September 24, 2025 • 57 mins
Episode Highlights with Aimie
- Why she started this line of study after she foster parented while in medical school
- Assumptions about trauma that turned out to be all wrong
- The reason therapy might not be the solution, or certainly not the only one
- How trauma is connected to our physical health and why this matters so much
- Creating inner safety… and why this sounds so simple but can be tough to actually do
- What trauma is in the body. And how do we actually make our bodies feel safe?
- Why creating safety isn’t just in the mind and how to address this in the body
- How to begin to recognize trauma in ourselves and in our children
- Trauma stored in the body will always trigger survival mechanisms that can be subtle coping mechanisms or patterns of disconnection
- The physical reactions that can be tied to trauma including skin reactions, digestive issues, immune system, brain inflammation, and more
- What generational trauma is and how it supports the biological impact of trauma
- How oxidative stress impacts the body, even epigenetically
- What it means to complete a trauma response and why this is important
- When we have a trauma response, it means we felt powerless, alone, and trapped
- The nervous system component of healing
- What ventral vagal/parasympathetic is and why it is helpful for healing
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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with any order. Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast.
I'm Katie from Walnessmama dot com and I am here
today with my friend doctor Amy Apijin, who is amazing.
She I think will learn a lot from this episode.
She's incredible and you will see why. She's Board certified
(04:10):
and preventive and addiction medicine. She's the author of the
book Biology of Trauma, as well as a podcast and
a course by the same name, and she bridges science
and healing as a double Board certified physician with advanced
decrees in biochemistry and physical health, and as founder of
the Body Biology Institute, she pioneered the biology of trauma methodology,
transforming how we understand the biological impact of trauma and
(04:32):
the path to recovery, which we talk a lot about today.
Her approach combines rigorous medical expertise with compassionate insights gained
as a foster and adoptive mother, creating a revolutionary framework
for healing that addresses mind to body and biology. Let's
learn from doctor Amy. Doctor Amy, welcome. It is such
a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for being here. Ah,
(04:53):
thank you, Katie.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I am too, because I've shared my story of how
doing some of the inner work and addressing the emotional
side of healing actually was one of the most impactful
things I did, even for my physical health, and how
life changing that was. And I feel like your work
truly is insight and explanation as to why that was
the case so strongly for me and might be so
much the case for so many other people as well.
(05:19):
I feel like you connect some really important dots when
it comes to this topic. And you do it in
a way of having so much love and compassion and
understanding and walking that path with people. I know. I
got to read some of your work in research for
this episode, and I had heard of you even before that,
and especially the idea of the biology of trauma, and
I would love for you to kind of just start
off broad maybe give us a little bit of foundation
(05:40):
by what you mean by the biology of trauma, and
maybe some baseline understanding of the physical connection, because I
think often it can be easy to assume trauma is
more of a mental and emotional thing only, and I
feel like your work really shines insight into how this
is like very holistic and connected to our bodies as well,
which to me seems like good news because that means
we can actually the star body and the healing process
(06:01):
as well.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well. I feel like you've just summarized my whole entire work,
so well, that's exactly it. Where I actually started. This
line of study became my research after I foster parented,
and I foster parented while I was in medical school.
I had just finished my master's in biochemistry, and all
of a sudden, I had this four year old who
(06:23):
had been through a lot of trauma, and I was
looking for answers to be able to help him rise
above his childhood. I had no idea that this would
completely turn my own life upside down and change my career,
and in the process I realized that my assumptions about
trauma were all wrong. My assumptions had been that you
(06:46):
change people through love through stability, and that's what I did.
I gave it my all, and it wasn't working. I
then tried all of the evidence based therapies, and I
had access to some of the best child psychiatrists and
therapists there on my medical school campus, but that wasn't
working as well, and it really drove me to a
(07:08):
place of desperation of I need na just information, like
I need something to do as a mom. That was
what was driving me, and over time, what I started
to notice was that his desperate attempts to push me
away to guard his heart were ones that I could
recognize in myself, not to the degree that he was
(07:30):
acting out on them. I was not destroying property, threatening
to kill people. I was not acting out on that level.
But I noticed, wait a second, I think I guard
my heart too. I think I'm afraid of opening up
and people seeing the real me and not liking the
real me. But at the time I didn't have any
(07:51):
any time to look at myself because I was very
busy with this four year old who had turned my
life upside down. But then I started in my patients,
and as I would in the wards, on the hospitals
and in the clinics, and especially seeing chronic health symptoms,
I would hear my patients say things and I was like,
(08:11):
wait a second, that's kind of like what mcguil does.
That's kind of something like what Miguel would would say,
or if he were able to be honest, what he
would say. So I started to see it all in
my patients, and that's what started to clue me in
this whole idea of trauma being connected to our physical
(08:32):
health is more than just an idea. It's more than
just a theory. There's something going on. I don't understand
it yet, but there is clearly a connection. Again, I
didn't have time to lean into that because I was
busy with my son, and then I was in residency
at that point, and it wasn't until twenty fourteen, and
(08:55):
I will say that I went through the hardest thing
that I have ever been through. I'm assuming it would
be the hardest thing I will ever have to go through.
And my body crashed and all of a sudden. It
truly wasn't all of a sudden, but it felt all
of a sudden. I was on two mood medications for
anxiety and depression as being told I had burnt out,
(09:17):
I had chronic fatigue. I couldn't get out of bed
one morning because the fatigue had gotten so bad, and
I just continued to push through and till it got
that bad. And then labs showed autoimmunity and that was
my wake up call. And so here I am, as
a physician, as an adult, realizing that my body has
(09:39):
something going on. I know from the studies from the
adverse childhood experiences that these are connected to childhood trauma.
But I didn't have trauma. I never would have looked
at my childhood and said, oh, I have trauma. And
so it again opened my eyes to the fact that
(09:59):
there's something that I'm missing about my understanding of trauma,
because whether or not I understand it logically, my body
seems to be storing trauma. My body has a trauma burden,
and that burden has become so heavy it's broken my
physical health. But the question for me, of course, was
(10:20):
not just well, how did this happen? At this point,
I'm laying in bed. I can't even get out of
bed to go for a walk, to go into work,
and so I have to go on another journey to
figure out how to get my life back. And that
was when I started asking the question, given that this
is where my body is at, given that I'm already sick,
(10:43):
I'm already having a disease burden from trauma, is there
any hope for me? Or is this the rest of
my life? I didn't know the answer. I didn't know
if I could undo and reverse a lot of that.
And that's what I spent the night several years studying
and doing and figuring out. That's actually how I found
(11:04):
functional medicine. That was where I started, and then from
there it just progressed into different advanced studies. And then
I started doing trauma therapy trainings and as a physician,
sitting in on all these trainings with these trauma therapists, learning,
just learning, learning learning, what can I do for myself?
Can this actually be undone the good news, as you've
already alluded to, is that there's so much that we
(11:26):
can do. I am just amazed at the body and
what is in our power to do. And that's what
changed my career, is that I no longer was satisfied
with my medical career. I was now an addiction medicine physician,
running a detox clinic and loving my work, but also
(11:48):
feeling like there's more that I could be doing. There's
more that I could be doing to actually change people's
lives forever, not just be doing a seven day detox
off of alcohol opium, sort of paying pills for them.
And that's what ultimately led me to change what I
was doing for work and go to the people directly
and say, here's what you can do or your own health,
(12:12):
given that your body does hold trauma, it has this
trauma burden, and there are so many things that you
can do about it.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Well. Your story really, to me is so incredible in
all aspects, much like for being a foster parent while
I'm medical school, I can't even fathom much less. I mean,
you were balancing so many things and seemingly still had
this very strong core passion of helping people even when
you were helping yourself, you were also still focused on
helping others. And I think of that quote of those
who can like walk through the fire while carrying a
(12:42):
bucket of water to help those still in it as well,
And that quote just makes me think of you, especially
like you, I tried all the therapies for a long time,
and I realized I had gotten really good at still
guarding my heart while doing all of the therapy check marks,
at least for a long time. Like I knew in
talk therapy how to say all the right words and
talk to my inner tise and do all the things
without ever actually getting vulnerable or going to those deep places.
