66: How Stored Trauma Rewires Your Biology, The Three-Level Healing Framework + The Inflammation-Trauma Feedback Loop | Dr. Aimie Apigian

on today's episode of the Holistic Savage Podcast.

It's much easier to work with children and their trauma because it hasn't created as much damage in their biology that we've got to repair. But you give me someone who's in their 50s, which is a lot of the people are coming to me, right? Perimenopausal women who are now finally realizing that all of their coping strategies are no longer working. And so we're looking at decades trauma that has become chronic, that has been creating damage in their DNA. That's a lot more to repair now because the damage has created a biology that creates a feedback loop that says we're in danger. Look at all this inflammation. Inflammation is a sign of danger. Nutrient deficiency is a sign of danger. Toxins, a sign of danger. And so you have all of this internal messaging of danger that you can't escape. And that's part of what creates a trauma response in the body is anything that exceeds our current capacity. It overwhelms our physiology.

Welcome to the Holistic Savage Podcast. I'm your host, Brennan Vermeijer. Okay, functional friends, welcome back to the Holistic Savage Podcast, where I get to interview all sorts of really interesting people about interesting things and self- officially the podcast gives me an excuse to talk to some of my favorite functional friends. So I have the pleasure of having Dr. Amy Aitken with me today, who we've known each other for years. I feel pretty well oriented with like your heart, your soul, your intention, a bit about your work. And so I'm really excited to finally have this conversation, go deep into the biology of trauma, talking about your brand new book, which is already a bestseller, and you've just had a birthday. So what a buildup. Amy, how are you doing, my friend?

I'm well. It's, it's been a good year. And so here we are in December. I'm in San Diego at the moment. So it's a beautiful sunny day, right? Like life is, life is actually okay and good.

Well, I mean, I would hope so that these are all good things. I think the last time I saw you was in San Diego at IMMH and we were going to try to squeeze in a recording, but the chaos of the conference ensued. So I'm glad that we were able to make the time, but to kind of set the stage a little bit because, you know, I feel like we first met maybe at like Mindshare once upon a time. And I think we have a decent amount of overlap with our work where it's like, okay, my whole thing, you know, functional mental health, right? And so obviously you can't be like a functional mental health gangster without being pretty trauma-informed, literate. And I'm very like mechanistic biology and all of that, but I would love to know just both for my own, because I care about you as a friend and I'm curious myself, and, you know, our audiences can get to know you on a deeper level. I'd love to hear the backstory of who is Dr. Amy and how did she get into the work that she's doing that then became, you know, the biology of trauma.

Yeah. Well, when we talk about stories, as you know, it's layers deep, right? And that there's a layer that you're aware of, and then there's a layer that you will become aware of, and then there's the layers that you still don't even know. So as I look back at my life, I always had felt this calling to, um, help and specifically help hurting children. I've since learned that it was likely very connected to my experience being very close with my father growing up, and he was adopted and had never wanted to talk about it, had never processed any of that. And so there was a lot of emotion and insecurities caught up in that relationship that as a small girl I was absorbing and trying to just do my best to make him happy. And so come fast forward several years, I'm now in medical school. I'm just finishing up my master's in biochemistry. I have a few months of space in my life, and I ask the question, like, how can I spend my time the most meaningful way? And I decided to become a foster parent.

Oh, wow.

Now, after all the changes that you have to make to your home and all of the process that you go through, I was actually already back in third year of medical school, internal medicine rotation, when I got the call from the social worker. And it was a social worker, Esther, and she says, I've got a small 4-year-old boy for you.

Oh, wow.

And really, Brendan, like that was all she had to say. And it was just a yes. And looking back, I see so many of my trauma patterns that were showing up at that time to continue to take on more than what I could handle. That like all of the stuff, all of the stuff, and it actually ended up being single-handedly the thing that changed my life the most and ultimately led to the change in my career. I went into general surgery after medical school. And during that process, I then had the experience of adopting Miguel out to another family, and that broke my heart so much that one month later I was in full-blown chronic fatigue syndrome, couldn't get out of bed, and we discovered autoimmunity. Not to mention that I was already on Zoloft and Wellbutrin for anxiety and depression that I was I was just trying to mask and, you know, numb away in order to just continue to be able to keep up with my work and residency and responsibilities and being a mom. And so I had gotten myself in a very low place with my physical health, with my mental health, as a result of pouring myself out for everyone else and actually being so disconnected from myself. I didn't even know that I was disconnected from myself. Like, how can you know what you don't know? I didn't even know that I was disconnected from myself because I'd never actually been in my body, allowing myself to feel those things called feelings and processing things like grief. It was always just like, well, what's the next thing that I got to do? What's the next thing that I got to do? And pushing through perfectionism and people pleasing are some of the key characteristics that a person will have in their life when they have stored trauma in their body.

