Medical Doctor Reveals: The Science of Healing Trauma From the Inside Out
In this in‑depth interview, host Josh Trent converses with Dr. Amy Apigian, a double‑board‑certified physician and author, about the biology of trauma and how it is stored and expressed throughout the body. Dr. Apigian explains how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and chronic stress trigger a cascade of physiological responses—from neuroception and vagal states to the cell‑danger response driven by adrenaline—leading to freeze, dissociation, and somatic symptoms such as chronic sinusitis. She emphasizes that healing must address multiple layers: metaphysical, energetic, somatic, and biochemical, and that these cannot be siloed. Practical tools are shared, including pausing, scaling anxiety down by 0.1 points, and five core somatic skills (feeling, shifting state, pacing, tracking, choosing). The conversation also explores gender differences in expressing anger, the role of therapists in integrating biological cues (e.g., a latte) into treatment, and the importance of community and mentorship among trauma‑informed practitioners. Dr. Apigian describes authentic joy as the capacity to hold grief and joy simultaneously, and directs listeners to her resource site biologyoftrauma.com for further guidance.
Chapters
Heart disease, diabetes, all of the big killers. We have found the one thing that drives all of it. Every single chronic health condition has been associated with adverse childhood experiences. Every single one. Many in the trauma world, they miss this part. How does that get encoded in the body somehow where you won't even know that it's still there, but it's gonna show up decades later in your physical health?
Dr. Amy Apigian is a double board certified physician and author of the number one international bestseller The Biology of Trauma.
Stored trauma becomes stored because we were never able to reset back to I'm safe, the story is over, I can breathe again. What triggers the trauma response is the perception of an inescapable life threat. Your body, your cells enter what's called the cell danger response. It literally is dimming the lights to say we are going to make less energy because we are just going to survive but not be fully alive. It's not safe to be fully alive. Is the fastest way to shift your state when you have nothing else. We're actually terrified to feel what's in our body.
Why are we so afraid? If we were to look at my choice to come into this lifetime and have a relationship with a bipolar mom, manic bipolar, who, whom I love. What was actually happening in my neural system when I was a child, and how did that inform both my success and my impingements as I aged?
Let's talk about it in the layers. One layer would be the parts. One layer would be the beliefs that you formed about yourself in that context. And so a question that I would ask you is, At that time, who did you decide that you needed to be? The responsible one? Yes. The perfect one.
Strong and make other people laugh, step into any room and make the room adjust to me so that I felt safe.
Right. So looking at that, that was a part of you. Wasn't all of you, but it was a part of you that developed and adapted to be able to do that. Yeah. Not everybody has those skills. That was an adaptation. So we look at that part and we see, well, what were the implications of that? What were the implications of needing to be the one as a child with so much responsibility? Likely, possibly resulted in a lot of shoulder bracing because we have two areas in our body where a lot of that bracing happens, and it's our shoulders or our neck and our pelvis. The reason for those is that the shoulders bracing, this cuts off my vagus nerve. I don't feel my body as much. So that means that I can show up and be who I need to be and not feel how misaligned that is with my own true self.
Would that be like a kyphosis?
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Which is why scoliosis is very associated with this type of childhood stress of becoming more of the responsible, perfect one earlier than what we needed to be. The pelvis, those muscles— so all— think of all the hips, think of the psoas muscle— they brace because our most vulnerable anatomy is our stomach. If we think about the organs that are vital for our survival, our brain, well, it's in this whole container of bone though. Yeah. We think of our heart, but it's protected by ribs. We think of our lungs. Well, they're also protected by ribs. The most vulnerable place then ends up being our belly, because if we were wounded there, we could die, bleed out. Yeah. And there is no bony structure supporting it. And so naturally our body would be like, I don't feel safe. And we curl up. That's why The fetal position is the common position for complete overwhelm because our body will naturally want to do that. So that's the bracing that happens. So even just now, I noticed that you are sitting supporting your shoulders. Mm-hmm. I wonder what happens if you lean in just a little more so that pushes your shoulders up without them needing to hold themselves up. Pressure's on your elbows. And you just allow your shoulders to come up, but not because they're holding themselves up, but because you're leaning into your support.
I feel like I need to tension my lats, otherwise I would slouch forward.
Yeah, yeah. But this idea that so much of the kids will feel that they've got the weight of the world on their shoulders. So now taking this from We identified the thoughts and the beliefs. Now moving into the somatic, just the bracing of the shoulders and knowing that I can come in and I can provide some support for my shoulders. So if I bring in some pillows, 'cause this still feels like my shoulders are like, well, if I'm all the way down, it's not safe to be down. I need to hold the weight of the world on my shoulders to feel safe. But since I don't have that support, then I have to do that by myself. So just being able to bring in some somatic support. And I have people put something underneath their elbows and their arms so that it pushes their shoulders up. But it's not because their shoulders are having to do it. It's support. I will hold you up. Yeah, that's where we have to start. Because if we just ask our shoulders to drop, they're like, no, that's not safe. It's not safe. And so rather than force that opening up, I'm like, I got it. I will support you. I will hold you up. It's the same thing that we do, like, with the heart. Once I have them connect with their heart in a somatic way, and there's often heaviness in the heart, then who's holding the heart up? Who, who's holding the heart when it has all of that heaviness? We can create the sensation of I'm holding my own heart up. Looks a little weird because you've got to kind of put a hand over on the side of your chest and maybe even underneath your ribs to kind of create that sensation of, I'm coming around you and I'm going to hold you up so that you don't have to hold yourself up. And just those somatic connections start to create the safety for the opening, for even the talking with us and sharing with us the weight that it's been carrying, and it hasn't felt like it could share that with us.
I love it because my favorite position is this, because it allows me to like— I put weight here and I put weight here and I can rest. When you're describing the layers, which I love, I've never heard somebody describe it in the way you did, which is really beautiful. And it's simplistic, which, which is really the hallmark of intelligence, this simplistic way to describe things that are so complex. The, the second layer, when we get from the mind and into the body, how do the stuck energy traumatic codes, if you will, how do they actually get stuck in there? Because you talked a lot about my posture, and I think, well, if posture informs fascia, and fascia is connected to the nerve endings, and it's all one coherent system, then my posture is essentially adjusting to some codes. Some codes of trauma that literally live in my biology, how do they actually get stored in there? What's the real mechanism of how they get stored? Because I, I would assume once we know how they get stored, we can do the awareness work and the somatic work and all the good stuff to release the codes.
It gets stored in the neural system and all of its monitoring for what is safe and what is dangerous. So we take that, and now let's bring that down to the biology level where it really gets stored, and how I show that this becomes the mechanism by which trauma becomes disease. Mm. We've known the research. The research first came out in the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, where for the first time, we saw this connection of, oh, what happens to me in childhood may not even show up until I'm an adult as my physical health disease. Blew our mind. And conventional medicine still doesn't know what to do with that.
Literally going to put that on the screen right now. So if you're on Spotify or YouTube, we're going to put the— it's called the adverse childhood—
adverse childhood experiences—
adverse childhood experiences on the screen as you're describing it, because it's a really profound visual. I've seen this chart before. Right. Can you explain a little deeper into that? 'Cause this is related to my codes question.
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
It is. And it's fascinating. I'm gonna tell you the story of how it developed. Dr. Vincent Felitti, he's also down in San Diego, and he is internal medicine doctor. And they, the US government, was working to create what is now the preventive medicine field. This idea that, hey, rather than just treat disease, what if we prevented it?
Great.
That's what they thought. So they did all of their analysis. They've got incredible data on the health of the nation in the CDC, or the Center for Disease Control. And so they did all of their analysis and they saw, we have found the real reason for all of these causes of mortality, or, the reasons why people die. Heart disease, diabetes, all of the big killers, we have found the one thing that drives all of it. They were so excited. They marked obesity as the reason for all of these downstream physical health conditions that will kill you. So they said, Obesity is our new mission. Our goal is to create a program that will address obesity, 'cause if we can address obesity, all of these downstream things will decrease or go away. So they put Dr. Vincent Felitti as the one responsible, in charge of designing this whole Stop Obesity. He did such a fantastic job. He created a program where people would lose over 100 pounds in a year in a healthy way. It was the best program that has ever been developed. He's so proud of himself, gloating actually, that then when his best patients, the one who are losing the most amount of weight, start dropping out, he's quite upset. Then he finds out not only are they dropping out, they're regaining all of their weight and more. This is upsetting all of his good numbers that he needs to report back to the CDC.
Yeah.