(13:06):
And you also mentioned that you also had autoimmunity show
up at one point through this, and I find it
interesting that autoimmunity affects women in a much larger percentage
than it does men. And even the language around autoimmunity.
I've shared before how I had to learn how to
rewrite my language, but I used to say things like
that my body was attacking itself. And I find it
so interesting, especially when there's a trauma history, that autoimmunity
(13:28):
often shows up, and kind of to me, that's now
I do it as a great messager or and insight
into what might be going on and what our body
might be asking for. But I just feel like you
touched on so many incredible points in that one answer,
and I would guess many people listening can really resonate
with different parts of that and maybe wondering, Okay, if
I am aware of trauma, or even if I'm not,
(13:49):
but something is there, or something I'm still guarding, or
something is off, or I have autoimmunity, what does that
path look like? I know it's different for everybody, but
I also know that you've done this work with now
so many thousands of people. Like, where might someone begin
even in that process of beginning don guard or beginning
to actually go down the road of befriending their body
and unraveling the strama?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, where do you even start? Because by this time
it's so big and where to start is a really
important question. And like you, we can be in therapy
for years and still need to sort of start over,
still need to go back and do one of the
basic foundational skills that people need to have, which is
(14:35):
creating inner safety. And while that sounds so simple, I
really resonate with what you said around I could say
all the right things, I knew all the information, but
I was still guarding my heart, which means that I
still did not feel safe. If I'm having to guard,
(14:56):
if I'm vigilant, if I'm on edge because I'm just
waiting for the next shoe to drop, that's not actually
feeling safe. And I realized in this process that I
had never actually truly felt safe inside. I had always
felt insecure. I had always felt like failure was just
(15:16):
around the corner, and I had always felt a degree
of feeling unlovable and that I had to perform in
order to be worth anything. And this idea, you know
that relationships are then more transactional, where if I give
you this, if I feel this need for you, well
then you must give me love and you must not
(15:37):
abandon me. And knowing that that one had always been
in the background made a lot of sense for as
I came to my new understanding of what exactly is
trauma and how does the body hold on to it?
Realizing that then the first step, once I've identified that,
(15:58):
the first step is how how do I actually make
my body feel safe? All say this as well, which
is as a you know, as a high functioning individual
who goes to medical school and has a couple of
master's degrees. I was a pro at living in my head.
(16:22):
What I mean by that was thinking about everything, analyzing everything.
That was my strength, that was my superpower, and what
I thought that I could do then, or maybe it
was what I'd always done, so I didn't know anything
different yet was I thought that I would just be
able to tell myself that I was safe, and even
(16:45):
you know, there's mantras for that. You can put little
inspirational notes around the house, on sticky notes. You can
put a rubber band around your wrist, and every time
you have a thought that represents fear or insecurity, you
can snap yourself and sort of punish yourself. And I
thought that, but I would be able to create inner
safety through these mindset approaches, working with my brain and
(17:06):
my thoughts, because that's the only thing I had ever
really known and to have to undo that was a
big shock for me, and it was also sad for
me to realize it. As a physician, I had also
been the one to tell all of my patients to
do those kinds of things. I had sent my patients
(17:28):
to talk therapy been like, you know, you should talk
to someone about that, and realizing that I had given
a lot of bad advice over the years, with good
intentions but actually set them in the wrong direction, assuming
that I knew how to actually create inner safety, but
that is not how you create inner safety. You actually
(17:48):
have to feel the feelings. You actually have to learn
how to read these messages from your body that it's
giving us and be able to then know how to respond.
A big phrase that's become popular is this mind body connection.
Sounds cool, but actually what is that? And it's not
(18:09):
going to be enough to just connect your mind to
your body, meaning put your mind's attention on some sensation
in your body and connect the two. That is not
going to be enough. You do need to be able
to learn how to listen and understand the messages from
your body and respond to those messages for it to
have any chance of actually feeling safe moving forward in
(18:32):
the world.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That makes sense that it kind of sign them perfectly
to what I was going to ask you next, which
is essentially, how do we even begin to recognize these
signs of trauma in ourselves? Or I know a lot
of people listening to our parents, and this for you
originated with your foster child and wanting to help him. Like,
how do we begin to recognize those signs, especially when
I know sometimes they can show up pretty subtly, and
sometimes they can be pretty big and easy to notice.
(18:55):
But how do we start to learn to listen? And
then I would guess from there, how do we then
begin to create feeling of safety in our body? Because
that resonates so deeply with me what you've said of Like,
I also used to think I could just mentally will
myself into that, and it turns out that doesn't work
at all. But how do we begin to recognize those
signs in our bodies?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
What a great question? I feel like as a physician,
this would be one of the most important things that
I would people to know. And we look for patterns now, granted,
this is how I was trained in medical school to
look for patterns. And if someone comes in with a
rite upper quadrant pain in their belly and they've got
a fever in a high white count, well then this
(19:35):
is the pattern of a gallbladder infection, and so I
look for patterns. And it's the same thing with trauma.
This is really helped me simplify what had seemed very
complex and vague. Is just to realize no, like the
body is still the body. These are still principles, and
trauma can be seen as just another condition and a
(19:58):
syndrome that has patterns that we can recognize. The patterns
that we recognize are ones that are based on survival.
And as I look at my life, I could see
many ways in which I would do things just to survive.
It wasn't healthy, It certainly wasn't promoting my best health
(20:20):
and my best self, but it was helping me get through.
It was helping me get through the day. It was
helping me function, It's helping me survive. So anytime that
I realized that I'm doing something to just help me survive,
that is trauma showing up. Trauma stored in the body
will always trigger survival mechanisms, and so we can look at, well,
(20:46):
what are the ways in which we survive. These can
be so subtle, as you said, they can be the
copy mechanisms that we use. They can be the sugar
and the chocolate that we reach for in the middle
of the day when we start to feel a little tired.
But We've been programmed to feel that it's not okay
to feel tired. We've been programmed to think that we
(21:06):
have to always be productive, and so I can't allow
myself to rest. I can't allow myself to relax. I
can't allow myself to have just a moment of not
doing anything but just being. And so when I notice
myself engaging in these activities that help me push through
and ignore my body's sensations and messages, then that's a
(21:29):
survival pattern. We also have patterns of disconnection. Disconnection is
a big form of how trauma manifests and continues to
be stored and held in the body. What does disconnection
mean can mean different levels of disconnection. Certainly, one level
is dissociation, where especially in the middle of a trauma experience,
(21:54):
one can dissociate to the degree that sometimes they feel
like they're out of their body and they're watching what's
happening to them. They're that disconnected from their self. But
there's so many other more subtle forms of disconnection. I
see this a lot in those who multitask and those
(22:16):
who zone out during conversations or meetings, where their mind
just drifts. Their mind drifts and I noticed myself having
this pattern quite strongly, and I, thankfully was being able
to was able to get curious about it, and I
started realizing that whenever my mind drifted, it was because
(22:38):
something had just been said that was a truth for
my body, and it had hit home in such a
way that my body was like, WHOA, let's not feel that,
let's not actually look at that. We need to create
some distance. And my mind would drift and it would
think about a trip, it would think about my to
(22:59):
do list, that would think about anything else other than
what was actually being said at that moment. So these
are the more subtle ways in which these trauma patterns
can show up, especially in the form of disconnection. There's others.
There's the disregulation. So disregulation can also show up in
our physical health and our emotional health. If we talk
(23:22):
about the emotional disregulation, this is where you just kind
of fly off the handle, relatively quickly, relatively easily. This
was one of the hardest things for me as a
mom working with Miguel was I would tell him no,
he couldn't play with his legos right now because we
had to go to the store, and just that word
no was such a trigger for him that he would
(23:46):
go into a rage, and now it would be several
hours of having to hold him because he would be
harming me, harming himself. And it was all because I
had said, no, we can't do that right now. So
this idea of having a bigger reaction than what the
situation actually calls for, that's disregulation. But one of the
(24:08):
fascinating things for me is that we can see this
in our physical health and rather than an emotional reaction,
our body can turn that into a physical reaction and
all of a sudden, we are having a rash. We're
having our skin irrupt, whether psoriasis or some other form
(24:31):
of skin rash. This is a common one. People have
related it sometimes to this stress, but it's actually not stress.