Mm. There were a lot of really good elements, like all the ingredients, you know, of, of the soup are there. Right. So I, I can kind of see this and, um, it almost gives me more questions than anything. So I think you said his name was Miguel?

Yes, Miguel.

So I'm, I'm assuming or presuming based on the synopsis of, okay, so you're in the intense academia throes. Maybe some degree of dissociation, not fully in tune and aligned with within yourself. You without hesitation take on the massive undertaking of taking on a foster child who sounds like you had for about 4 years, probably got very close. That was probably an extremely important relationship. And then that loss, I'd be curious to, because I don't want to make any assumptions, I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about that of what that experience was like, what, what you learned about life, love, yourself, parenting, and then how do you go through that transition? I mean, 4 years is a long time. A lot of roots can grow on sort of a psychological, spiritual level. And then how do you sort of reconcile that, that loss or that, I guess, expansion beyond that experience that then maybe brought you back to yourself or had you reflecting on some of your own you know, blind spots, as you alluded to? I'm just curious.

So Miguel was 4 years old when I got him, and he had been in the foster care system since age 9 months.

Oh, wow.

And for me to look at his life and read through these papers, stacks of papers, Brendan, of all the places that he had been, all the group homes, all the families, all the movement and the placement that happens when you're in the foster care system. I could see trauma all over that. And I think many people look at that and say, now that is trauma, abuse, neglect, separation, abandonment. That is trauma. So I never was one that recognized that I had had trauma because especially comparing my childhood to my son's childhood. Who was I to ever use that word trauma? So it surprised me when I started to see myself almost as a reflection in the mirror of his behaviors, because his behaviors were so loud. They were so obvious because he was very reactive. We call it reactive attachment disorder. And What that meant was that he was so afraid of being loved. He was so afraid of opening himself to connection that he would do anything to not connect with me. He would do anything to not be loved by me. And here I am thinking that all hurt children just need lots of love and that's how you heal them. And so here's the medicine. Love is the medicine. But how do I get him to take the medicine? And that really was the turning point for me for starting to learn that I have to make it safe for someone to take in goodness. It wasn't safe for him to have a moment of happiness and joy with me. Why? Because when we have happiness and joy, our hearts open. And for him, his heart opening meant my heart is going to be broken because that's the only experience that he had known in the past. So he would not even let himself experience, exchange a smile with me. Or if he accidentally did, if we were working on a puzzle and something happened and we both laughed and we had that moment of eye gaze where we really connected with each other. The next second he was reaching out to hurt me. And that looked like hitting, punching, biting, kicking, pooping, peeing, you name it. I had that happen to me. And this completely changed my understanding of, first of all, what trauma is and what actually does it mean to heal trauma, 'cause it was not what I had thought. And for me to then recognize that even though my behaviors were not as loud and extreme as his, I still guarded my heart. I still kept people at a safe emotional distance to not let my heart get hurt. There was a certain amount of hurt that I felt like I could tolerate and be okay, but if my whole heart got hurt again, I didn't think that I would recover from that. And so I noticed myself again, like this reflection in the mirror of there's, there's something here that I'm relating to that I see in myself. I didn't have time to deal with it at that time. I didn't have time to process it. I didn't have time to look at my own stuff because I'm in medical school or then I'm in residency and I've got this child who All he wants to do is protect himself from me and hurt me. It took up all of my time and all of my energy, all of my money. And which is why my body eventually just had to crash for me to get the message that I've got to put myself first. I've got to put myself even on that to-do list of compassion and kindness and care. And my body was not able to hold that anymore without the consequence and the cost of some serious physical and mental health illness.

Hmm. That's a really, really powerful story. I, and I quite literally can't comprehend how you were having that experience while also trying to make it through medical school. Like that by itself is, is astounding. And I would imagine your story is, I mean, I'm sure it already resonates with countless people and it'll likely resonate with a lot of my audience and it resonates with me too. I mean, I can very clearly think of two major relational experiences I've had in my adult life that, you know, there's trauma and loving somebody through their tra— you know, there's all, all the, the lessons that we learn, but then of course the reflection. Now you address something that I think is kind of the core question that I'm curious to explore with you, which kind of comes down to like, what is trauma, right? You know, I've, I've spent so much time, I have a trauma module for my, my FMHP program. So it's like, I could talk a lot about systems biology and biochemistry and physiology, neuroendocrine pathways and all that cool stuff. But like at the heart of it, it's kind of this like, yeah, but like, what is trauma and how do you really heal from trauma? Right? Like I've been on, maybe it was just in anticipation of this podcast, but my, my social media content this week has been very, you know, trauma focused. And then of course, when I present the science, people ask, Yeah, great, cool science, but like, what do you do about it? You know what I mean? I'm like, oh, well, that's a different conversation. But, um, I like the way that you positioned that where, okay, kind of, you know, seeing yourself through this lens of maybe like, who am I to think I have trauma? I've had such a privileged life. Right. And I do that a lot myself and I'll be curious to kind of hear like, what are the repercussions of maybe invalidating your own semi-traumatic experiences. And I think we can safely say, well, trauma is probably a spectrum, right? There's probably, you know, less severe trauma and more severe trauma, but I want to hear how does, how does Dr. Amy really sort of define trauma? Not like, you know, DSM or, you know, an ACE scoring system, but in your mind, how do you see psychoemotional trauma? Not like a traumatic brain injury, Um, and then we'll kind of start exploring how it impacts, impacts the body because you're making a powerful connection there of you have your own trauma and maybe you weren't fully attuned to that, but you were able to very perceptively recognize the trauma within Miguel and loving him through it, trying to be that safe space, but then through hyper-fixating on taking care of him. Your body eventually collapsed and autoimmune and chronic fatigue creeped up. So I'd love to hear you unpack that a little bit.