So he's like, "I gotta talk to them. What the hell is going on?" So he calls them in, they come in, and he's like, "Why did you drop out? It was working. You were dropping so much weight." All of these bad things are not going to happen to you because you're dropping your weight. And they said, Dr. Felitti, what you think is the problem, my overeating, has actually been the solution to my real problem, which is I don't wanna feel, I don't want to be noticed, I don't want to be attractive. Because you see, I was sexually abused. And now that I've been losing the weight, I have become so uncomfortable with the compliments, with people noticing me. I don't want it. It's too scary. So I'm sorry, but it's safer for me to be overweight than to— for me to be at a healthy weight. Blew his mind. What blew his mind was that these were women in the middle-class society that wasn't supposed to have all of this trauma. That's for the lower classes, the, the socioeconomic status that we all know is in poverty, and they've got a lot of trauma. Not middle-class America. So this is how we even discovered that there is this connection between what happens to you as a child and the health problems that you experience as an adult. That was just the beginning because since then, they've now done studies. Josh Trent, every single chronic health condition, has been associated with adverse childhood experiences, every single one. So in my mind, as a physician, I am asking, but why? How? Like, how? How does that actually get encoded? Speaking of your question, how does that get encoded in the body somehow where you won't even know that it's still there, but it's gonna show up? Decades later in your physical health? How could I know as a physician that your condition, we've actually gotta be talking about what has happened to you and do we want to do some trauma work? Because I know now that if we don't, all I can offer you is a Band-Aid.
Or a pill.
That's what a pill is. A pill is a Band-Aid. It's just masking the symptoms, I'm not actually getting to the root of what helped create this. Now, is that the only thing that created this? No, it is the confluence of everything in, I consider it your soup. What all has gone into your soup? Mm-hmm. Your genetics, absolutely. Your genetics create your vulnerabilities. But they don't create your conditions. They create the vulnerability to the condition, but something else has to pull the trigger. And that stress, overwhelm, this physiological state that we've been talking about where your neural system is always in survival mode, either high gear and stress or emergency brake, we're shutting down because we're just so overwhelmed with it all. And so that is part of it. But what about your generational stuff? Let's just call it stuff. What a technical word.
We get it, though. It is. It's generational things. Yeah, stuff.
Baggage. Is that in your soup? Yes. Yes, it is. How? Combination of things. Energetics. The whole energy field. Absolutely. Yes. And we know that because we've seen examples of people who have resolved something inside of them by doing some somatic work around a drowning that their grandfather experienced. Yeah. So we know that this is somehow part of your soup, but there's also this whole generational epigenetics. And the more stress and trauma that our grandparents and ancestors went through, the more that there are these changes to our genetics through the epigenetic. Methylation. So that's part of your soup. And so that is why there will never just be one reason why you got this disease or condition or symptom. Yeah. And the layers of healing— we want to use that word— the layers of repair, which I like that word better, the layers will be as much as you want to do. I'm not here to tell you that you have to do all of the layers. I'm here to show you all of the layers that created this. You get to decide how far you want to go. And if you are the kind of person that says, I don't want to deal with any of that, I want the pill, okay, who am I to judge and decide what's best for you? My job now as the physician healer is just to show you what could be possible if We wanted to look at all of the reasons that contributed to this showing up in your life.
There's so much brilliance in what you shared, especially going back to the adverse events in childhood. And I think about the absolute domino cascade that occurs that is connected to the epigenome, that does have methylation issues with children that are in utero. And then the mother could be experiencing stress. It's all passed down. I, I, for, for the life of me And this is what fascinates me about your work and about what I'm passionate about. And that is this 7th generation principle that you've put a medical and a, and really a major scholastic effort into this. You've done an incredible job of taking what the Native Americans said and bringing it to modernity. What made you realize that trauma wasn't just a mental construct, that it was actually a lived somatic body experience? Do you remember the moment when that clicked for you?
Yes, 2008.
2008.
I know, aligns with your 2000.
Alignment, okay.
2008 was the year that I became a foster parent. I had just finished my master's in biochemistry. I had some space of time before jumping back into the third year of medical school. And I decided that I was going to become a foster parent during this time. Came out of the good intentions of wanting to use my life, my time for the best good. And as time would have it, by the time I actually finished all of the work to become a foster parent, I was already back in third year of medical school. But then I get a call, social worker Rosa, Amy, We have a little boy for you. Oh, and he was 4. He had been in the foster care system since he was 9 months old. Should have been placed in the foster care system much earlier than that based on what he was going through. But he had been through so many different moves since being in the foster care system that at this point he could not be with any family that had children or pets. Because of his behaviors. All she had to say was, "We have a little boy for you." And honestly, that would've been enough for me. And my big bleeding heart at that time would be like, yep, sign me up. So here I am, single, already now back in third year of medical school, internal medicine rotation, and now taking in this boy who's had a very troubled past. At that point, my whole world changed because what I thought was trauma and thus the way to heal trauma was nothing like what I was going to go through. Nothing like what I was going to go through. So that was my turning point of realizing it's not a mental decision. I can't, reward him enough to not do these survival behaviors. There is some unconscious beneath his logic and willpower that drives him to do these things that push me away, that hurt me. I actually start the book, the introduction, with a story of me holding him in a moment in a rocking chair, and he tells me how he's going to kill me. That's how drastically my life changed. And I'm so grateful. If he had been any different, if he had just been someone who didn't have as big behaviors as he ended up having, I probably wouldn't have even gone on this journey myself.
Or written the book.
Or any of this. Yeah. Any of this. It was because, Everything that I learned that should work for him wasn't working, Josh. I'm taking him to the child psychiatrist at my medical school as I'm on child psychiatry rotation. I'm like, hey, so I've got this son because by then I had adopted him to get him outta the foster care system. And their solution was, you know, Amy, put him on medication. Seroquel is the treatment of choice at this time for those kind of behaviors. And honestly, he's going to be here, checked into this ward in a few years, if that. And then he's going to be in juvenile hall by the time he's 15 and 16, and he's going to have a life of addiction and crime, and you're going to have your heart broken. That's what happens to these kids. And I was like, oh no. Oh no, not on my watch.
What made you feel that way? Oh no, not on my watch. Because that's a big amount of fuel. That's a big amount of energy that it costs you. You must have sensed that there'd be an expansion of consciousness and love by you supplying that kind of energy. There must have been that insight in you at that time.
There was so much that even went into my decision to become a foster parent that went back to my childhood. And this idea that I was trying to repair things from my family of origin through this relationship. We all do that to some degree. Yeah. Until we become conscious of what we're doing and stop the pattern. But I had felt unseen. I had felt lost. I had felt misunderstood. And that's what I saw happening to him. And it was my way of starting to repair the wounds that I was still carrying from my little child, Amy. I'm not going to give up on you.
Yeah, like much respect to that. And actually much respect to all parents that feel this charge, that feel this inspiration to be with children whose parents are gone. Like, it's such a beautiful thing. It's really beautiful. And there's a cost to it as well. And I think of you like in medicine, working with patients, being a new mom. Did you ever have moments where you thought, is this it? Am I all alone here? Did you ever have loneliness and self-deprecation? What was that like for you in the very beginning stages of this bolus of energy being shot at you by the universe?
The very beginning of it was a time of excitement for me because I was sure that I was enough to heal him. My love for him was so big that just the sheer force of my love would heal these wounds that he obviously carried.
Mm-hmm.
It wasn't until I saw that that was not true that the reality of what I had committed to really hit home, and it became the loneliest place for me because I'm on the hospital wards or in the clinic all day long for my medical training. And then I come home to a child who wants nothing to do with me. And his hatred of me was so obvious in his behaviors that every night was a battle. And I would end up even just having to hold him sometimes for hours just to even get him to be able to go to bed. And it was exhausting and lonely, but also lonely in the sense that no one understood me. No one understood why I would make that decision. So I lost a lot of friends. They didn't know what to do with him because it was also changing me in the process. And I would go to a dinner with my medical school colleagues and I would have to be so attuned to him because of what I knew he could do. And I needed to prevent that, that they saw me as now controlling. And this other version that they didn't know what to do with and they didn't want anything to do with it. Like they're still in their party mode. We're in medical school. And so it just, it isolated me from even my family who didn't not only understand me and my decision, but then was very cautious about accepting him into the family and was taking sides and believed his lies. He would tell my mother, for example, that I was starving him. And she believed him. And so that was very hurtful. And it just, I mean, Josh, talk about opening up my eyes to the family dynamics that I was actually living in and growing up in to see that this is what has been underneath the surface. This has been in the unspoken energetic field that I haven't even known to identify. But this isn't right when my family is taking sides and seeing me as the bad person.