If stress is causing that degree of physical dysregulation, it's
at the degree of trauma for your body. Digestive issues
are a really common one. This is because of the
(24:51):
vagus nerve. The vagus nerve comes out of our brainstem.
It's the longest nerve and so it travels down behind
our throat down into our stomach. The tips are in
the pelvis, which means that the vegas nerve is so
intimately connected with our gut that when we are experiencing
a physical dysregulation response, it's going to show up often
(25:12):
in our gut, and people can feel maybe nausea or
pain some people describe but not forming in their gut,
or people will talk about the knife twisting in their gut.
This is all because of the physical changes that are
happening in response to something. But those changes then create
(25:32):
imbalance and all of a sudden, now we're not releasing
as much stomach acid, or we're not releasing the enzymes,
and so we're not absorbing well. And now we're going
to develop leaky gut because stress and trauma, both of
them actually impair our lining of our intestinal wall, creating
leaky gut. And now there's inflammation, that information travels up
(25:53):
our vagus nerve and causes the brain information, so now
we have brain fog as well. Brain fog and brain
information are actually one of the most intimately connected physical
manifestations of a trauma response in the body. And I'll
end with this where if we have a trauma response,
(26:14):
it causes such an impact on our immune system, the microglia,
those immune cells in our brain, that it will create
brain inflammation. It's part of the protective nature of disconnection.
Let me just help you zone out so that you
don't really feel what's happening because it's so unbearable and unbelievable.
(26:39):
What here's the crazy thing. And this was what really
led me to this idea of the biology of trauma,
is when we have brain inflammation that's caused by something else.
For me, at this point, my microglia have had so
many hits that it's just a few nights of not
sleeping well and my microglia get active or eating something
(27:02):
that I have a food sensitivity too, and that again
triggers the microglia. If I have a trigger of that
brain inflammation that has nothing to do with anything emotional,
that will still cause a trauma response in my body,
and I will feel myself reacting and shutting down and
realizing that, oh, like I feel overwhelmed. I'll kind of
(27:26):
usually tend to look to the people in my life, like,
who's causing me pain right now? What are they doing
to me? When actually has nothing to do with anybody
else other than my immune system is having this response
and that degree of inflammation, especially in the brain around
the neurons that will cause a trauma response. It's so
(27:49):
fascinating to see that to our body, it does not
differentiate between emotional trauma, physical trauma like inflammation, psychological trauma.
It doesn't differentiate it. Trauma is trauma. There's one trauma
response that the body has and it does not differentiate
between the different types like we tend to do.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, that's so fascinating and I definitely want to circle
back to that and go deeper on because the great
part of that is that the body is having that
one response and that it kind of encompasses the emotional
and the physical and the psychological. To me, what it
seems like is then we can use kind of all
of the levers available to us to help that either
become from a negative feedback loop to a positive feedback
loop if we understand how to fully support the body
(28:34):
before we get through there, I want to also just
touch on the idea of generational trauma if we haven't
gotten to talk about that yet. And this was a
fascinating concept for me to learn, but can you kind
of walk us through briefly what generational trauma is and
how it gets passed down?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
This is one of those fascinating topics where again I
stand back and I'm just amazed at the body. Generational
trauma is this idea, idea that ancestors can go through
trauma experiences and it changes their biology to such a
(29:09):
degree that it's passed down. And we haven't always clearly
understood how, but we have definitely seen the effects of it.
Those who have gone through the Holocaust, for example, we
can see the ongoing impact psychologically emotionally in their children.
(29:30):
But it wasn't intel. Rachel Yehuda really did a fascinating
study that showed that actually those children still had changes
in their epigenetics. Epigenetics, What does that mean? Epigenetics refers
to changes to our DNA. Trauma changes our DNA, and
(29:52):
the way that it does that is through something called
oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a bypro of our body's
natural activities to stay alive. Oxidative stress is even something
that is a byproduct of making energy, and so in
(30:13):
our cells we have mitochondria. They are the factory houses
that make all of our energy. As a byproduct of
making energy, they also create oxidative stress. So oxidative stress
by itself doesn't mean anything but what we want to
look at is is the body being able to clear
it out. Our body does have natural mechanisms to clear
(30:35):
out oxidative stress. Of course it would, because if it's
something that's naturally made, we would naturally have clean up mechanisms.
But here's where we start to then talk about again
the biology of trauma. There are two ways in which
that oxidative stress can become so big that it starts
to damage and change our DNA in such a way
(30:56):
that will be passed on to generations. One is that
the amount of oxidative stress that's being created is far
too much for our cleanup mechanisms to be able to filter.
And this is when we are in a experience that
is so overwhelming and there's no return to a sense
(31:20):
of safety. If our body holds on to that fear,
then it won't be engaging the cleanup strategies, because cleaning
up only happens when we feel safe, when it's time
to restore ourselves, when it's time to rest and recover,
and so as long as our body is stuck in
(31:43):
danger mode, the cleanup mechanisms are not going to be
as effective. This will then tend to create a build
up of the oxidative stress, and when it builds up,
it will go into our nucleus, damage our DNA and
the repair our enzymes are not going to be able
to keep up with the volume of damage that is
(32:04):
being created. I'm sure we'll swing back to this later,
but this is why it is so important to be
able to complete our trauma responses and return to a
sense of safety. A trauma response is normal, it's natural.
In fact, it's part of life. There's no human being
that can avoid a trauma response. But what we want
(32:28):
to do, and especially what we want to be teaching
our children, is the resilience part of how to complete
those responses so that they're not staying stuck in that
danger mode because of the impact that it will have
on their body and their physical health. The other way
in which the oxidative stress builds up though and damages
our DNA is As I've mentioned, we can have a
(32:51):
biology of trauma, and in this case, we can have
a biology of trauma that predisposes us to traumas and
packed on our body. In this case, I'm referring to genetics.
We can have the genetics that are clean up mechanisms
our repair enzymes are not as effective. We can run
(33:11):
a twenty three ande meters and see what our genetics
are for our oxidative stress repair enzymes, and some of
us have snips or those single nucleotide polymorphisms, which means
that these mechanisms are not going to be as effective.
And so if I am going through life and I
(33:32):
have enzymes that aren't able to work as well, I'm
only able to experience so much stress, so much trauma
before my body is like, ohh, this is too much
for us, because we're just not as good as cleaning
up as other people perhaps. And so this is a
fascinating topic that as we look at generational trauma, there
(33:52):
can be a genetic component in the sense that we
can have genetics that we pass down to our children
that make them more predisposed to overwhelm. I'll give one
more example, which is neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the brain chemicals
(34:13):
that help us feel and do different things in attachment
and bonding. Serotonin and dopamine are essential for healthy attachment formation.
And we can have genetics. For example, I have an
undermethylation status as an undermethylator. Oftentimes, not all under meth lads,
(34:37):
but many undermeth lads we have lower activity of serotonin
and dopamine. What does that mean? That means that my system,
my nervous system, is not as available for attachment and bonding.
So we can have had the best mothers in the
world who were very good at attuning, but we can
(35:00):
have low serotonin and low dopening that as a baby,
it made us more predisposed to developing an insecure attachment
or attachment trauma simply because our nervous system, our own
biology is setting us up for that unavailability because I
(35:20):
don't feel as well or I don't get as much
joy from connection that dopamine gives us. So there's this
idea of generational trauma that can be certainly passed down
through epigenetic changes, through the oxidative stress and that damage.
And there's this whole world of what imbalances, what deficiencies
(35:44):
are we passing down that will also in a sense
create generational trauma because I'm setting my child up for
having a biology of biochemistry that makes them more predisposed
to overwhelm. That's the idea of the end utero experience,
And is a mother taking enough folate or is she
(36:07):
taking too much fulliate? Is she being exposed to toxins?