This is the topic that I love to go into because for me, it brings so much hope. So people often look weird at me, like, you like to talk about trauma? And I'm like, yes, because there is so much that we can do about it once we understand what it actually is. But very few people do. And as I was working with Miguel, I am literally trying everything that I can get my hands on that I can get him to. If it seems to help, I'm going to be doing it. And in that process, I discovered that there was a certain therapy that it was a miracle compared to all the other things that we had done. And so I'm standing back as a good scientist and researcher and I'm like, what just happened here? Why was this so powerful in the healing process? And here's what it was. It was an art narrative structure that walked through a person, Miguel, drawing out very specific steps that his body would have taken during an experience of the past. Now, being someone who had always seen trauma as something psychological, something emotional, I'm thinking like, the body? What do you mean the body? And to see that this is very structured, it's not just, oh, don't draw anything. It's no, you're going to draw the moment, the very first moment that you sensed that something might be off. And I'm thinking, why is that important to the process of healing trauma? I don't get it. And then after that, we say draw the very moment that you, it would've been confirmed in your body, in your mind that no, this is a real danger. It's not just a possibility. This is a real danger. My life is in threat. Now draw your body going to this, I'm going to do something about it. And it was fascinating for me, again, as a physician who's now doing surgery and I've seen the body come and wake up out of anesthesia, which is the ultimate immobilization. And to be able to start to make these connections of these are principles that the body has to survive anything. This is how the body survives anything. So that what trauma actually is, then it is this process of going through these very specific steps. And getting to this place of utter powerlessness, helplessness, overwhelming fear and sensations at the level of panic, I might die, and feeling completely alone in the experience. That's it. You take those elements, you put them all together, and you have a trauma response. And in that context, it's actually not little t, big T, a little trauma, a lot trauma. It's, did your body have this response or did it not? If it did not, we're not going to call it a trauma response. It would have been a stress response. It would have activated that stress survival response, but not the trauma survival response. And those are two very different physiological states. Recognizing that, we can then work with the trauma response and how it encodes memory both in the body and in the mind to then be able to work with the story later and record it as a memory of the past. But until you know exactly how to feed that story back to your brain and your body, it never receives the information in the way that it says, and that's the end of the story.

Hmm.

And they were safe and they did survive and they did live on to learn lessons and to have moments of happiness and have moments of connection. And so without getting that information, that is why a trauma response becomes chronic. And we no longer just have to talk about, well, yeah, that event in the past and when my body did that. We're still talking about how it lives in our life and our body today as a result of what happened back then. But our body never got the information that it needed to say it is over. You can relax. Which is why, Brendan, people are still hustling for their worth at age 50. When something happened in their childhood that made them question whether they were worthy of love, affection, belonging, connection. They're still hustling decades later for their worth because they never got the information. They never were able to feed the story of that exact sequence of steps that happens in our body to say, that is over. We can rest now.

It's really powerful because I always like to try to look at things through like an evolutionary biology perspective, right? Like if, because I think as, you know, collective humanity, society evolves, I mean, I think our lives are depending on, there's so many variables. I don't want to be insensitive, you know, socioeconomic status, where you're born, who you're born to, right? But collectively as a species on this planet, I mean, we have it more cush than before. It's not primal hunter-gatherer days. And you think about just how incredibly traumatic life was for pretty much all humans that ever existed to these various extents. And I really like, I was fascinated by how you delineated between stress response versus trauma response. I don't think I've ever heard anybody split those, you know, usually it's kind of like, well, the neuroendocrine HPA stress response is, you know, kind of lumped in there. It's part of the trauma sequelae or something. Right. You know, and what fascinates me so much about like trauma is kind of the perfect subject that brings, you know, physiology and psychology together. And that's, that's why I love what I do is, you know, historically we've always kind of separated the mind from the body, but obviously you know, more like 20, 30, 40 years ago. Whereas these days with like psychoneuroendocrine immunology, like, you know, we're closing those gaps quite a bit. You know, psychosomatic medicine, it's how many people have felt very invalidated or gaslit of like, oh, it's all in your head, it's psychosomatic. And it's like, well, it's not, not really what psychosomatic means. It's more that what's going on in your head is, is directly impacting your body and physiology. And so, you know, looking at like the hard science of, we know trauma can alter DNA methylation patterns. It can, you know, if cell danger, if the theory, the construct that is cell danger response is a real thing, it seems to activate that. It could impair mitochondrial bioenergetics. It dysregulates the HPA axis. It can alter gut permeability and microbiota. All the things, but that still doesn't really answer the question of like, how do you get that pathophysiological trauma response cellular loop and process, you know, to, to really end. And what I'm hearing, and I think a lot of people might be of the mindset of like, okay, but, but like safety, but I want to hear you speak to that more because you're the expert on that. Of, you know, and especially I think it's worth noting like early life stress, adverse childhood events, you know, when the brain is still highly neuroplastic and we're trying to build our neural networks to build our sense of reality and how we fit into it. So I like how you use Miguel of that. That's all his nervous system had ever learned that imprinting, you know, was already there. So how could he possibly perceive it? Anything other than a threat. Right. So I'd love to just hear you keep going on this. It's so fascinating to me.