To me, this seems like the ultimate threshold of you're either going to have maturation and acceptance, or you're going to go into victimhood and woe. And so there's some— whether you want to look at the Eastern philosophy of soul contract, there's some kind of karma, dharma with you and—
absolutely—
your son. And then there's also people witnessing you going through this. Like, they're, they're probably thinking, you're an MD, like, why are you choosing this path? Like, you already have a lot going on. Why don't you just do something easier? There was something that your soul chose about this path, and it led you to, in a big way, which you've already shared, the book, this understanding that trauma, AKA stuck energy— um, why don't we start there, actually, because this is really important. All the things that he was feeling when you had to hold him for hours, he was experiencing the biology of trauma, stuck energy. He never had a place to express. He didn't feel safe. You know, maybe he was in exile and his protector was just spraying water trying to protect everyone. If you look at it from an IFS lens, I'm sure that was there. What did you feel start to awaken in you from him that actually propelled you to write the book?
The unexpected happened. And that was he became a window into my own insecurities. And I started to see myself in his behaviors. I've never done those extreme behaviors. However, I started to recognize I guard my heart too. I push people away too. I am very afraid that if someone were to actually, get to know me, that they would find the truth that I am unlovable. And so I can't let them see the real me. And that's exactly what he was afraid of. All he had ever known was rupture in relationships. You're here for me now, but you're not going to be there for me in 6 months from now. Yeah. And so it's not safe for me to connect because I'm just gonna be hurt and hurt on such a deep level that I don't even know how to feel that. I can't feel that. And this became my own reflection of myself. At that time, I didn't have the capacity to do anything with that because I could clearly see what he needed was not a friend. He needed someone who was a strong adult to say, I'm not scared of you. I'm not scared of your big feelings. I'm not scared of your big behaviors that come from those big feelings. I'm not leaving you.
And from there, literally, your understanding of what lives in the body is not just in our mind.
And that's where I could clearly see I don't care how many cookies I reward him with. If he doesn't do that behavior or if he does this instead, he has no power over this. This is something that's coming from such a deep survival place. It's taking over his logic. He doesn't want to be doing these things. He doesn't want to be this way.
This is really important because I think how many people in the world are a wounded child that's in a wrapper of an adult body? A lot, actually. And a lot of billionaires. I think you can have money and you can have peace. I'm not saying it has to be one or the other, but the question I'm poking at here for you is there are— I believe it's 5. There are 5 responses that you talk about in your work that are so deep and they live so much in the trenches of our cellular memory that trying to heal them with a mental model won't work. Can you slowly go through those 5? Because this is really important for anybody who's experiencing that on a regular basis to start to self-reflect. It can actually change their life if they understand at least one of these 5. Really, just pick one, right?
The way that I like to picture this is the dashboard on your car. This is what I will call neuroception. It's the perception of your neural system that says, are you safe to drive this car right now? Or is it not safe to drive the car right now? And so on the dashboard, you have these different monitors that give you information about your car. It's gonna tell you how much gas you have in the tank. It's gonna tell you the tire pressure, it's gonna tell you the, temperature of the engine, level of the oil. It's going to tell you all of these things on this dashboard that allows you as the driver to know, how do I drive this car? That's exactly what's happening inside of our nervous system. It's this minute-by-minute assessment of all of these monitors on the dashboard. So what goes into this dashboard? What's on our dashboard internally that would then tell our body, how do I navigate in the world right now? Am I safe to be around other people right now? Am I not safe to be around other people right now? And it can be kind of categorized into these different layers. The most superficial layer is our thoughts. Our thoughts come from our beliefs about ourself, which come from these different parts of ourselves that have these stories, these narratives, and then these beliefs. And those can generate thoughts. And it is true that our thoughts affect our biology. And so our thoughts are one of the monitors on our dashboard, which is why we do want to notice our thoughts, get curious about, hmm, why would that thought come into my mind right now? While also not chasing the thought. But that is just the superficial level. And that's where a lot of people, especially in the mindset, world, they stay at that level. There's all this other stuff. Yeah. And one of the areas that has come more to light recently excites me about what's happening in the field is this idea of somatic layer. The somatic layer is this body layer, and it's the idea that your body has associations that it has formed based on different sensory inputs. Let me break it down. You've maybe been in a car accident and now you're driving down that same stretch of road. Mm-hmm. It's a different day. It's a different drive. You know logically that you're safe. There's no accident happening this time. However, your body, starts to have a reaction. And just as you're approaching that spot, you start sweating, your heart starts racing, your hands grip the steering wheel. In your mind, you're thinking, this is stupid. Why is my body doing this? It's not happening at the willpower decision level. It's happening at the body level. And you can't stop that body reaction. Now what's actually happening, the science of that is that your body in that moment of the accident created associations. In the somatic therapy world, we call those couplings. And it coupled that tree means danger, that milepost, that sign, whatever it was that was around you at that time, what you saw, what you smelled, what you felt.
It's just like a big snapshot of everything, of all day.
A snapshot that your brain was able to combine some chemicals, especially dopamine, to say, "This is really important. Never forget this. Never forget this." So it's taken that memory, and that's the somatic memory that our body still holds. So that you smell, see, taste anything of the sensory world and it is coupled with something from your past. You smell a perfume and all of a sudden you're having an experience from the past because that smell is coupled with some message from the past, whether a positive message or a dangerous message.
I'm laughing because as you're talking, when I smell fresh-cut grass, it reminds me of Hell Week in football. Where I was like sweating and suffering on the field. Every time I smell fresh-cut grass, I'm like, oh my God, I can like feel the sweat in the shoulder pads. Right. But please continue. You're right. Smell, smell is one for me.
Yes, so that is on the dashboard of our nervous system, that it's constantly collecting information to alert us to what could be signs of danger. But then you still have this whole other layer. If those two weren't enough, now you've got this whole, layer that I call the biology layer. And this is where many in the trauma world, personal development, they miss this part. They miss the part that our own biology is giving signals to our nervous system that says, "We're fine down here, don't worry about us," or, "We're not fine down here. Don't have a conversation with that person." We don't have the energy for that. Like, we literally cannot create enough ATP, which is our energy currency. We cannot create that much energy for you to have that hard conversation and for you to be the kind of person that you want to be right now. So you should avoid, you should isolate, you should do whatever survival pattern that you've been programmed to do. But our own biology becomes the biggest, the most major signal to our nervous system and this dashboard of, am I safe or am I not?
Let's go deep into that. The thing that makes the light come on, the biology of which you speak, is that like a cellular enteric wrapped inside of some fascia? Like, what is actually the informant in the biology of the light coming on. What really is that scientifically, energetically? I'm sure it's both.
It's all of it.
It's all of it.
It's a spiritual— fascinating thing when you look at all of these different constructs. Chinese medicine, Western medicine, they're both right.
German new medicine, throw in there, or no?
Sure, why not?
Okay.
Yeah. So is it energetic? Is it biochemical? Yes. The answer is yes. Yes and yes. Just looking at it in terms of the very conventional medicine model, you have something like toxins, maybe because you've been eating non-organic foods, your body has been exposed to a lot of glyphosate, and that glyphosate is a toxin to your mitochondria that make energy for you. Whenever we enter into a stress mode, either because we're doing something great, like running a marathon, living our life purpose, or, man, I've gotta have that hard conversation and that's stressful. Our body is asked to create more energy because that's what we need for stress response is more energy. And so there are signals like adrenaline that go down to an individual cell and say, cell, I'm gonna do something stressful. I need more energy. Okay. Now the cell is going to look around and be like, yep, we can do that for you. No problem. We'll turn it up right now. Or it will look around and say, sorry, I wish I could, but I've got this glyphosate over here and I've got this magnesium deficiency over here and I've got this parasite over here and I've got this low serotonin over here. I wish I could, but actually we're gonna need to just kind of dim the lights. We're gonna need to more isolate and shut down rather than rev up and give you the go. Mm. That's gonna be the better way to survive this response. So we can see our nervous system doing that all day long, and we don't even realize that the majority of the messages that are telling our nervous system, can I amp it up? Or do I need to back it off, are coming from our own biology. We are so used to thinking of it as just like, well, the thought that I had, well, let me change my thinking.
Right.
Yeah. Or the feeling that I have, ah, well, let me not feel grief. All of those are still essential. We can't eliminate those. But now it's just this larger picture of they're all so connected. You cannot silo them. And so you look at even a health condition, maybe a digestive issue. We were talking earlier about stomach ulcer. Is stomach ulcer genetic? Is it biochemical? Is it the H. pylori infection? Is it psychosomatic? Is it emotional? Is this your generational trauma? And to all of that, I would say, Yes.
Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, so good.
Drives people crazy because they want one answer. We are still looking for, no, what's the one magic pill that I need to fix this? And then here I come along and I'm going to say it's never one thing, it's all of it. Which is why whatever is going on in your body is going to need all of these parts to be able to get you to the level of wholeness and health. That you want.