And we now know I don't know. I'm assuming you
saw this study because you see everything, but there was
this lead the study that came out around microplastics being
found in the umbilical cords. And so our toxic world
and environment can be part of the generational trauma that
(36:30):
we're passing down to our kids. Not intentionally, it's just
the environment that we live in.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, And as you just explained so beautifully, like, there's
so many factors that come into play into this. And
of course, especially with trauma, it's very personalized and very individualized,
and I feel like one lesson. I've gotten to learn
it very personally the last ten years especially, and I
guess might feel very true for you as well. As
I believe the body is infinitely and amazingly capable of healing,
(36:57):
I've learned that the body is always on our side.
So even if we're having symptoms that are uncomfortable, it's
actually the body doing whatever is in our best interest
to keep us safe, to protect us, to help us.
In fact, I got to learn to rewrite that whole
my body is attacking itself to realize if my body
were trying to kill me, it could do it literally
in less than a second instantly, my body's always on
my side, So instead, if I can get curious, what
(37:20):
is it trying to tell me? And I feel like
this ties in really well with your approach and you
really actually help people very practically learn and go through this.
And I love how you talk about kind of that
creating the inner safety and learning to listen to your body.
This episode is brought to you by Native Path and
in particular something I have been experimenting with and really
(37:41):
really loving lately. And here's what you need to understand.
A lot of us think calcium is important for our health,
especially for our bone, but is this actually true bad news?
It turns out maybe not, or at least there's more
nuance here. One of the largest bone house studies ever
conducted followed thousands of women taking calcium oral vitamin D
daily and the results were surprising, but not in the
(38:03):
way you would think. They saw no significant reduction in
their risk of fractures, and they saw no improved bone density.
So all those calcium pills might not be doing what
we think. And it turns out they might actually be counterproductive.
But here's where it gets interesting. A brand new study
found that women who did one thing every morning consistently
for six months gained seven percent bone density, which is massive.
(38:26):
This is the same amount of bone mass the average
person loses over the course of five years after a
certain age. So what did they do. It was not
a medication or even a workout. Came down to one
simple thing added to their morning routine. And that's why
a lot of people, especially people over fifty, are making
this one simple change and seeing massive results. I'm sure
(38:47):
you're probably curious what it is, and it's a particular
protein from one of my favorite brands called Native Path,
and they're offering all of you up to forty five
percent off of this, plus free shipping and a free gift.
Right now, visit save with Nativepath dot com slash Wellness
Mama to find out what it is and how to
implement it and save up to forty five percent. So again,
(39:09):
that special site for forty five percent off is save
as ave with Native E PA t H dot com
Slash Wellness Mama and see why people are adding this
to the routine with amazing results. This podcast is brought
to you by Element, and this is a company you
(39:30):
might have heard me talk about before, and I really
love their products because proper hydration leads to better sleep,
it sharpens focus, it improves energy, and so much more.
But hydration is not about just drinking water, because being
optimally hydrated, a state called U hydration, is about optimizing
your body's fluid ratios. And this fluid balance depends on
(39:51):
many factors, including the intake and excretion of electrolytes, which
many people don't get. The right amounts of electrolytes are
charged minerals that conduct ELECTRICI city to power your nervous system.
I talk a lot about nervous system on this podcast.
They also regulate hydration status by balancing fluids inside and
outside of ourselves. Element was created with the science backed
electrolyte ratio of one hundred milligrams of sodium, two hundred
(40:14):
milligrams of potassium, and sixty milligrams of magnesium with no sugar.
Since electrolytes are a key component of hydration, here's what happens.
When we get our electrolytes dialed in. We have more
steady energy, improved cognitive function, suffer fewer headaches and muscle crams.
We can perform better for longer and especially the support
fasting or a low carb diet because when we stop
(40:34):
eating carbs, like during a fast, the absence of insulin
allows the kidneys to release sodium, So replacing that loss
sodium with electrolytes can help you feel good on the fast.
Since Element is zero sugar, it also doesn't break up fast.
Electrolytes are also important for maintaining blood pressure, regulating digestion,
and proper fluid balance, keeping skin hydrated, which is a
big one that I feel like often gets missed, and.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
So much more.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I feel like proper electrolytes is a missing piece for
a lot of people. And I love Elements new canned
drinks which are sparkling water with all the same ratios
of minerals I just talked about, and they are delicious.
You can check it out and learn more at drink
Element dot com slash wellness Mama. That's d R I
nk l mnt dot com slash wellness Mama, and at
(41:19):
that link you will receive a free sample pack with
any order. What stood out to me and what you
just said as well, was completing the trauma response. I
think that's a really important piece that maybe gets overlooked
often because trauma responses are uncomfortable and negative emotions aren't
very much fun, and we want to like just resist
them and get rid of them as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
So I would love to hear more.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Explanation from you on that, and just to share vulnerably
my own experience with that. So I was actually assaulted
in high school and I thought I had totally dealt
with it. I had really just like shut it down
and built walls. And then years later I was actually
preparing for a podcast, a guy did a thematic rolfing
therapy on me. Didn't expect that to have any impact whatsoever,
(42:02):
and immediate, like I went back into the relived the
trauma like all over again, Like it felt like a
psychedelic experience. No psychedelics were involved. After that, I shook,
like nervous system shook for hours, and I realized animals
do that naturally. If an animal almost gets killed, when
they get to safety, their body immediately processes it and
they don't go walking around with PTSD. I had, as
(42:24):
a human been able to override that response and instead
internally subconsciously go I will never feel emotions again, I
will never feel helpless again. I will never let myself
be hurt again, and suppress all that for like a
solid over a decade while I lived in pure sympathetic
nervous system response, thinking I was perfectly well adjusted and
my body, my body processing that day actually began the
(42:45):
healing cycle for me, and it showed me, oh, this
was actually in my body even though I was ignoring it.
So I would love to hear you talk about how
do we actually complete the trauma response because I didn't
even know I had suppressed it until it came back.
But how can we be aware of that in little
ways in our day and in our kids so that
we can hopefully not create that same thing I did
for a decade.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
It is amazing that the body holds on to this,
and it holds onto it until we're ready. And one
of the key concepts that I teach those who come
to my courses is that we don't have to be archaeologists.
We don't have to go excavating our past and looking
for what else needs to be healed, because when it's ready,
(43:25):
our body will bring it to the surface. That's how
wise our body is. What does it mean then to
complete a trauma response, Because, as you've just said, we
can complete it years later. We don't have to do
it in the moment. However, the sooner that we can
do it, the less impact it has on all aspects
(43:48):
of our life and health and body. When we go
into a trauma response, that means something very specific. It
means that we felt powerless, alone and trapped and trapped
(44:14):
in the face of something that felt like it could
kill us. And so this comes directly from Steve Porgies
and the polyvagel theory, where this trauma response is going
to be used by the body. Whenever we feel that
(44:35):
we are up against an inescapable life threat, as long
as that life threat feels escapable, we will be in
the sympathetic mode and working to escape. But the moment
that our body, and by our body I mean our
autonomic nervous system, there's a specific skill that it has
(44:58):
called neurosception, and it is perceiving everything, perceiving the size
of the danger and our capacity. This it's a big
concept I share in my book around our capacity and
the perception of the size of danger is what makes
a trauma response a trauma response, and so as it
(45:20):
is sensing this danger, it will decide when it moves
from feeling escapable to the moment that it feels inescapable.