You know, what's interesting is that it starts with safety, but it doesn't end with safety.

Okay.

Yeah. And that's where most people actually prematurely end their healing journey is I just want to seek safety.

Yeah.

But seeking safety is still requiring us to be small. It's making our life more contracted, not more expansive. So even though safety is our first foundation, it actually doesn't end there. And here is why. If we were firefighters, Brendan, I know that's secretly what you've always wanted to do. I knew it. I knew it. Be that savior that comes in and be like, I'll save the day. So you and I are firefighters. There's a call, we go out to the scene, we're successful, we put out this fire. We're gonna now return to safety. So we drive the fire truck back to the station, away from the fire. We're back in safety, are we not? But is that really all that we need in order to have that full recovery and healing? No, because when we return to the station, we're— the gas in our fire trucks are, you know, low. We have all of our equipment out. It may have been injured or damaged in some way. So there is no way that at that moment we are ready for the next call. And if we're not ready, we're not actually safe and ready to rest. Because our bodies will always be like, oh, but a call could come right now. And if a call came, I wouldn't be ready. And so our body doesn't let us rest fully until it's had both the safety and the readiness. And people are often missing that readiness aspect. And so they're not even thinking about how do I now bring in support? How do I now bring in expansion into my healing journey so it's not just, no, no, no, I'm going to stay in so I can stay safe. No, I'm going to, I'm going to avoid my triggers, which means that I just, I just need to avoid all of you people because you trigger me. So I'm going to start isolating. Yes, that's safety, but that's not healing. And so healing requires, yes, safety, but then moving into that expansion. But how do we do that? Because unless we actually achieve that safety, and readiness on 3 levels, our body will stay stuck in that sense of danger. 3 levels. What are we talking about levels? Well, yes, because we have the psychological level, which is that when we experience something like abandonment, for example, there is a part of us that freezes and stays as that age when that trauma happened to us. And so 4-year-old Miguel with me also had a 9-month-old Miguel that was taken from his mom. And even though she was the one that was hurting him and neglecting him, she was still his mom. And to be taken from her and not know if he would ever see her again as a 9-month-old, you can't even express those things. And so there's just, it's such a shock that happens that there's a part of him that sort of stops right there and stops growing up. And so you have this 9-month-old baby Miguel that gets triggered when I walk away because I have to go to work that day. And all of a sudden he's not acting like the healthy 4-year-old Miguel who knows that I'm going to work and that I'll be back that evening to have dinner with him. He's now acting like that 9-month-old that never knows if he's going to see her again. And that's the behaviors that I was getting, which was why it was confusing because I, as a very logical person that runs my life based on my brain and what I understand, I'm coming back this evening. Why are we having this reaction? It's because There was a level of him, a psychological level that hadn't ever had resolution of that story. And so that was still the story playing out in his mind. She says she's going to be back, but I don't believe it. I don't trust that. And it's at a survival level that is even more powerful than his logic. So let's go to that level. So that level is the somatic level. You mentioned psychosomatic. They're really the same thing. And the somatic level, as you know, is this implicit memory of the body, meaning our movements, our position in space, the sensory information that we're taking in, and the meaning that those have, the associations or the coupling that those can have. Let me give you an example. Chapter 1 of my book, I start telling the story of my patient Elena, who's in a car accident. Many people have been in a car accident as well. Have you been in a car accident?

Uh, just, just one, not a severe one, but, but I often will use a car accident analogy. So I'm curious where this is going.