I think that's why people get scared of healing, because they realize what you're saying is true on some level, not even from a thinking level, you know, the biological layer that you're describing. I love that. So biological, somatic layer, and then mental.
Yeah.
And they feed and inform each other.
Yes.
But I think in our guts, even that term gut feeling is an interesting thing. Because to have a gut feeling, you can't always explain it.
Right?
It's like, I like that person, but I don't know why I don't like that person. But I don't know why. It's this— it's literally in our guts. In some of my research, I, I went deep into how many actual connections are in the enteric nervous system, which is wild.
It's more than our brain.
It's more than our brain. It's like more than something like— I even heard somebody say like it's, it's a galaxy's worth of stars versus connections. That being said, is it, is it really that we can just start wherever we feel called to start in the healing journey if there's 50 things that get to have attention. This is what I believe. My question comes from people feeling overwhelmed. People feel overwhelmed. They don't want to start because they know how much work it's going to take. Have you seen in your practice and in your life and with your book and just everything that you're exploring, have you seen that there is an optimal place to begin among all the other places? I mean, essentially wherever you start, good, because at least you're starting in one piece, but Can you shorten the learning curve for somebody who's like, yeah, I want to heal, but I feel all alone. I want to heal, but I feel overwhelmed. Where do they begin?
I summarize my work as precision nervous system healing. How can I be more precise about exactly what your body nervous system needs right now, even though it's a mountain Yeah. What's your next step? Maybe different than someone else's next step. This is why we need to be precise about it. Saying that, looking at the big picture, the first step is always learning how to shift our inner state. There are 3 different states, operating states that our body has. Again, this is all driven by the nervous system. I know you don't like that word.
That's all right.
Every time I say that now, I'm just like, I'm making him nervous. I call it neural, you call it nervous.
It's fine, it's whatever. If it doesn't hold the charge, then it doesn't hold a charge for you. I just, I just like neural because for me, with my background and my upbringing, right, I just like the word neural. But we can, we can say nervous or neural either way, y'all. We're talking about the axons and the dendrites here.
Exactly, either way, this is what we're talking about, the electrical cords. So neuroception is the driver for your physiology. Yeah. I liken that to my car that's a stick shift. Have you driven stick shift?
Oh, yeah.
Isn't it so fun?
It's great.
I have so much more control, but not in a bad way. Like, I feel so much more involved in the process of driving when I'm the one shifting the gears than when it's just happening and I'm more passive.
Yeah.
That's exactly how our neural system is operating. It is the one shifting the gears based on the information that's coming in from these 3 levels. And so say that I have some signal danger come in from somewhere, and my neural system is like, "Oh, we gotta shift gears." To what gear and how fast is all based on our neural system. So it is the driver. And there are 3 categories of states that we can be in. One is, ventral vagal. Many people will know that as rest and digest, parasympathetic. I call it calm and alive because I'm going to differentiate that from a different vagal that happens in overwhelm. So calm and yet alive, not calm and passed out, calm and numb.
Nope, not sedated, but like, exactly, peaceful in here.
Yeah, actually here, calm and very alive. And then if there's danger our neural system is gonna shift gears and put us up into the sympathetic state. Sympathetic, another word for that, if you're not, you know, all into the biochemistry, is activation. So for all my trauma therapists out there, that's the word that they usually word is activated. Activation is just that. It's not bad, it's not good, it's just activation. It's just the higher gear, 'cause I'm burning through more fuel. That's what the sympathetic stress activation does for me. But as soon as I reach overwhelm, that is no longer an effective strategy. Overwhelm is going to paralyze me and it's going to shift me out of that and throw on my emergency brake. And now I'm in this low frequency, low energy operating state because it's my operating state. My whole physiology shifts in that direction. So if I have these different states, what if I could learn how to shift my own state so that I'm not at the mercy of wherever my neural system is taking me? But I could say, oh, I'm in sympathetic activation right now and it's not serving me, let me shift it to calm alive. Ooh, I'm in overwhelm right now and it's not serving me. Let me do my skills and shift my own state back to just safer. Maybe I can't get all the way back to safe, but if I can just do safer, it changes my physiology. And the challenge for people is that they live so much of their life in these two states, either activation or shutdown. And that is not where your body is able to even engage in its own healthy and repair mechanisms. Mm-hmm. It's in survival mode. But since that's where people live the whole time, they're not even able to access what could my body do if it were allowed to do it? And so That is for everyone where I have them start that creates the fastest shift in their chronic health symptoms is them learning how to shift their own state. And the fastest way to do that is with some type of somatic connection with their body where they're creating the sensation of safer, creating the sensation of support. And just that is the place to start, because then that opens up some energy. And now we can take that energy and apply it to the next step that we need to take.
Wow, there's so many layers in what you just shared. That's so good. Y'all rewind that, uh, because my next question— I saw you did this.
Yeah.
And for y'all watching, subscribe, because you're present, so you may as well subscribe. Subscriptions are really interesting. It's like when I do this, I'm subscribing to listening to my body. Yeah, think about it. Like, I love that you did that because I do that all the time. I do it in breathwork. I do it sometimes if I'm stressed out, I'll lay on the floor and do that. There's this warmth from my hands where that puts— in your description, it puts my hand on the knob to actually shift my gear. And I shared on your podcast that in 2016 I found breathwork. How much have you found personally in a clinical setting that just touch and breath So simple, yet because of the beliefs, so hard sometimes to give ourselves permission to do. Have you found that breath and touch, or anything else that you might mention for us— breath and touch seems so elegant, so potent, so powerful, but we run into our beliefs that make us feel like we shouldn't do it. Have you found this to be true?
And it's so simple that many people dismiss it, right? That's so simple.
It shouldn't work, right? Yes.
It's so simple. I've done that. I'm like, no, you haven't.
If somebody ever says to me, I've done breathwork, and they're still an asshole, I'm like, you get to breathe more. No judgment. Like, just awareness.
Awareness.
But the simple acts, they seem so more potent than anything else, right?
And we think that we are so complicated and we are so unique that something so simple wouldn't, couldn't work for us. And so this is the foundations that I teach. I say, you're right, we've got to go do the deeper work. We've got to go do that grief work, the attachment work, the letting go and detox. We've got to do that work. But it's not even safe for me to take you to those places until you learn how to shift your own gears. Then I can go out to the racetrack with you and we can get some work done because you are able to navigate your own body, your own states in a very different way. You see, even though I'm great at reading nervous systems, neural systems, even though I'm great, guess what? I cannot ever be the expert in your own body. Sure. You've got to become that. Oh, but I don't, I'm not smart enough. I can't do that. I'm looking for my guru. This is what's happening in the field right now. We're looking to the vagus nerve stimulation devices, we're looking to the this, we're looking to everything outside of us rather than being able to say, I can learn some of these skills and it's in me so that no matter where I go, it's always with me because it's inside of me. And this idea that the somatic connection is the fastest way to shift your state when you have nothing else. That is the fastest way to shift your state. Will it ever be the only thing? Hell no. It's never the— it's never only one thing. Yeah, it's just this idea of this is where we start because it's the most important thing to learn these skills that will allow you to navigate the deeper waters and not drown.
The ultimate question is, we're trying so hard to put Band-Aids on a society that makes us sick, and we all know it. And it's like the emperor's not wearing any clothes, and the little kid, aka this podcast, is saying, hey, the emperor's naked! And everybody's pretending, like, our economics, our society, the way, uh, men and women have been pitted against each other, the treatment of people based on their skin color, poverty. I mean, it's just like we're in such a soup to use your word. We're in such an unhealthy soup that it just flashes before my consciousness. Even when I— the first time I ever heard this phrase, I was like, that's it, that's, that's what we're swimming in. And it was from J. Krishnamurti. He said, it's no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. When I heard— I think I was like 25 when I heard that. I was just beginning to be a trainer. And I was like, oh, that's what's really going on. It was like right away. But just because we know something is broken in us, outside of us, with society, it doesn't mean that changing it is going to be easy. Because here's the big question for you and all of us, is once we know, we can't unknow. We can pretend like we don't know outside of us or inside of us, the maladies, the the illnesses, the dis-eases, really. And if we pretend like we don't know, then it's just gonna make us sick and it's gonna perpetuate this whole crazy game that we're in. So the ultimate question is, do you believe that it's really a condition of a lack of honesty in this world with self, with other, with community? Do you feel like it's really just an honesty issue about what's actually here versus what we all wish we were projecting was actually here?