At that moment, our body shuts down in order to
protect us, and there's no amount of willpower or logic
(45:42):
that can override that. It is more powerful than even
our adrenaline. We can have adrenaline pumping through our blood,
but our body has shut down and that's communicated to
the vagus nerve. So if this is where we're at,
how do we come complete that and get back to
a sense of safety. We have to undo all of
(46:07):
those three things that we just talked about. You need
to no longer feel trapped. You need to no longer
feel powerless. You need to feel like you have your
power back, your agency, your ability to say no, I
don't want this. You need to be able to not
feel alone. How do we do that? There's very scientific
(46:30):
aspects that are involved here. If I cannot move, well,
then I don't have my power back and I'm still trapped,
which is why the movement is really important. And for
some that will look like shaking. What is really important
is at some point to be able to go back
and actually do the self defense that you would have
(46:52):
wanted to do. Do the self defense movements that you
would have wanted to do, even though this is years
later and I with people who are doing those decades later,
and still we go through the actual movement. So it
can't just be something that you imagine. It needs to
be the actual movement. So maybe the movement needs to
be pushing someone away or for me, I also had
(47:15):
a sexual assault story when I was twelve, and there
was all of this idea of like the self defense
movement that I would have wanted to do included like
fighting and clawing and pushing and kicking him away. So
whatever self defense movements that we could not do because
we were trapped, we now need to do because that
(47:36):
forms a muscle memory in our body that actually creates
learned helplessness if we don't go back and complete it.
So that anything that reminds our body of that moment,
and whether that is a smell, a sound, something that
we see or hear, like, all of these sensory information
(47:57):
is associated in these memories, in these implicit memories in
the body. So anything that fills closely associated with it,
and our body is going to be like, oh, we
know what that means. That means that this is an
inescapable life threat and we should shut down to survive,
and it will shut us down rather than being able
to stay engaged and stay curious and move into action
(48:21):
to solve the problem. So we don't want that learned
helplessness to stay as a memory in our body, which
means we need to actually do the movements. This is
why talk therapy will only go so far, because if
it's not involving the body level and those movements that
were blocked, that were we were not able to do
to defend ourselves, it won't reach that level of implicit
(48:45):
memory in our body. But let's talk about the mind
for a moment, because we have these beliefs that form
during these experiences, and these beliefs can be ones of
I'm different, I'm broken, I'm now forever flawed, and these
(49:07):
beliefs become self evident truths. They're not just something that
we think. They become a truth for us, which also
means that whenever anything hard comes our way, we fall
back to those beliefs and say, oh, well, I can't
do hard things or maybe we have the belief that
everyone is always against me, or maybe we form the
(49:29):
belief that our body is attacking us, and this is
the lens through which we see the world, and so
that needs to have a reset where we do a
form of art narrative therapy if we're doing it years later,
where we rewrite that story. It's the same story, but
now we put it into its context. Oh I didn't
(49:52):
do anything wrong. I was just in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Oh I didn't do anything wrong.
They were just high on substances and lost control of themselves.
I just happen to be in their way. And we
reframe it so that those beliefs can be reset so
that they're the proper context and understanding of the story
(50:16):
and not these ongoing beliefs about how we are broken
and defective. But there will be one more way in
which we need to reset to safety and complete these
trauma responses. And this last way will depend on how
soon or how much later we are completing these responses,
and that will be looking at the impact of trauma
(50:38):
on our biology. Because our body holds on to pain
and fear from the past, it will hold that on
in the nervous system, which is connected with every other
system in our body, whether it's the metabolism, the indocrine
system and our hormones, the immune system, the digestive system.
(50:58):
It is connect with all of that. So the more
time that we have gone holding on to these experiences,
the more it will have impacted our biology. And like
you say, the body has such an incredible ability to
heal itself. And what I started to do was teach
my patients some very basic simple somatic exercises. Somatic just
(51:25):
means body based, so they're more involving again movement or
touch in such a way that I'm creating a different
experience and sensation inside. And that was allowing their body
to experience moments of safety. And even just that was
changing their biology. Because as much as I still will
(51:45):
need to repair the immune system, and let's look at
the digestive system, we may need to take some enzymes,
we may need to take some lions made, we may
need to do these things. In acetyl system is great
for that brain information. And one of the most important
things is also to get our nervous system out of
that danger mode and back into a sense of safety.
(52:09):
We call this ventral vagel or parasympathetic or rest and digest.
That is the state in which our own body can recover.
And if we can shift our nervous system into that state,
it will it will be able to do so much
of the work by itself. It's just not able to
(52:30):
do that when it's still stuck in danger mode, whether
that's the sympathetic anxiety or whether that's the trauma and
shut down. And so being able to show my patients no,
like you can, you can shift your nervous system, and
you can even do it within sixty seconds, and having
them do these somatic self practices throughout the day because
(52:51):
I didn't even want them to depend on me. I
wanted them to be able to be in their home,
be out in the grocery store, be driving, feel that trigger,
and be able to do something about it right here,
right now, shift that nervous system back to a place
of safe enough, and that by itself sorted changing their
health more than any other medication that I was prescribing.
(53:12):
They started experiencing twenty six percent decrease in their daily
physical pain just after twenty one days of doing these
soumatic self practices. Their depression and anxiety went down by
thirty percent, they started sleeping better, twenty eight percent decrease
in insomnia issues, digestion, Their system was working better. They
had twenty eight percent less digestive symptoms whatever those symptoms were,
(53:35):
twenty eight percent less just after twenty one days of
these basic Yes, a certain, very specific sequence of exercises,
but it doesn't take as much for the body to
shift back into healing and safety than all the years
that it's taken us to get here living in danger mode.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
Yeah, which is definitely encouraging. I think of that idea
of especially when it comes to trauma and the nervous system.
It's not even so much just what happened to us,
but actually those beliefs that we adopt based on it,
like you talked about that become part of our identity
and part of our story long after the event itself
is far past, and it like really impact us so
deeply in daily life. And I love how you talked about, like, yes,
(54:19):
there's things we can do to support the body and
the brain in this like nac or like For me,
coaling was really helpful because I have a lot of
genes that need a lot of coal eid, and I
didn't need eggs for a solid decade or whatever. Those
thigs are. Those are great switches, but for me, for
a long time, those were the only ones I looked at.
And I was doing all of the supplements and all
of the biohacks that all of the things I could
possibly think of to support my body. And it wasn't
(54:41):
until I did these pieces that you're talking about and
the nervous system work, and felt the emotions and made
peace with my body and my emotions and my mind
that actually anything started to actually heal. And that was
when all the physical things also shifted for me without
changing any of those physical levers I was pulling. And
I know this is really truly like your passion and
(55:01):
your life's work, and that you have so many resources
for people in all of these things that we've talked
about in this podcast today, and of course I will
link to all of them in the show notes, But
can you briefly give us some starting points for someone
who might want to begin to do this work and
to make friends with their body and their nervous system.
From all the resources you have available in front of
you guys listening on the go, they will all be
linked in the show notes as well.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
One of the most comprehensive resources that they can grab
is my book. So my book is coming out for
those who know Gobermante, he wrote the forward, and so
this is this manual for the nervous system of understanding
how does the body experience trauma? What does our definition
of trauma need to be? And then why does it
(55:44):
hold on? And then what does it need to heal?
So it's broken up into those three sections and will
walk people through these concepts and help them see how
much of a trauma burden their body is holding, but
be able to move into solution and say, here is
practically what we need to do, because as you've said,
we need to do all the levels. We need to
(56:04):
do the mind level and the beliefs, we need to do,
the body level, and these somatic movements and self defense movements,
but we also need to do the biology. If we
miss one of those pieces, we're not going to be
able to experience the healing that is possible for each
of us. I also have a few guides on my
website Biology Offtrauma dot com for those who want to
(56:25):
check that out. And I now run a twenty one
day journey for those who want to take that with me,
and happy to provide you that link, Katie, for people
to be able to check out the twenty one day
journey and these specific sequence of somatic self practices that
I taught my patients and now bring to the.
Speaker 1 (56:41):
World amazing Well, like I said, all those links will
be in the show notes. I know that you have
a tremendous number of resources available, including your book, including
your podcast. You have so much out there. I'll make
sure those are all linked. I also know how busy
you are, doctor Amy. Thank you so much for the
time and for all that you've shared today. This has
been truly phenomenal and I know very helpful to many people.