All right. So we're in a car accident and it's this idea that we can now drive down that same stretch of road and it's a different day. It's a different drive. We know this logically, but our body starts having heart palpitations. Our hands start sweating on the steering wheel and we grip the steering wheel and our stomach starts to churn. And we're like, this is the most ridiculous thing. I am a grown-ass adult. I know that this is completely safe today. This is not yesterday. This is today. So why is my body having this reaction? That's the implicit stored memory of the body. And that level can also keep a person stuck in an an ongoing sense of danger. And the way that that happens is that those moments that were traumatic, meaning overwhelming, helpless, powerless, and all alone, they create dopamine along with some other neurochemicals in order to sear that memory into our brain that this plus this plus this equals danger. Well, what happened is that your brain looked around the environment and said, this tree, this road, this spot, this plus this plus this equals danger. And so now when you see that spot and you see that tree, your body's like, danger, danger, danger, because it's built in, it's wired in into your nervous system at the body level. So we're even going to need to say, We've gotta work on that body level. We gotta need to work on the movements. We gotta work on your posture. 'Cause it was also the fact that you were sitting in the same position. You have a steering wheel in front of you. Like all of this has become coupled into this implicit memory that this, all of this equals a life threat. But then as you've already mentioned, there's the biology level and the more damage that trauma has made to our biology, the more that this will be playing an influence. It's much easier to work with children and their trauma because it hasn't created as much damage in their biology that we've got to repair. But you give me someone who's in their 50s, which is a lot of the people are coming to me, right? Perimenopausal women who are now finally realizing that all of their coping strategies are no longer working. And so we're looking at decades of trauma that has become chronic, that has been creating damage in their DNA. That's a lot more to repair now because the damage has created a biology that creates a feedback loop that says we're in danger. Look at all this inflammation. Inflammation is a sign of danger. Nutrient deficiency is a sign of danger. Toxins, a sign of danger. And so you have all of this internal messaging of danger that you can't escape. And that's part of what creates a trauma response in the body, is anything that exceeds our current capacity, it overwhelms our physiology. And so by the time that we are in, you know, for me, it was my 30s when my health crashed, but it can happen at different ages for different people based on how much stored trauma we're talking about now that it creates— it's created a biology of an internal environment that is an ongoing source of danger. So that is why I say, when we look at how does our body know that we are safe, it's not just one thing. It's at the mind level, at our belief about ourselves, at our perception of, are other people generally good or are they generally bad? Those parts of us that I talked about, but then there's that somatic level. And when I walk in a room and I smell lavender, well, for some people lavender signals safety. For another person who that was the smell when this happened, that's a sign of danger. And it was just a smell. It's just a smell, but that's how powerful our body has encoded these memories. To help us survive and be able to detect danger at a second's notice to be able to respond. And then the biology that is this more chronic underneath the surface layer that keeps our body stuck because of its ongoing signals of danger. We're going to need to repair all of those to truly achieve both safety and readiness.

I love this so much. I, where do I want to, where do I want to start? So the car analogy, I use basically that same analogy of like, okay, you know, a 15-year-old girl, you know, she got in a horrible accident with her parents when she was, you know, 6, 7, lost both of her parents, completely hypothetical by the way. And yeah, so it's like she turned 16, her, adopted parents gift her a car and, and she has, you know, a visceral negative response, right? And, and of course, like logically she might understand, okay, it, it doesn't logically make sense to be afraid to get in that vehicle and drive. It's, it's that, you know, kind of unlearning, unlearning the self-limiting belief, kind of deconstructing that neural network. That was associated with that to learn, hey, not every day. It's like your body and your mind have to learn, not every time I get in the car, am I going to get in a traumatic wreck? And when I put that into more of kind of like a primal example of like a caveman that goes on a caribou hunt and ends up getting torn up by wolves and like barely escapes with their life, and they're going to crawl back into a cave and go hide and lick their wounds and get healed up, like first safety, you know, to heal their, their visceral wounds and whatnot. But I really, really like this concept of not just, you know, run to safety and hide forever, but then the readiness to let me try again. Let me go back into the world. I'm going to go hunt the caribou again. Because imagine all the neuroplastic remodeling and belief system modulation that would occur when like, hey, this time I punched that wolf in the face, I slayed the caribou, and now I'm eating like a king. Like, what would that do to somebody's healing and sense of self in that still equally dangerous world? The world didn't get less dangerous. They became more resilient and ready. So I really like how you structure that. And the other point I was going to make, I know you've seen it too. There has been a growing culture and ideological trend online, social media propagates everything, of kind of this like, oh, well, you know, my parents didn't always treat me the way I wanted to treat me. I'm going to identify as being traumatized by that. And I'm going to use that to justify cutting them out of my life and, you know, validating my own not readiness. To do the work to, you know, make amends, right? And we're seeing actually that ideology kind of blow up right now of there's kind of one camp that's like, well, your feelings are valid. If they're toxic, cut them out of your life. They're dispensable or whatever. But then there's the counterargument of like, well, you know, maybe don't just be so quick to cut people out of your life perpetually. Maybe it's strategic, like you take that space, return to safety, Um, but that, uh, what, so I guess I would be curious to hear Dr. Amy's perspective on, you know, how do, how do people, you know, first get to safety, but then what's the work that happens in between safety and ready? Cause that feels like the kind of secret sauce.