I'm gonna say that from my perspective, it's a lack of knowledge. I'm not sure lack of honesty at the ground level. I think it's a lack of honesty at the leadership level, but at the ground level, I have a patient coming in to sit in front of me, and she, let's just pick Elena from chapter 1 of my book. Elena came in, sat in front of me, developed autoimmunity in her late 40s. She's thinking, this is just autoimmunity, what do I need to do? And as a physician, I see that it's just a lack of knowledge, that she doesn't know all the reasons why she just developed autoimmunity. So from my point as the physician, do I share that with her? Do I withhold that from her? That's where the honesty shows up for me as the leader.
But you're being honest. You're figuring out if this is applicable or not based on the level of awareness, consciousness, intelligence that she has, right? So I'm pushing back gently because why not? I, I think, I think it's both. Because when you're seeing someone in a clinical setting there's only so much time you spend with them, and you can't teach them about metaphysical energy and the etheric field and what—
right, they can't do all of that in the 15 minutes that health insurance covers.
They're, they're not going to get that. But, but what I'm— uh, my— the, the intention of my question, the real intention of my question was, once someone that you work with, or just any of us, gets to a level of awareness— I'm not, I'm not judging anyone, nor am I using honesty as a hammer. I'm not saying that honesty is like this black and white, because it's not. Sometimes it's dependent on one's level of awareness. How— to the degree that they can be honest is predicated by their level of self-awareness. Otherwise, they just don't know. They don't know. So I get what you're saying. But what I'm saying is when many of the people that listen to the show and many of the people that are already in the conversation with you and I, they have some level of awareness, they have some level of, of, you either being honest with self or being afraid to be honest with self. And in no way is my question putting down my fellow human beings for not being honest, 'cause I think all of us at times may struggle with honesty to self and others. I think it's just a human condition, it's a human thing. But the reductionized question is, if we just focused on honesty, either that we don't know what to do or that we do know what to do and we're not doing it, If we just had honesty as a lens where we saw everything, I think we could turn this entire society and world around very quickly. But there are certain structures that are in place that don't want that to happen because they're capitalizing on your voice not being heard, on what you're doing with your book, with your work not being amplified. And to that I say, fuck off, because it's a— it's a message worth sharing. The message of truth is, is what's worth everything. It's like, what, what in our life is more important than truth? I know I'm being very, um, passionate and out there with my verbiage, but God, it's like I, I felt this ever since I was a child, what I'm sharing with you. And I think we all feel it. We all know that there's this beautiful existence that's more possible. It obviously starts with us. So I'll pass it back to you, the, the question of honesty, not as a hammer, not as a judgment. How might you explain that, the lack of honesty of self and other that could change our society? How might you share that?
I am gonna take that to where my brain and body takes that somatically, which is, it's a lack of safety. Mm. I have experienced that tension between, am I being honest with myself? Am I looking at it honestly?
It's a process.
And realizing that my block at that time was it wasn't safe to be honest. It wasn't safe enough to even be honest with myself. Whether other people experience that or not, I don't know. Maybe I'm the solo duck out in the water being like, I don't feel safe to be honest with myself sometimes. I think you're good. Yeah.
There's a lot of other ducks out there.
What's coming up for me is I have a lyric in a song that I recently composed. It's been one of my new expressions of my beingness, beingness, right? Like, even, even having words for it is, is still like the area that I'm stepping into is, do I always have to have words for things? And so part of me now composing music about this whole neural system and my journey has been, how do I bring in the music that will help express the feeling of it? And so I've started to put some of my songs on YouTube. Songs of the Inner World is the channel that I'm now putting this music on. And my latest song that I composed was the hardest one for me to compose, 'cause it's on feeling grief. How, knowing that I need to feel it to heal it, But what the fuck? Like, and that was the same conclusion that I came to with myself, was I haven't been able to feel this because it hasn't been safe to feel it. So my job is not to feel it. My job is not to be honest with myself. My job is to create the safety to feel, the safety for the honesty. That's my job, that's my work. And when I do that, when I create that safety, the rest will just follow because I've created the safety for it to be in my space. And so I have this lyric, this line in the song that says, all I need to do, I don't need to feel all of my grief. All I need to do is make it safe enough to feel. And so how can we make it safe for ourselves or others to be honest? I don't think that that is going to happen at a commercial, conventional level. Yeah, that's not the business world. They're working with a completely different construct to engage us in a way that we lose all power. So it's back to the individual. It's back to us as an individual. How do I create— how could I create just enough safety for me to actually look at myself, look at my patterns, look at my issues, look at how I have created this life that I complain about?
Yeah.
And have the safety to be honest about it.
I stand reframed. It's one thing I love about podcasting is I can have my awareness and my consciousness changed and expanded and almost like silly putty, right?
Isn't that lovely? Like just the dance of that.
Literally. Like, well, look, I wouldn't be authentic if I wasn't sharing what I truly believe with my passion, from my body, from my heart. To then pause, which is a beautiful tool for safety.
Which is another skill that people need to learn.
To then pause and hear someone out and allow pontification to happen. And then go, you know what, I think actually she's on to something there. Because I approach life as a man.
I hope so.
Yeah. That's a whole nother podcast. Yeah, so I approach life as a man. And that's why in our logo is the triangle, by the way, the thing that I know I get to learn the most about, which is why God brought me a daughter, is women and feminine energy. And so I'm not— I, I'm consciously incompetent when it comes to women, okay? Um, and most men fall in my category. Actually, sadly, a lot of men are in the, in the unconsciously incompetent. They don't even know that they don't know, and they're like, well, this is the way it has to be, like the Andrew Tates of the world. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because what happened right here was a, was an elegant dance of communication that, that was just happened to be modeled organically on a podcast. And this is the part of podcasting that, that brings me alive. This is the juice of humanity that we get to experience together, because it's having a strong view but being open to someone else's view that actually allow more peace to reside in the body. Because I, when I hear your take on honesty and the connection of safety to honesty just feels better for me. Feels better for me than my, well, we're not being honest, right? Because there was almost a touch of, of— now that I'm reflecting, there's almost a touch of judgment in my, well, we're just not being honest with ourselves, which is paradoxically true.
It is true.
But then on the other side, what I just learned from you, and I hope what you all are really getting right now, because this is huge, is that honesty is informed by safety, specifically for women, which I've had a lot of episodes, and I learn this with my wife all the time. One that just came out a couple weeks before this one was Alex Charfen, a guy here in Austin. Do you know him?
That was fantastic. No, I don't know him, but I listen to your podcast.
Shout out to Alex. And the thing about Alex is that he experienced a lot of what I'm sharing with you where he thought his way was the right way. And so as men, the greatest gift that we can bring is an open mind. Literally, it's the most amazing thing because look what just happened for people sitting here with us. They were probably like, yeah, Josh is right. And then they're like, well, she's actually right. And it's like, well, they're both right. It depends on the context. And so let's go— now that I've shared that, let's go deeper into the safety because this is a huge misnomer. One thing that Alex and Teal Swan shared with me on the podcast She said that men have no idea the level of missing safety that women experience when they walk down a street compared to a man. Do you find that's true for yourself and in your practice as well when it comes to the way women experience safety versus men? Or do you not grok with that understanding? What's your take on that?
I have seen that there are some similarities just being a human being. But then there are these differences for how men experience safety.
Yeah.
And they experience safety through being respected.
Providing respect.
Providing.
Yeah.
Yes.
Having, having like affluence or stature.
Right.
Yeah.
Whereas women experience safety as, can I speak up? Do I have a voice here? And those are issues that men can experience given their background. And so there can be many crossovers, but there are these differences in what men experience as, "This is how I feel safe," versus what women experience as, "This is how my body actually feels safe." But one of the big misunderstandings still in the field is this idea that you can tell yourself that you feel safe.
"Ha, yeah, just feel safe. What are you doing? Hurry up, feel safe." It sounds ridiculous. Yeah, it really does.
But it really is true because this is where all of our mantras come from, right? Like, put it on a sticky note on your refrigerator. I want you to say out loud, when you look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself, "I love you, I am safe," where your body is like screaming back like, No, we are not. No. And you don't love me. You abandon me all day long. You never listen to me. You never connect with me. You just try to force your way through the world with your mind, having no sense of what I need to feel safe and supported. And so there's still this huge disconnect between the mind and the body, even though we have so much information now about mind-body connection. I still think that most people don't even know what that means. They think they know what it means intellectually. They haven't embodied it. They haven't actually felt it.
What do you think it means?