So thank you. Thank you for the work that you do, Katie,
(57:04):
and thank you as always for listening and for sharing
your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your
attention with us today. We're both so grateful that you
did and I hope that you will join me again
on the next episode Adulanaswama podcast. If you're enjoying these interviews,
would you please take two minutes to leave a rating
or review on iTunes for me, Doing this helps more
(57:27):
people to find the podcast, which means even more moms
and families can benefit from the information. I really appreciate
your time and thanks as always for listening.
Well on for My Body's podcast. This episode is brought
to you by Native Path and in particular, something I
have been experimenting with and really really loving lately. And
here's what you need to understand. A lot of us
think calcium is important for our health, especially for our bone,
But is this actually true bad news? It turns out
(00:22):
maybe not, or at least there's more nuance here. One
of the largest bone health studies ever conducted followed thousands
of women taking calcium and oral vitamin D daily and
the results were surprising, but not in the way you
would think. They saw no significant reduction in their risk
of fractures, and they saw no improved bone density. So
all those calcium pills might not be doing what we think,
(00:44):
and it turns out they might actually be counterproductive. But
here's where it gets interesting. A brand new study found
that women who did one thing every morning consistently for
six months gained seven percent bone density, which is massive.
This is the same amount of bone mass the average
person lose is over the course of five years after
a certain age. So what did they do? It was
(01:04):
not a medication or even a workout. Came down to
one simple thing added to their morning routine and that's
why a lot of people, especially people over fifty, are
making this one simple change and seeing massive results. I'm
sure you're probably curious what it is, and it's a
particular protein from one of my favorite brands called Native Path,
and they're offering all of you up to forty five
(01:25):
percent off of this, plus free shipping and a free gift.
Right now, you can visit save with Nativepath dot com
slash walness Mama to find out what it is and
how to implement it and save up to forty five percent.
So again, that special site for forty five percent off
is Save as a ve with Native E PA t
(01:48):
H dot com slash Wellness Mama and see why people
are adding this to the routine with amazing results. This
podcast is brought to you by Element and this is
a company you might have heard me talk about before,
and I really love their products because proper hydration leads
to better sleep, it sharpens focus, it improves energy, and
(02:09):
so much more. Mud Hydration is not about just drinking water,
because being optimally hydrated, a state called u hydration, is
about optimizing your body's fluid ratios and this fluid balance
depends on many factors, including the intake and excretion of electrolytes,
which many people don't get. The right amounts of electrolytes
are charged minerals that conduct electricity to power your nervous system.
(02:32):
I talk a lot about nervous system on this podcast.
They also regulate hydration status by balancing fluids inside and
outside of ourselves. Element was created with the science backed
electrolyte ratio of one hundred milligrams of sodium, two hundred
milligrams of potassium, and sixty milligrams of magnesium with no sugar.
Since electrolytes are a key component of hydration. Here's what happens.
When we get our electrolytes dialed in. We have more
(02:54):
steady energy, improved cognitive function, suffer fewer headaches and muscle cramps.
We can reform better for longer, and especially the support
fasting or low carb diet because when we stop eating carbs,
like during a fast, the absence of insulin allows the
kidneys to release sodium to Replacing that loss sodium with
electrolytes can help you feel good on the fast. Since
Element is zero sugar, it also doesn't break up fast.
(03:17):
Electrolytes are also important for maintaining blood pressure, regulating digestion,
and proper fluid balance, keeping skin hydrated, which is a
big one that I feel like often gets missed, and.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So much more.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
I feel like proper electrolytes is a missing piece for
a lot of people. And I love Elements new canned
drinks which are sparkling water with all the same ratios
of minerals I just talked about, and they are delicious.
You can check it out and learn more at drink
Element dot com, slash Wellness Mama. That's d R I
n k l mnt dot com slash wellness Mama and
(03:49):
at that link you will receive a free sample pack
with any order. Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast.
I'm Katie from Walnessmama dot com and I am here
today with my friend doctor Amy Apijin, who is amazing.
She I think will learn a lot from this episode.
She's incredible and you will see why. She's Board certified
(04:10):
and preventive and addiction medicine. She's the author of the
book Biology of Trauma, as well as a podcast and
a course by the same name, and she bridges science
and healing as a double Board certified physician with advanced
decrees in biochemistry and physical health, and as founder of
the Body Biology Institute, she pioneered the biology of trauma methodology,
transforming how we understand the biological impact of trauma and
(04:32):
the path to recovery, which we talk a lot about today.
Her approach combines rigorous medical expertise with compassionate insights gained
as a foster and adoptive mother, creating a revolutionary framework
for healing that addresses mind to body and biology. Let's
learn from doctor Amy. Doctor Amy, welcome. It is such
a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for being here. Ah,
(04:53):
thank you, Katie.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I am too, because I've shared my story of how
doing some of the inner work and addressing the emotional
side of healing actually was one of the most impactful
things I did, even for my physical health, and how
life changing that was. And I feel like your work
truly is insight and explanation as to why that was
the case so strongly for me and might be so
much the case for so many other people as well.
(05:19):
I feel like you connect some really important dots when
it comes to this topic. And you do it in
a way of having so much love and compassion and
understanding and walking that path with people. I know. I
got to read some of your work in research for
this episode, and I had heard of you even before that,
and especially the idea of the biology of trauma, and
I would love for you to kind of just start
off broad maybe give us a little bit of foundation
(05:40):
by what you mean by the biology of trauma, and
maybe some baseline understanding of the physical connection, because I
think often it can be easy to assume trauma is
more of a mental and emotional thing only, and I
feel like your work really shines insight into how this
is like very holistic and connected to our bodies as well,
which to me seems like good news because that means
we can actually the star body and the healing process
(06:01):
as well.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well. I feel like you've just summarized my whole entire work,
so well, that's exactly it. Where I actually started. This
line of study became my research after I foster parented,
and I foster parented while I was in medical school.
I had just finished my master's in biochemistry, and all
of a sudden, I had this four year old who
(06:23):
had been through a lot of trauma, and I was
looking for answers to be able to help him rise
above his childhood. I had no idea that this would
completely turn my own life upside down and change my career,
and in the process I realized that my assumptions about
trauma were all wrong. My assumptions had been that you
(06:46):
change people through love through stability, and that's what I did.
I gave it my all, and it wasn't working. I
then tried all of the evidence based therapies, and I
had access to some of the best child psychiatrists and
therapists there on my medical school campus, but that wasn't
working as well, and it really drove me to a
(07:08):
place of desperation of I need na just information, like
I need something to do as a mom. That was
what was driving me, and over time, what I started
to notice was that his desperate attempts to push me
away to guard his heart were ones that I could
recognize in myself, not to the degree that he was
(07:30):
acting out on them. I was not destroying property, threatening
to kill people. I was not acting out on that level.
But I noticed, wait a second, I think I guard
my heart too. I think I'm afraid of opening up
and people seeing the real me and not liking the
real me. But at the time I didn't have any
(07:51):
any time to look at myself because I was very
busy with this four year old who had turned my
life upside down. But then I started in my patients,
and as I would in the wards, on the hospitals
and in the clinics, and especially seeing chronic health symptoms,
I would hear my patients say things and I was like,
(08:11):
wait a second, that's kind of like what mcguil does.
That's kind of something like what Miguel would would say,
or if he were able to be honest, what he
would say. So I started to see it all in
my patients, and that's what started to clue me in
this whole idea of trauma being connected to our physical
(08:32):
health is more than just an idea. It's more than
just a theory. There's something going on. I don't understand
it yet, but there is clearly a connection. Again, I
didn't have time to lean into that because I was
busy with my son, and then I was in residency
at that point, and it wasn't until twenty fourteen, and
(08:55):
I will say that I went through the hardest thing
that I have ever been through. I'm assuming it would
be the hardest thing I will ever have to go through.
And my body crashed and all of a sudden. It
truly wasn't all of a sudden, but it felt all
of a sudden. I was on two mood medications for
anxiety and depression as being told I had burnt out,
(09:17):
I had chronic fatigue. I couldn't get out of bed
one morning because the fatigue had gotten so bad, and
I just continued to push through and till it got
that bad. And then labs showed autoimmunity and that was
my wake up call. And so here I am, as
a physician, as an adult, realizing that my body has
(09:39):
something going on. I know from the studies from the
adverse childhood experiences that these are connected to childhood trauma.