You know, where your responses are taking me is this core concept that information is never what's going to change us. It's always creating a new experience. And so going back to that hunter, right? If, if he always hides because he got hurt, how do you rewire that? It— the only way to do that is to create a new experience. And it's not going to be, well, read books about how to hunt better. Yeah, right. It's, it's taking the information and creating an experience because it's experiences that our nervous system can adapt to and our neuroplasticity can integrate that new experience along with our past experiences to now have context to be able to say, well, sometimes this happens, but sometimes this happens. And so experiences is where it all comes down to. So as it comes down to safety and readiness, whether it's cutting people out of your life, how do we apply that principle that it's not just information, it's not just a mantra, it's actually creating an experience of safety, which most people have never done, Brendon. Most people don't know what it actually feels like to feel safe in their body and be in the present moment. It's, it's an idea that they like. They read about it. They read lots of books about it. They meditate about it, but they don't actually feel it because that's part of the syndrome that has been happening in our society globally is that we are more and more disconnected from ourselves. We spend more and more time taking in information Analyzing information, reanalyzing it just to make sure that we did the first analysis the right way, but not actually allowing ourselves to say, I'm having a feeling about this right now. And then being able to express that with the other person. I'm having a feeling right now that, and being able to authentically express what we're feeling, whether that's something like, I'm feeling a little unsafe right now, or I'm feeling really happy with our connection right now. Either one, just being able to authentically feel our feelings and express that. So the safety then, it really comes down to, for me, it has come down to asking a better question, which I think that you'll appreciate. You're the kind of person that also likes to ask better questions to get better answers. So the question no longer is, how do I keep myself safe? Because that will always lead to more and more restriction of my life. Contraction is never a healing process. Expansion is healing. So if I'm asking the question, how do I keep myself safe? I'm only going to get an answer of contraction.

Interesting.

But what if I asked the question, Regardless of them, regardless of who they are, who do I want to be? What is the kind of person that I want to be? What is the kind of daughter that I want to be? Now, this is a question of expansion, and it's my choice. What they do, what they believe, what they say, is not my business anymore. My business is who do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of person that has to hide away in order to stay safe? Or do I want to become the kind of person that I can be around people, people who are not perfect, people who are people like me. We hurt people. That's what, that's what we do. I've hurt people and being able to recognize that allows me to be the kind of person that I I want to be that has grace, that has understanding that you hurt me. I'm not gonna take it personal. I know it's not really about me. There's something going on in your life and I'm gonna just hold space for that. I don't need to protect myself from you. Who do I want to be? What is the kind of daughter that I want to be that I will be proud of myself when I'm on my deathbed?

Extremely powerful. And it leads me to ask, I mean, I feel like I do nothing but spend time thinking about these things and I don't know that I have the answer to it. Although I've, I have suspicions and theories after 16 years of trying to help people reach their health goals in life. Right. I'm curious, why do you feel people have a hard time really feeling their emotions and understanding it, or Personally for me, maybe I'm a sociopath, but you know, I live alone. I spend a lot of time talking to myself. And for me, vocalizing and actually talking through what's going on in my head is extremely cathartic and it makes it more visceral, more somatic for me in the sense of I got a lot going on upstairs. So to actually slow down and concentrate and consolidate enough to actually verbalize it and speak it into existence, I think there's a lot of power, power in our, in our breath and our vocal cords and using our words to, you know, in something that's interesting about humans, we seem to only really understand things through stories and narratives, right? And so especially like traumatic, horrible thing happens to you. And in real time, you might be going into shock and having, you know, you're just trying to get through it. but then hindsight will create a narrative to try to explain it. Right. And it's like, well, that's really just a narrative that we're creating to try to make sense of what just happened in this world of infinite possibilities. And I feel like what might be going on to some extent, you know, people, maybe they had traumatic experiences that were never reconciled or properly healed. And then, um, I feel like a lot of people at a subconscious level, maybe they're kind of running from something, you know, they're seeking the validation or they seek familiarity and then they find themselves in unhealthy relationships and situations where it almost allows them to hide from themselves and not have to face themselves, not have to face the fears, not have to face the wounds. And, you know, not that I'm wanting to make this conversation about psychedelics necessarily, but it's hard to talk about trauma and feeling your feelings and whatnot without, you know, psychedelics just in the clarity that it can, and it forces you to face yourself. You think about like an alcoholic that does 3 grams of psilocybin out of nowhere. That might be a rough trip because if you're not fully radically ready to face your deepest, darkest, or brightest truths, it's going to be, it's going to be a little bit of a rough trip. And so I think that's where like, you know, IV ketamine, MDMA has really, you know, performed well with, with the trauma component. But I guess I'm curious your thoughts on, on, I guess, two questions is why do people have a hard time feeling their feelings and making sense of it? And how can, and I'm sure it's all in your book, but what can they do about that to get more in touch with their own feelings? And What's that gap to being ready to really face yourself, right? Not projecting it on other people and making it like a, it's their fault. And my practitioner just didn't find the root cause. My parents were mean. Like, I'm just curious your thoughts on that. And this is kind of the billion-dollar question, right?