It is a feeling. It is a sensation of, I'm okay. Wow, I'm okay. It doesn't, I don't think, need to be any more complicated than that. What complicates it is that it's a feeling Not a thought. I can't decide that I'm safe. I have to create the sensation that I'm safe. And that's what trips a lot of people up, even professional practitioners. I work with a lot of yoga, body workers, people who are very embodied, and yet they come and they learn these foundational somatic skills of how to actually create create that sense of safety in your body. And they're like, I realized that I've never actually felt safe in my own body, in my own skin. It's always been up here, me saying I'm going to do this yoga practice because I'm going to create safety. It's still always been a thought, a mental process, not an actual embodiment. We're actually terrified to feel what's in our body.
Why are we so afraid?
We think that we're going to get overwhelmed and drown and die.
Like we'll get stuck in the feeling and it'll never stop.
Yeah. And it's true because that is what it feels like to, to be in that trauma response. And so in Chapter 1, I lay out those 5 steps that our body takes into the trauma response. And once it crosses that line from, well, that was just stress— I mean, not to minimize stress, but that was just stress.
Yeah.
This is something else. We haven't known the word to call it, but it feels really awful. It feels like the bottomless pit. It feels like I'm free falling and no one's there to catch me. It feels like I have lost my anchor. I'm drifting and there's no end to this drifting. So it's a very hopeless place, which is very intentional for our body to put us in that place in order for us to survive what has become a trauma. There are 3 survival mechanisms that it switches to, and that is part of it, is that feeling, which is why it's so awful. Of course we don't wanna feel it. Of course we don't wanna feel it.
But we're going there to learn something. There's a deep learning. One of the things I learned from Paul, and by the way, you guys have to do a podcast. I'm so curious how you guys would play games. It'd be fun to watch with your medical background and you as a healer, and then it would just be so fun. He says that, and I've heard it from other people in their own words, I'm sure Paul would say that he's borrowed this wisdom, but he says that when the pain teacher arrives, you have to be ready to learn the lesson. And if you don't learn the lesson, the pain teacher will come back again. And so the most humble, powerful place of real sacredness and self-care, self-love would be, all right, deep breath. I'm feeling the feeling. What are you here to teach me? It's so simple. I have said that probably like a thousand times in the sauna space.. And I've even said a prayer where I'll do this, like you modeled for us. I just intuitively, like a long time ago, I started doing it because it just feels good. And I'll say, God, what is it that I most get to learn? And how can I be most humble to learn it? And I'll just repeat that, not having to have the answer, because I find that when I am white-knuckling getting the answer, it never comes. I have to actually surrender to feeling it. And then when I feel it, I usually get a little whisper like, go talk to that person, go have that conversation.
The clarity comes.
Go, go do that thing. But it's in, it's in the neutral, it's in the downregulation that you talked about, that really all the clarity and all the wisdom actually appears. Otherwise, I just keep going back to the pain teacher, and the pain teacher's like, I already told you, I already told you, but you weren't listening. Do you find that, how can you describe, I described a spiritual metaphysical lens, but how would you describe that from the neural system and from medicine itself?
The stored trauma becomes stored because we were never able to reset back to, I'm safe, the story is over, I can breathe again.
The story's over, yeah. That lands, the story's over.
And so because the story's not really over, then it gets held and stored, and it still is creating all of this impact on our biology. Mm. All the other things as well, but I'm gonna focus on the biology 'cause that's what you're asking me about right now. And so this idea that even down to my metabolism, my thyroid, my digestive system, my immune system, they're all so closely connected with the story that's giving me this ongoing sense of danger that now my whole system, every system in my system is waiting. Danger's right around the corner. It might happen again because the story's not over yet. Mm. That creates pain in our life. The pain of the story not only feeling that the story is not over, but then also the pain of what is this costing me? It's costing me my energy. I can't go out and do what I enjoy doing, whether that's biking, hiking, socializing. It just— I don't have the energy because that state is affecting my metabolism. And so the cost also becomes That's part of the pain. So at any of those points, we can decide, okay, I've paid enough of the price. I'm ready for something different. And then it's, well, what do I do? And the idea that we find the entry point, because it is so deep. Mm-hmm. It's a deep well. So all I need is the entry point. And sometimes for some people that entry point is, well, what are my thoughts about this? What do I believe about this? Sometimes the entry point is, this is so painful in my body. Let me just go to my body and start to create that entry point there of curiosity. What's going on here? Other times it's the biology and digestive issues can be a very common one. So let's just go there for a second. Digestive issues. If you start to do some of the repair work, maybe you've had SIBO, maybe you've had microbiome imbalances, whatever it is, and you start making those adjustments, those adjustments are all adaptations from this pain, from these patterns. So you start changing this, and now that's also going to disrupt the construct that your body's been operating on, and it's going to bring things to the surface. You're going to start feeling things that you're like, I didn't know that doing the parasite protocol would make me feel— oh yes, it will make you feel. Yeah, because that parasite infection happened as a result of these patterns in your nervous system that made it even be welcoming and invited.
It was a habitable place.
Exactly. It's like it opened up the front door, it's like, come on in, made a, made a whole bedroom for you. Whereas everyone gets exposed to parasites, but if your nervous system isn't already in those patterns of protection and patterns of pain, yeah, you're not susceptible to it.
Oh my God, I have to share. What you are speaking is lived truth for me, what you just shared. I dealt with chronic sinusitis my whole life, literally ever since I was young. 3, 4 surgeries. And I got to this place that describes exactly what you were talking about, where I just decided, you know what, I'm actually not going to look at what pills, what medicine, what surgery, what things. There's this whole Shoemaker Protocol, but then he's incredibly unhealthy. I'm just like, what? You're not even healthy and you have this protocol to be healthy? It doesn't make any sense. So I put all that down and I said, I am going to commit to not working as hard as I've been working and to trust God in life. I'm going to look at my hypervigilance. I'm going to feel the sensation in my sinuses when I get— because it starts to come on and my body speaks to me. It's a little like— I even did it this week. I canceled 5 appointments this week.
5.
Because I knew my, my body started to talk to me and it's like, if you work this hard again, we're going to bring around this sinus again. And here's the amazing thing. In over 3 years, I have not had one sinus infection. I don't have to do any more sprays anymore. It's all gone. So it's exactly what you're talking about, but it's energetic because I'm not increasing my allostatic load indefinitely. I'm at this place where I can actually live what you're speaking about, and I can, I can have these subtle cues that if I don't pay attention, I get the sledgehammer. And I'm like, I have this amazing podcast today. I am going to reschedule all this other stuff. I'm going to push everything out. So yeah, I'm, I'm curious, like, there's so much energy and metaphysical that I'm describing, but it lands, I'm sure, in all ways with you. I'm sure it lands metaphysically and medically and spiritually for you as well. Do you ever find that people try to pigeonhole you into medicine? Because you're, because you're a lot more than that. And even the title of your book, you know, it's got a medical term on it.
So I've got a cell membrane on the COVID There's a cell membrane.
But so when I ask you these questions, it's like, yo, permission to answer however you want, not just as an MD, you're also a soul. What, what comes up for you when I shared my story about behaviors and intuitive guidance from my body and literally letting go of something that plagued me my whole life?
The word that comes to mind is predictable.
Predictable.
This is so predictable.
Okay.
I wish more people knew this, right? Like, yes, you have a physical health condition. Yes, there is biology and biochemistry and physiology behind that, and There's all this other stuff that's influencing the biology. So I'm saying, like, you can't separate them. They're so connected that it's often hard to even talk about them being connected because it's all one thing. Yeah. And if more people could know that, they would know that— take any symptom, you're going to want to do all of these different layers. And when you do that, the metaphysical, the energetic, the somatic, and the biology, wow, the level of repair that you're going to be able to do for your body is going to change the rest of your life. It's predictable. Like this, this is, this is the science. We know this.
Yes. There's so much depth here. The next question I was going to ask you was scientific. I'm going to change it. Because I feel like even the logo of medicine where it has the snakes wrapped around, it's almost like a, like a talisman. Is that the medicine logo?
It's Moses's staff.
Moses's staff.
From the Old Testament in the Bible.
Okay, so here we are bridging the two worlds. What do you believe that people consistently don't understand about the relationship of biology and science and spiritual energy, what do you wish people could really understand about the connection between the two?