But I didn't have trauma. I never would have looked
at my childhood and said, oh, I have trauma. And
so it again opened my eyes to the fact that
(09:59):
there's something that I'm missing about my understanding of trauma,
because whether or not I understand it logically, my body
seems to be storing trauma. My body has a trauma burden,
and that burden has become so heavy it's broken my
physical health. But the question for me, of course, was
(10:20):
not just well, how did this happen? At this point,
I'm laying in bed. I can't even get out of
bed to go for a walk, to go into work,
and so I have to go on another journey to
figure out how to get my life back. And that
was when I started asking the question, given that this
is where my body is at, given that I'm already sick,
(10:43):
I'm already having a disease burden from trauma, is there
any hope for me? Or is this the rest of
my life? I didn't know the answer. I didn't know
if I could undo and reverse a lot of that.
And that's what I spent the night several years studying
and doing and figuring out. That's actually how I found
(11:04):
functional medicine. That was where I started, and then from
there it just progressed into different advanced studies. And then
I started doing trauma therapy trainings and as a physician,
sitting in on all these trainings with these trauma therapists, learning,
just learning, learning learning, what can I do for myself?
Can this actually be undone the good news, as you've
already alluded to, is that there's so much that we
(11:26):
can do. I am just amazed at the body and
what is in our power to do. And that's what
changed my career, is that I no longer was satisfied
with my medical career. I was now an addiction medicine physician,
running a detox clinic and loving my work, but also
(11:48):
feeling like there's more that I could be doing. There's
more that I could be doing to actually change people's
lives forever, not just be doing a seven day detox
off of alcohol opium, sort of paying pills for them.
And that's what ultimately led me to change what I
was doing for work and go to the people directly
and say, here's what you can do or your own health,
(12:12):
given that your body does hold trauma, it has this
trauma burden, and there are so many things that you
can do about it.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Well. Your story really, to me is so incredible in
all aspects, much like for being a foster parent while
I'm medical school, I can't even fathom much less. I mean,
you were balancing so many things and seemingly still had
this very strong core passion of helping people even when
you were helping yourself, you were also still focused on
helping others. And I think of that quote of those
who can like walk through the fire while carrying a
(12:42):
bucket of water to help those still in it as well,
And that quote just makes me think of you, especially
like you, I tried all the therapies for a long time,
and I realized I had gotten really good at still
guarding my heart while doing all of the therapy check marks,
at least for a long time. Like I knew in
talk therapy how to say all the right words and
talk to my inner tise and do all the things
without ever actually getting vulnerable or going to those deep places.
(13:06):
And you also mentioned that you also had autoimmunity show
up at one point through this, and I find it
interesting that autoimmunity affects women in a much larger percentage
than it does men. And even the language around autoimmunity.
I've shared before how I had to learn how to
rewrite my language, but I used to say things like
that my body was attacking itself. And I find it
so interesting, especially when there's a trauma history, that autoimmunity
(13:28):
often shows up, and kind of to me, that's now
I do it as a great messager or and insight
into what might be going on and what our body
might be asking for. But I just feel like you
touched on so many incredible points in that one answer,
and I would guess many people listening can really resonate
with different parts of that and maybe wondering, Okay, if
I am aware of trauma, or even if I'm not,
(13:49):
but something is there, or something I'm still guarding, or
something is off, or I have autoimmunity, what does that
path look like? I know it's different for everybody, but
I also know that you've done this work with now
so many thousands of people. Like, where might someone begin
even in that process of beginning don guard or beginning
to actually go down the road of befriending their body
and unraveling the strama?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, where do you even start? Because by this time
it's so big and where to start is a really
important question. And like you, we can be in therapy
for years and still need to sort of start over,
still need to go back and do one of the
basic foundational skills that people need to have, which is
(14:35):
creating inner safety. And while that sounds so simple, I
really resonate with what you said around I could say
all the right things, I knew all the information, but
I was still guarding my heart, which means that I
still did not feel safe. If I'm having to guard,
(14:56):
if I'm vigilant, if I'm on edge because I'm just
waiting for the next shoe to drop, that's not actually
feeling safe. And I realized in this process that I
had never actually truly felt safe inside. I had always
felt insecure. I had always felt like failure was just
(15:16):
around the corner, and I had always felt a degree
of feeling unlovable and that I had to perform in
order to be worth anything. And this idea, you know
that relationships are then more transactional, where if I give
you this, if I feel this need for you, well
then you must give me love and you must not
(15:37):
abandon me. And knowing that that one had always been
in the background made a lot of sense for as
I came to my new understanding of what exactly is
trauma and how does the body hold on to it?
Realizing that then the first step, once I've identified that,
(15:58):
the first step is how how do I actually make
my body feel safe? All say this as well, which
is as a you know, as a high functioning individual
who goes to medical school and has a couple of
master's degrees. I was a pro at living in my head.
(16:22):
What I mean by that was thinking about everything, analyzing everything.
That was my strength, that was my superpower, and what
I thought that I could do then, or maybe it
was what I'd always done, so I didn't know anything
different yet was I thought that I would just be
able to tell myself that I was safe, and even
(16:45):
you know, there's mantras for that. You can put little
inspirational notes around the house, on sticky notes. You can
put a rubber band around your wrist, and every time
you have a thought that represents fear or insecurity, you
can snap yourself and sort of punish yourself. And I
thought that, but I would be able to create inner
safety through these mindset approaches, working with my brain and
(17:06):
my thoughts, because that's the only thing I had ever
really known and to have to undo that was a
big shock for me, and it was also sad for
me to realize it. As a physician, I had also
been the one to tell all of my patients to
do those kinds of things. I had sent my patients
(17:28):
to talk therapy been like, you know, you should talk
to someone about that, and realizing that I had given
a lot of bad advice over the years, with good
intentions but actually set them in the wrong direction, assuming
that I knew how to actually create inner safety, but
that is not how you create inner safety. You actually
(17:48):
have to feel the feelings. You actually have to learn
how to read these messages from your body that it's
giving us and be able to then know how to respond.
A big phrase that's become popular is this mind body connection.
Sounds cool, but actually what is that? And it's not
(18:09):
going to be enough to just connect your mind to
your body, meaning put your mind's attention on some sensation
in your body and connect the two. That is not
going to be enough. You do need to be able
to learn how to listen and understand the messages from
your body and respond to those messages for it to
have any chance of actually feeling safe moving forward in
(18:32):
the world.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That makes sense that it kind of sign them perfectly
to what I was going to ask you next, which
is essentially, how do we even begin to recognize these
signs of trauma in ourselves? Or I know a lot
of people listening to our parents, and this for you
originated with your foster child and wanting to help him. Like,
how do we begin to recognize those signs, especially when
I know sometimes they can show up pretty subtly, and
sometimes they can be pretty big and easy to notice.
(18:55):
But how do we start to learn to listen? And
then I would guess from there, how do we then
begin to create feeling of safety in our body? Because
that resonates so deeply with me what you've said of Like,
I also used to think I could just mentally will
myself into that, and it turns out that doesn't work
at all. But how do we begin to recognize those
signs in our bodies?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
What a great question? I feel like as a physician,
this would be one of the most important things that
I would people to know. And we look for patterns now, granted,
this is how I was trained in medical school to
look for patterns. And if someone comes in with a
rite upper quadrant pain in their belly and they've got
a fever in a high white count, well then this
(19:35):
is the pattern of a gallbladder infection, and so I
look for patterns. And it's the same thing with trauma.
This is really helped me simplify what had seemed very
complex and vague. Is just to realize no, like the
body is still the body. These are still principles, and
trauma can be seen as just another condition and a
(19:58):
syndrome that has patterns that we can recognize. The patterns
that we recognize are ones that are based on survival.
And as I look at my life, I could see
many ways in which I would do things just to survive.