So, you know, it's really quite simple when we look at it through the lens of the body. So the principles that are in place in the body and what the body does to survive and what the body needs to heal. So we can look at the principles of it that really guide us then for navigating all of these decisions. And when we look at the why, the numbing, why the numbing, why the disconnection from our body and our feelings, this is the primary way in which our body survives Feeling powerless. Now I go through these patterns in chapter 9 of my book. There are 5 patterns that we can use to identify and recognize, am I holding stored trauma in my body? Well, if you have any of these 5 patterns, the answer is yes. And disconnection is the first pattern. It's so strong. And we look at why. I love science, so I always ask But why, why, why, why? And the reason is quite simple. As we go through that trauma response and I, and I walk you through all of that to the point where you understand that your body needs a very different survival mechanism than the stress response. Once I make that clear in my book, now we can dive into how, like, what exactly does your body use as strategies to survive Feeling completely powerless and alone. And the first thing that our body does for us is it disconnects us from the present moment. Our present reality is so painful, literally creating these unbelievable and unbearable sensations in our body, whether shame or actual physical pain from physical trauma that's happening. The crisis, the existential crisis of feeling completely alone, that is so unbearable that the first thing that our body does is disconnects. How does that happen? It's called dissociation. We all do it to a degree. Some of us do it to such a degree that we feel that we're watching ourselves from outside of our body. But other forms of dissociation are, I'm going to do some emotional eating. Because I need to just disconnect from my body. Dissociation or disconnection is just putting space. There's this, and I need space from this. How do I numb this? How do I move this away? How do I mask this? How do I stuff this down? All of those are forms of disconnection. And this is how we can recognize what we call a chronic functional freeze, which is this idea that We're holding on to this trauma response that we had previously, and it's now become chronic. We've learned how to function, but it takes so much energy for us to push through this instinct that we have to go small. And this is why we then continue to need things that help us disconnect. And our society is full of it. Social media, phone scrolling, TV screens. I mean, just screen time and the lights that make up our screens help us disconnect, promote disconnection. Then we find ourselves engaging in foods that we're sensitive to that are creating maybe a histamine response or some other immune response that triggers the microglia in our brain. You talk about this a lot and there's your brain inflammation. Well, What is brain inflammation doing for us? In this context, brain inflammation is helping us disconnect. It's helping us numb. It's helping us not be present to the awfulness of my reality. And Brendan, as I've been on this book tour and I've talked with more people than I ever have before face to face as I hand them my book, 95% of them stop when they see the title, they stop cold. And then they look at me and they say, how did you know? How did you know that I needed this at this time? I don't think that I'm just magically picking the right people. I think that everyone is walking around with pain that they're holding inside. That they're needing to numb just so that they can function like I was needing to do at one point. So then we look at, well, what do we do about that? Like the healing process. How do we start to feel knowing that like Miguel, love is the medicine, or in this case, feeling is healing, but how do we take the medicine? Cause the medicine is terrifying, just like connection and were terrifying for him. I've got the medicine, kiddo. I've got all the love in the world for you. I need you to be able to do it, to take it in though. The medicine doesn't do well if it's outside. So same thing for us. We know, we know that we need to feel in order to heal. But as soon as we talk about, okay, well then let's feel our feelings, our body and our brain say, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Why would we do that? And we develop all of these self-sabotaging behaviors and we find ourselves still distracting, avoiding, and numbing, maybe through different ways, but we're still doing the same thing. And so actually the first step is not feeling. The first step is never, well, just start feeling your feelings. The first step is, it's not going to surprise you. The first step is, how do I make it safe for these feelings to come up? How do I make it safe for me to feel these feelings and not get drowned in them? How do I make it safe for me to ride the wave that I know is coming if I open that up and to be able to ride that wave, not get overwhelmed by it? And yet that's what most people do because we haven't been taught how to actually safely open up. Most people jump in too much, too fast. Yeah. It's like jumping into the swimming pool in the deep end without having learned how to swim first. Learn how to swim first and then you can jump into the deep end. But most people are like, I want to get this done. If I need to feel my feelings, let's just get this done. And they go in and they do whatever, whatever they do, right? They do. There's lots of things before psychedelics. There were many other ways to jump into the deep end of the pool without actually having done the prep or the preparation to create the safety so that you know how to swim. And so especially, I work with a lot of people who have some form of physical health illness like I had. Once you have a physical health illness, you cannot do that. You cannot jump into the deep end of the pool because your body does not have the biological capacity for that amount of stress. And opening up your feelings is stress. It is stress. And so what I do is I show them how to just start by dipping their toe into this shallow end of the pool. We're going to literally create a different experience, Brendon. We are creating a new experience that it is now safe to feel my feelings. And when I create that experience, well, that's a new experience because I've never felt safe feeling my feelings before. And so now I have this new experience that I can bring in context and I can say, oh, it's when I do this that I've drowned in my emotions. But when I do it this way, it feels safe to open up because I'm just opening up a little bit. I'm not expecting to open up all the way. I just, I stay within the window of tolerance, the window that stays manageable, that feels manageable. And I create the experience of safely guiding myself and befriending myself rather than this being just one more thing that I'm pushing my body and expecting my body to somehow keep up with what my mind wants to do and further promoting disconnection and self-abandonment.