I would want them to understand that in order for the, the true healing, that you need to look at, at all of these levels, all of these different pieces. I still, again, see them as siloed where you have the therapy world and they're so focused on whatever their specialty is. Maybe it's cognitive behavioral therapy, maybe it's somatic, maybe it's energetic, maybe it's bodywork. But then you try to talk to them about mitochondria and adrenaline and ATP and they go cross-eyed. Sure. And I'm like, but how do you do your job? Because that's what you're actually working with. And Someone showing up with a latte gives you important information about their nervous system. But if you don't know the science, you don't know the biology, you're not even gonna know to be curious about, "Can you tell me about that latte? What is it doing for you? Why would you bring that into session with us today?" You're gonna discover that they've got a very strong functional freeze that just to get to your session, they're having to generate energy, they're having to create adrenaline. Wow, what rich insight that you would have to work with that if you only just knew the biology. Or maybe have you considered asking them, you know, after our sessions here, what happens? Like, what do you do? And you'd find out that they're drinking an extra glass of wine that night. You'd find that they're stopping by their favorite store and getting their favorite ice cream. Wouldn't that be helpful to know? Mm-hmm. Because if that's what they're needing to do to come down off of the session with you, that is so much information for you. How is that food affecting and somehow helping their nervous system with what it just opened up? To you with? That tells me that they didn't feel safe. They're having the vulnerability hangover.
Sure, I've heard of that.
Yeah.
Oops.
Yeah, I shared too much. Oops, I opened up too much, more than what felt safe to do. And so now I've got to do this over here to change my biology, to help numb the feelings that I just opened up too much. And even just looking at numbing, Josh, one of the primary ways in which people use to numb feelings is food. If you don't ask about that as a therapist, how can you get to the fact that they're even numbing? Yeah. I used to binge eat before a session. Did I tell my therapist? No. Did I even think to tell? No, because that's food. That has nothing to do with my therapy. It has everything to do. Like, a person's biology affects the capacity for a therapy session. So you better be talking about the biology. But you can't just talk about the biology because you go to your primary care provider And their capacity for healing is going to be entirely dependent on the meaning of that symptom that their body has decided. What does this mean for me? The sinusitis, what does that mean? This means that this is my way, my body's way of slowing me down when it's scared that I'm doing too much.
Absolutely.
If that's the meaning, and you're just trying to provide the next surgery, you're missing the whole meaning of it. And of course, you're not going to get better. But what provider, medical provider, is even asking about, "What does this disease mean to you? How does this help you?" People would get very confused. "What do you mean my sinusitis is helping me? No, no, no, my sinusitis is the problem. That's why I'm coming to you." And so, like, this is the big misunderstanding is that somehow we can just talk about this and somehow that be effective. And yet when I look at who are the healers of the future, the healers of the future are the ones that have the big picture. Even if they don't have all of the skills for all of the pieces, They see all the pieces. They surround themselves with others who can help provide the pieces that they're not skilled in to actually be effective in what we're doing.
I have literally no comment, which might be a first. Um, everything you just shared is beautiful on its own. Now what it leads me to is what I felt in my chest and probably what y'all are feeling too, and that is "what about my responsibilities? I know what you're saying is true. I know that my body's asking me to slow down, but I have 3 kids to pay for and my rent doesn't care if I slow down and my responsibilities." Now, just talking this through with you, it's so—
No, let's pause right there. Let's pause right there. That person who's listening to us right now, that's their thought.
Yep.
I'm gonna channel you.
Sure. I might've been going where you were going, but go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
What if we just pause right there? Pause, right? We've got the story, and the story is gonna take us into all the other worries and all the other stuff, right? So what if we just pause right there? Hand over heart, hand over belly. I would love shoulder support, but we'll do the best we can. And that's just it. I'm doing the best I can. Say it out loud.
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm doing the best that I can.
Like, I feel my body just settle a little bit. That's where I would want people to start, is just safer. Doesn't have to be 100% safe. We're not going to get there, at least not at the beginning. Yeah, but just safer. Well, how much safer, Dr. Amy? 1%.
1%.
1%. Yeah. When I have people come into my somatic exercises, I have them give me, what number of anxiety would you give what's happening inside your body right now? And whatever number they give me, I say, we're going to go for a 0.1 less than that. But don't you want to get me down to zero? No. Actually, I don't. Ooh. That wouldn't feel safe. Your body has that level of anxiety because it feels like that's the level of anxiety that you need to get your stuff done. So all we're gonna do is we're gonna just take that and say, I hear you and I'm just gonna pull it back a notch, just 0.1 point safer. Now, when we do the exercise, We find that it actually usually shifts a few, a few days. A lot more. Yeah, from 9 to 6.
You've taken away the pressure of it having to go down so much.
Exactly. Yeah. There's so many ways that we can come in and just provide safer, even just, this is a big one, Josh, for people, even just this idea of, and I'm here with you. I'm here with you. You don't have to do this alone. Just that, like our body constantly feels alone if we've been living in our heads for most of our life. So just the message of, yeah, this is hard and you're not alone. I'm here with you now. We'll do this together. That, just that, again, the touch with the words. I'm creating a feeling. It's not just me telling myself. I'm creating the feeling. Allows our nervous system to shift just to safer.
It's very good. Um, what came up for me— and we're gonna have to do another podcast, okay? Because this is just so good. I could literally go for hours. And I'm gonna say that probably what most— I'm gonna guess most people felt that point one, or maybe even a point or two, just from doing what you shared. I have seen, and I'm curious what you've seen, that when you get somebody to a place where they feel safe enough to feel what's present, typically what comes up that I've seen specifically when I would work with people in person and breathwork, it would be anger, sadness, anger or sadness. So I want to give homage to what I was feeling earlier that I want to give everybody permission to feel angry about the way things are in the world. And that's okay. It's okay to feel angry about how things are. Now, is anger going to get us to change? If we feel it, but not as a total fuel source. So my question for you is, have you seen both either the lower density grief, sadness, despair, and anger be these catapulting experiences? That can get someone up to a greater state of peace and even more safety if they do the practices of breathing and touch that allows them to feel it in the first place. To me, it makes perfect sense, but it might be like the first time somebody's hearing this. You're telling me that if I feel angry, it's going to make me feel better, or if I cry, it's going to make me feel more peace? That's what I'm saying. But I'm curious if you've seen this and experienced this.
This is a big misunderstanding in the space as well, is this idea that I will only feel better I will only and always feel better if I do therapy, if I do this.
Yeah.
And actually what happens is that our body comes out of this state the same way that it went in. And the way it went in was this overwhelm and almost betrayal of how could this happen to me? How could this be happening? This was not ever supposed to happen. So good. And so as our body goes into that, like, I guess I'm just gonna hibernate, it comes out of what we call the freeze and the shutdown, and it opens up into the anger and the grief of what precipitated that. And that's where a lot of people get stuck. Yeah. 'Cause they haven't learned how to be with that anger. They haven't learned how to sit with that sadness. And so they're not able to move through it, or I would say have it move through them, and they swallow it back in and they go back into the state where they were at before.
Yeah.
And so those are the skills that a person needs to learn. I have 5 core skills that a person will need for the healing journey. One is, can I feel? Can I feel? Can I feel my feelings? Can I feel my body? Body, then can I shift my state? We've talked about that. Can I pace? Can I pace the healing journey? Meaning not open up more than what feels safe to open up, because if I do that, I'm back where I begin. It, it's a step back than being able to only say, this is as far as I'm going to go today. I know that there's more to do, but it's not for today. And be okay with that. Can I pace? Can I track? Can I track my own state? Can I notice, ooh, I'm entering activation? Can I notice that? Can I notice when I'm approaching that line of overwhelm and hopefully know then how to shift my state so I can pull myself back and stay out of overwhelm? That is gonna be one of the key concepts of changing a biology of trauma. Finally, can I choose? Can I choose a different response? Requires the pausing that we talked about. Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, has a fantastic quote on this where it says the stimulus, right, is what creates then that response, but my power is in the space that I can create. Create. Most people don't have a space between their trigger and their response. And so if I can create that space, I now have the power to choose a different response than what I would have done before. And then that will create new programming, new map for my nervous system to be able to say, well, we did this other response one time. What if we did that again instead of the one that we've than for most of our life.
I think at this point, anytime I ever talk about healing or addressing the human being, it can never come from just one thing anymore. So caveat, y'all, all the mental models that we have in our programs, they're good, they get you there. But what's going to get you— I love what you said, and I want you to say it again if I butcher it. You said what, what activated you or got you there on the way in is also what gets to be experienced and felt on the way out. Can you say that again and go a little bit deeper into that? That's really important for people to get.
