes through all of the survival strategies that it has, and it only goes into this one. If nothing else has worked, what about.

For complex trauma where there's been prior trauma and someone automatically goes into freeze? Like they don't feel like they go into those other fight or flight, they just automatically go to freeze. Is that just happens quickly or like, what would you say to that?

It is happening that quickly, that they don't recognize It. And that's what was happening to me. And so as I started doing this deep study into the nervous system, I didn't even recognize my startle. I didn't even recognize my stress because I seem to go immediately from trigger to freeze.

I feel like that is so common. I feel like that's so common for females that are struggling with chronic illness. And so that's why I bring that up. I feel like they don't. May not resonate with the story because they don't feel the heightened intensity of the fight or flight. They just go straight to. I mean, they just feel like they go straight to free because they have it connected with what that actually feels like.

Here's why that's happening for them. I talk about the critical line of overwhelm, and that critical line of overwhelm determines how much stress you can hold before you cross that line into overwhelm. And for someone with chronic disease, that line has moved because their body isn't able to to generate a stress response. And so their critical line of overwhelm is at the point of startle because they can't sustain that stress response that's dangerous to their body. And so as their body registers what's happening, that there's something hard, their body's like, yep, nope, can't do that. And we're going to immediately go into the wall and the freeze and the shutdown. So it's all there. It's just like that critical line of overwhelm shifts depending on our own biology, depending on our support, depending on all of the factors that go into our neuroception, deciding what is my current capacity, which then is where the hope is. Because wait a second, if that line has shifted towards I can't handle any stress, then there are leverage points that I have to start moving that line and building my capacity. And that's what the healing journey is. The healing journey is taking meeting my body where it's at right now, but then building its capacity for hard things.

Yes.

Yeah, we were made for hard things, right? Yes.

Then. Then I can stay with something hard. I can lean into something hard, and that's when I'm going to be able to experience a wave of emotions and not immediately freeze and shut down, but this time have the capacity to ride that wave all the way through. And that's when the healing starts to happen, when we can ride our waves of emotions, even the hard ones, all the way through so they don't get aborted and then just tracked. That's right.

So talk us through. That was so good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you, Lori, for asking the question, because that was really powerful. Walk us through the steps for repair. Like, how do we repair that response so that we can move that wall and expand the bubble? I call it the bubble. We have to live in a bubble for a while.

Right.

How do we expand our bubble?

Right.

Well, as you've mentioned, we need to create the bubble first. Yeah. And so that's the first step. The first step is creating our bubble. And I call it creating the inner safety. Creating that sense of inner safety right here, right now. And that way, even if you're still in the middle of a stress, even if you're still in the middle of a relationship, that's not healthy for you, even if you're still in a war zone, you can still find moments where there's no immediate danger, and you can shift your nervous system into. And right here, right now, I'm safe enough. Right here, right now, I'm safe enough. And that starts to create that bubble that you're talking about. And when we have that bubble, yes, our life does become smaller for a period of time because we need to build the ability to stay feeling safe for longer periods of our day. Once we have that, then we say, I think it's time to start building my capacity. And how I build my capacity then is determined on my ability to stay feeling safe enough while I build my capacity. And that is how we stretch and grow and not break.

And I would imagine that you have some tools and resources that our clients can tap into to help them do that, because I do think that your book definitely gives them such a great overview. But I've been on your landing page, and you have some really great content. So I wanted to. We could stay on here all day with you. I just want you to know that we have a list of questions that were a mile long, and we could keep going with them. And maybe we're just going to have to have you back. I know you're super busy, so we'll wait for that to be over for you. Thank you for carving out time in this very important time for you. We're just so appreciative. But I just wanted to end with you having the opportunity to not just obviously share your book, but how do people connect with you? What resources do you have? Because we have so many listeners that need this information.

And thank you, Lori, for realizing and acknowledging that information will only take us so far. And so we can read a book, but it doesn't become life changing until we apply the information and it becomes a new experience that we can create for ourselves. And it's through those new experiences that we update the software that's been the programming of our nervous system. So yes, read the book because you're going to learn new things about yourself and see life and your body in a new perspective. And let's not stop there and just learning these insights, but let's do something. So yes, I have some free resources that are associated with my book. They can go to biologyoftrauma.com book and there they will find my five day nervous system reset that has five of my favorite somatic exercises for creating that safety bubble, learning how to do that. And then I also have a nervous system journal and an art narrative exercise. Between those three things, they will have something to do to be able to start to create these new experiences that their nervous system needs to do something different.

Yeah.

And then connecting with you on a deeper level should they want to and want to go on a further journey. Are there some tools and resources to be able to connect with you on that site as well?

Yes. Biology of trauma.com is a great resource for them. That's where they can also find me on social media. That's where they can find my podcast and different lead magnets that are guides and roadmaps to this healing journey. So look forward to what they will uncover and be able to do for shifting their nervous system into a different gear that will help them move forward in life.

Well, thank you so much for being you. Yep, thanks for being you. From the moment I met you at Mindshare, I knew you were definitely someone to be reckoned with. Like you are just a powerhouse and you're out on a mission to change lives. And it's so cool that. And I feel so, I know Kelly and I feel so blessed to have you on here today to carve out time. I know we've said that a couple times but we can't say it enough. It's a really cool time for you. You are in my thoughts and prayers as you do this because as you work to get the word out, we know that there are there, there's more heat. Right. Push back and things that you're going to be enduring in this. So I want you to know that you have a force of ladies over here that are praying for you. Have you that have you front and center as you are out on this mission.

So important that right there is how I can stay out of my trauma response. Because I'm not alone, right? I'm not alone. And when we are not alone, we can do some really hard things and appreciate your support and love. It's such an honor to have you in my life.

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