Yeah. Yeah. This is amazingly powerful. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because it's like I've you know, kind of my angle that I know you'll be appreciative of in a lot of ways. I kind of am like, all right, well, let me collect all my biomarkers. 'Cause if I have an objective biomarker anchor, right, of like the story that you're telling yourself is this, the story of your quantifiable physiology based on clinically established reproducible biomarkers, you know, is, is, is this right? And I mean, and this isn't, I mean, it's, it's kind of basic even in the beginning of my career with like weight loss clients and compliance, right? Compliance and effort in compliance, that, that's what drives the clinical outcome. So how do we optimize, you know, compliance and sustainability? And I love how you're saying, because in a world of instant gratification and quick fixes and, well, isn't there just like a pill I can take for that? Or, well, I hear these psychedelic things are pretty magical. Maybe I'll just take 5 grams of mushrooms, kill my ego, and it all melts away. Although that is where, you know, I'm being a little facetious, but that is where I think the MDMA has stood out so much, both from more of a mechanism of action, but also just the very heart-opening effect of MDMA, you know, and it quite literally feels like it melts away all the fear. So it allows you to have that exposure, not a constrictive run and hide and to try to feel the illusion of safety, right? But actually have the exposure to the uncomfortable, scary thing where your stress responses are calmed down a little bit and dismantled by by the drug. I think it would be a lot harder to do it, you know, completely sober. Cause like, let's say you're sitting with a trauma therapist and they're like, okay, let's, let's do an exposure. Let's go back to that time when this horrible thing happened. I mean, immediately. And it becomes very, very baby step process, I imagine, but I, I'm cognizant of time. I want to make sure I'm respectful of your time. I just, I have, I've never seen somebody put it together in a way that, you know, like you're not overcomplicating it with a bunch of scientific jargon, which is kind of my issue at times. It's simple. It makes sense. Well, actually, that's another point is I often see with my vantage point, I tend to see people kind of go down one of two paths. They kind of either go down, like, let's say the more esoteric, self-healing, EMDR, craniosacral, you know, whatever kind of that path. But there are others that like, I'm not going to do anything about talking about feelings. It's, it's mold toxicity. You know, I don't need to explore my inner world. It's heavy metals are making me sick. It's a stealth infection that's making me feel this way. And in reality, to your point, as we kind of touched on, Well, it's probably a little bit of all the above. We gotta do that inner work. And you know, if your microglia are already primed, I don't think the mold exposure is helping anything. Right. Exactly. So it's wild. But anyways, as, as we wrap up, tell us about, you know, the book, where should people get it? We've got some links for the show notes, of course. And you know, you must be doing like a book tour. I mean, tell us about the, the world that you're living in these days.

Yeah. My book came out September '23 and did hit number 7 bestselling book in the US. The week that it came out. So people are ready for this conversation around trauma and the body, not just trauma in the mind, but trauma in the body. And it's been wonderful. So I'm on the book tour and wherever I'm going for speaking at conferences, for example, then I'm setting up a book gathering. We discuss the book, we share on trauma in the body, and then I'll sign copies of the book wherever I go. And so I've got more locations coming up in 2026, lots, lots of locations. And that's exciting. So they can find me at biologyoftrauma.com. If they want some specific resources that I mentioned in the book, like my nervous system journal to start tracking the states of your nervous system, then they can go to, uh, www.biologyoftrauma.com/book. And there they can find the resources that are free that go along with the book.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to come hang out with me on my podcast on a personal level, selfishly, I just enjoyed talking to a friend about your brilliance and getting to break this down a little bit. I learned a few things. I'm sure my audience will benefit, and I hope that I get to catch you. I had to miss out on A4M last week. I, I was all set to go and then I was throwing up the night before, so I had to cancel the trip the morning of. I'm like just now getting my voice back, but hopefully we get to hang out at an event or two, maybe in the spring.

Let's make it happen.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, Dr. Amy. I think you're such a light, so brilliant. I love the work that you're doing, so I'm honored to have the opportunity to support it.

And right back at you. Thank you. Thank you for the work that you're doing.

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