So the body's trauma response is very sequential and intentional, and it's this building up of anxiety based on the size of danger that we are experiencing, perceiving, speaking of reality versus what I perceive. Sure. And so as the size of the danger gets bigger and bigger and bigger, My activation is going higher and higher and higher, but it can only go so high. Now, what's really neat, just to bring in the biology, is that this is all driven by adrenaline. Cortisol is not the stress hormone, you guys. Adrenaline, adrenaline is where we need to have our focus. So adrenaline is now surrounding our cells and saying, I have got this much danger, I need this much energy. And as long as you can make that energy, great, you're still gonna be in stress. You're not going to experience it as a trauma. But the moment that your cells say, "This is too big for us," your body, your cells enter what's called the cell danger response. It's research coming out of Bob Naviaux's work in San Diego. This idea that the cell has these three different phases or operating systems that we've talked about., and it has stress mode, and then it has this shutdown mode when the stress has become toxic, too much. At that point, that's the critical line of overwhelm. Your body, your nervous system says fighting or running away is no longer the best solution, cuz I don't have the energy to do that given the size of the danger. I can't run away. So now what triggers the trauma response is the perception of an inescapable life threat. Now, once you're an adult, you know, your wife looks at you the wrong way and you go into the freeze response because to you that feels like an inescapable life threat. We can look at it logically and be like, well, that's ridiculous that I would have a trauma response based on someone's look. No, no, no, no, that is based on your attachment and what that look would've meant from your mother.
I've seen that in my son and daughter, the way they respond to me sometimes. It's like I look in their face and it's like they feel like they're under true threat.
Yes, yes. So once that happens, our new survival strategies don't become fight it or run away from it. It becomes dissociate from it, immobilize. And conserve energy. And so if that's the state that we go into, we go into the heaviness, if you wanna talk about energy, the low frequency, right? That energy conservation literally changes your metabolism. It literally is dimming the lights to say, we are going to make less energy because we are just going to survive, but not be fully alive. It's not safe to be fully alive. If we're fully alive, we're gonna get caught, we're gonna get seen, we're gonna get eaten, we're gonna, you know, the list goes on for what that means. And so this is where we stop breathing even because the monster might hear my breath. Our core temperature, if you're tracking your data, you'll see your core temperature drop a few notches because evolutionary ways would say that if I'm warm, the monster will sense my warmth. I need to cool my body down. So if all that's happening under the surface, and it's like we then go into this shell, we retreat into our shell like a turtle, right? Like we pull our head in, we pull our feet in. This is overwhelming, going to retreat into myself. How do you come out of that? When you come out of that, you are going to be faced with what puts you into that. And you are going to feel angry that you threatened my life. You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to be my partner. You're supposed to be my protector. You're supposed to be whatever it is to you. Or if it's life that gut punched you, you're supposed to be on my side. You're supposed to be helping me. People can have this type of response from God, right? Like, God, how could you let this happen? You are supposed be my protector. If it's a parent, if it's a whoever it is, right? Like, there's that anger of, you created a threat on my life, how dare you. But for those people who grew up with the perception and experience that anger was not something that you could express, guess where you go? You go back into, oh no, no, no, no, anger, anger is a life threat. There's no way that I could express my anger. There's no way that I could let them know that I was hurt.
Do you feel like that's gender-specific? Do women struggle with that more than men? I don't, from what you've seen.
So I think it looks differently, Josh. Okay. But when I, when I speak to the men who are willing to be honest and open about what's really going on inside, they are so afraid. The men are afraid. Men are afraid of hurting others. And so they will swallow their own anger simply because they don't know the healthy way to express it. And they, they don't want to hurt others.
Got it. Yeah, I was noticing that in my life and in most of the people I've interviewed and many things that I've read and heard, that like dominant emotions for men can be anger, frustration, and it's not an emotion, but it's a state like a finiteness, right? Like masculine energy. So I'm not saying it has to be gender-specific, but I'm just noticing from my own life and from looking around and reading and podcasting and seeing that I think men, in my viewpoint, we're— it's easy for us to go to anger.
Sure.
It's easy for us to go to rigidity.
Yeah.
And for a lot of women, it could be a cascade of like many things societally that have happened for 200 years. But I've, I've seen and worked with a lot of women that can't express their anger. They feel like a timidness around expressing their anger. I even—
which is why then it turns inward and becomes autoimmunity, right? I'm attacking myself.
Sick. And so many times I've like, I've sent somebody a book or a podcast and we've talked about this. Yeah. So my, my intention in asking you this question is not to divide people, it's to bring coherence, right? It's to bring people together. Yeah. If a woman is struggling specifically, let's just speak— can you just speak to her heart right now? She feels all this stuff. And she put her hand on her heart and her stomach, and she's breathing. You created a special place for women to go. Let's just speak to the women. And Lauren gave it to me, and I've lost the link. You're gonna have to tell everybody the link. Where's the place where they can go to learn to go deeper into their emotions, to work with you? Can you share that with us right now? We'll put it on the screen.
Yeah, we'll make it easy. biologyoftrauma.com.
Perfect. So go there if you're struggling and you're seeking guidance. I think it's a beautiful thing to seek guidance.
It's beautiful. It's a sense of empowerment, right? Breaking out of the learned helplessness and let me learn one more thing. Let me seek. Let me not settle for where I'm at now.
Where would we be without mentorship? Right? Like, are you kidding me? Look at the names on the back of your book. Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Yvonne Johnson, who I'm not sure— oh, the National Parent Teacher Association, the president. So yes, there's many people in the field that are echoing back to you that you're doing amazing work. I'm here to tell you that I just enjoy speaking with you. I think you have a great way in which you deliver information. It's different than a lot of medical doctors there's a more groundedness to you, and I think we all can feel that. So final question for you before round 2— we'll do round 2 at some point— is this understanding of what it really means to be in authentic joy, to, to live your life not from forcing joy, not from chasing joy, but actually, for Amy, what does it mean for you to do whatever work comes up and to commit yourself to being in authentic joy. How would you describe that? What's your definition and understanding of authentic joy for you?
As you ask that, I am reflecting on how far I have come, Josh, because—
Same.
If you would ask me that many years ago, I would be like, authentic joy? Let's just start with being authentic.
Yeah, okay.
'Cause that was where I had to start. I didn't even know who I was. And it didn't feel safe to be who I was. There had been so many roles that I had taken on in order to survive my childhood, my residency, being a parent. And so if you would've asked me like, "But who are you? Who is the authentic Amy?" I would have had no idea how to even answer that. So that's where it had to start for me. Is actually, who is Amy? What do I believe in? What are my values? Then we can get to the authentic joy. But the, just the authenticity was such a huge and hard step for me in helping my young inner child self know that the story was over and that it was safe to be whoever she wanted to be. Said, "I'd never, never been allowed, never been allowed to just be who I wanted to be. I didn't know what I wanted. It was always, 'But what should I want?'" It was never of, "Well, what do you wanna do?" No, no, it was, "But what should I do?" I wouldn't even allow myself to entertain the idea of, but what do I want? What do I enjoy? It was always coming from that sense of, but what's the right thing? Because I have to do the right thing, because that was who I had to be before. So it was a huge step to just cross from that into my authenticity.
I don't know, there's not an end destination of it.
There's not.
Even if it's the first time I've ever asked that question on a podcast ever, because we've gone through a replenishment Yeah, a rebrand. And interesting, if you look at the brand, it's like this cattle thing, but it's also, for me, a brand just means a promise. Yeah, it's like a way in which you describe that which you stand for. That's a brand. And so I think about what you said where you did so much work to be able to just first be authentic, which is so honest, right? Knowing that authentic joy it's going to come and go. It's fleeting at times. It's not this permanent state. I think that's silly to say I'm going to live in authentic joy forever. But as we say goodbye, what is the greatest gift that you've learned in being your authentic self? And what does that feel like for you to actually be you?
The greatest gift for me has been to develop the capacity to hold grief and joy at the same time. So that for me is allowing me to be in authenticity with myself. No longer having the expectation that I'm only going to have joy and happiness. And no longer believing that grief and sadness is my lot in life. It's being able to hold it all and have space for both. At the same time, I can be in grief and I can have a moment where I genuinely laugh, and that laughter doesn't take away from my grief, and my grief doesn't take away from my joy anymore. They can coexist in this being that I am still cultivating.
Thank you for being my guest.
Thank you.
Appreciate you being here, coming to Austin. Y'all share this podcast with somebody who may be in unconscious incompetence or is struggling, where they don't have to struggle to this degree anymore. And we covered so many things. The one thing that really stuck to my soul was the way in which you go into the turtle shell is the way you come out. If you get one thing, head to her website again and make sure you share this podcast if you feel like it's worthy of sharing. If you feel something in your body that resonates with you, there's a reason for that. You know, we've all been so marketed to. We've all had things thrown at us for so long. I feel like conversations that are presented like this can really stick to your soul. So I really enjoyed it. Thanks for being my guest.
Thank you.
Y'all, we'll see you next week. We're talking about this at the Liberated Life Tribe, liberatedlife.com. And until I see you next week, I'm wishing you what I'm wishing for myself and Amy. The same thing. And that is, can we be graceful in the understanding of how to love ourselves, how to be well, and how to have true power that comes from peace? Because I don't think that power could ever come from any other place besides peace. We'll talk with you soon.
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