It wasn't healthy, It certainly wasn't promoting my best health
(20:20):
and my best self, but it was helping me get through.
It was helping me get through the day. It was
helping me function, It's helping me survive. So anytime that
I realized that I'm doing something to just help me survive,
that is trauma showing up. Trauma stored in the body
will always trigger survival mechanisms, and so we can look at, well,
(20:46):
what are the ways in which we survive. These can
be so subtle, as you said, they can be the
copy mechanisms that we use. They can be the sugar
and the chocolate that we reach for in the middle
of the day when we start to feel a little tired.
But We've been programmed to feel that it's not okay
to feel tired. We've been programmed to think that we
(21:06):
have to always be productive, and so I can't allow
myself to rest. I can't allow myself to relax. I
can't allow myself to have just a moment of not
doing anything but just being. And so when I notice
myself engaging in these activities that help me push through
and ignore my body's sensations and messages, then that's a
(21:29):
survival pattern. We also have patterns of disconnection. Disconnection is
a big form of how trauma manifests and continues to
be stored and held in the body. What does disconnection
mean can mean different levels of disconnection. Certainly, one level
is dissociation, where especially in the middle of a trauma experience,
(21:54):
one can dissociate to the degree that sometimes they feel
like they're out of their body and they're watching what's
happening to them. They're that disconnected from their self. But
there's so many other more subtle forms of disconnection. I
see this a lot in those who multitask and those
(22:16):
who zone out during conversations or meetings, where their mind
just drifts. Their mind drifts and I noticed myself having
this pattern quite strongly, and I, thankfully was being able
to was able to get curious about it, and I
started realizing that whenever my mind drifted, it was because
(22:38):
something had just been said that was a truth for
my body, and it had hit home in such a
way that my body was like, WHOA, let's not feel that,
let's not actually look at that. We need to create
some distance. And my mind would drift and it would
think about a trip, it would think about my to
(22:59):
do list, that would think about anything else other than
what was actually being said at that moment. So these
are the more subtle ways in which these trauma patterns
can show up, especially in the form of disconnection. There's others.
There's the disregulation. So disregulation can also show up in
our physical health and our emotional health. If we talk
(23:22):
about the emotional disregulation, this is where you just kind
of fly off the handle, relatively quickly, relatively easily. This
was one of the hardest things for me as a
mom working with Miguel was I would tell him no,
he couldn't play with his legos right now because we
had to go to the store, and just that word
no was such a trigger for him that he would
(23:46):
go into a rage, and now it would be several
hours of having to hold him because he would be
harming me, harming himself. And it was all because I
had said, no, we can't do that right now. So
this idea of having a bigger reaction than what the
situation actually calls for, that's disregulation. But one of the
(24:08):
fascinating things for me is that we can see this
in our physical health and rather than an emotional reaction,
our body can turn that into a physical reaction and
all of a sudden, we are having a rash. We're
having our skin irrupt, whether psoriasis or some other form
(24:31):
of skin rash. This is a common one. People have
related it sometimes to this stress, but it's actually not stress.
If stress is causing that degree of physical dysregulation, it's
at the degree of trauma for your body. Digestive issues
are a really common one. This is because of the
(24:51):
vagus nerve. The vagus nerve comes out of our brainstem.
It's the longest nerve and so it travels down behind
our throat down into our stomach. The tips are in
the pelvis, which means that the vegas nerve is so
intimately connected with our gut that when we are experiencing
a physical dysregulation response, it's going to show up often
(25:12):
in our gut, and people can feel maybe nausea or
pain some people describe but not forming in their gut,
or people will talk about the knife twisting in their gut.
This is all because of the physical changes that are
happening in response to something. But those changes then create
(25:32):
imbalance and all of a sudden, now we're not releasing
as much stomach acid, or we're not releasing the enzymes,
and so we're not absorbing well. And now we're going
to develop leaky gut because stress and trauma, both of
them actually impair our lining of our intestinal wall, creating
leaky gut. And now there's inflammation, that information travels up
(25:53):
our vagus nerve and causes the brain information, so now
we have brain fog as well. Brain fog and brain
information are actually one of the most intimately connected physical
manifestations of a trauma response in the body. And I'll
end with this where if we have a trauma response,
(26:14):
it causes such an impact on our immune system, the microglia,
those immune cells in our brain, that it will create
brain inflammation. It's part of the protective nature of disconnection.
Let me just help you zone out so that you
don't really feel what's happening because it's so unbearable and unbelievable.
(26:39):
What here's the crazy thing. And this was what really
led me to this idea of the biology of trauma,
is when we have brain inflammation that's caused by something else.
For me, at this point, my microglia have had so
many hits that it's just a few nights of not
sleeping well and my microglia get active or eating something
(27:02):
that I have a food sensitivity too, and that again
triggers the microglia. If I have a trigger of that
brain inflammation that has nothing to do with anything emotional,
that will still cause a trauma response in my body,
and I will feel myself reacting and shutting down and
realizing that, oh, like I feel overwhelmed. I'll kind of
(27:26):
usually tend to look to the people in my life, like,
who's causing me pain right now? What are they doing
to me? When actually has nothing to do with anybody
else other than my immune system is having this response
and that degree of inflammation, especially in the brain around
the neurons that will cause a trauma response. It's so
(27:49):
fascinating to see that to our body, it does not
differentiate between emotional trauma, physical trauma like inflammation, psychological trauma.
It doesn't differentiate it. Trauma is trauma. There's one trauma
response that the body has and it does not differentiate
between the different types like we tend to do.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, that's so fascinating and I definitely want to circle
back to that and go deeper on because the great
part of that is that the body is having that
one response and that it kind of encompasses the emotional
and the physical and the psychological. To me, what it
seems like is then we can use kind of all
of the levers available to us to help that either
become from a negative feedback loop to a positive feedback
loop if we understand how to fully support the body
(28:34):
before we get through there, I want to also just
touch on the idea of generational trauma if we haven't
gotten to talk about that yet. And this was a
fascinating concept for me to learn, but can you kind
of walk us through briefly what generational trauma is and
how it gets passed down?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
This is one of those fascinating topics where again I
stand back and I'm just amazed at the body. Generational
trauma is this idea, idea that ancestors can go through
trauma experiences and it changes their biology to such a
(29:09):
degree that it's passed down. And we haven't always clearly
understood how, but we have definitely seen the effects of it.
Those who have gone through the Holocaust, for example, we
can see the ongoing impact psychologically emotionally in their children.
(29:30):
But it wasn't intel. Rachel Yehuda really did a fascinating
study that showed that actually those children still had changes
in their epigenetics. Epigenetics, What does that mean? Epigenetics refers
to changes to our DNA. Trauma changes our DNA, and
(29:52):
the way that it does that is through something called
oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a bypro of our body's
natural activities to stay alive. Oxidative stress is even something
that is a byproduct of making energy, and so in
(30:13):
our cells we have mitochondria. They are the factory houses
that make all of our energy. As a byproduct of
making energy, they also create oxidative stress. So oxidative stress
by itself doesn't mean anything but what we want to
look at is is the body being able to clear
it out. Our body does have natural mechanisms to clear
(30:35):
out oxidative stress. Of course it would, because if it's
something that's naturally made, we would naturally have clean up mechanisms.
But here's where we start to then talk about again
the biology of trauma. There are two ways in which
that oxidative stress can become so big that it starts
to damage and change our DNA in such a way
(30:56):
that will be passed on to generations. One is that
the amount of oxidative stress that's being created is far
too much for our cleanup mechanisms to be able to filter.
And this is when we are in a experience that
is so overwhelming and there's no return to a sense
(31:20):
of safety. If our body holds on to that fear,
then it won't be engaging the cleanup strategies, because cleaning
up only happens when we feel safe, when it's time
to restore ourselves, when it's time to rest and recover,
and so as long as our body is stuck in
(31:43):
danger mode, the cleanup mechanisms are not going to be
as effective. This will then tend to create a build
up of the oxidative stress, and when it builds up,
it will go into our nucleus, damage our DNA and
the repair our enzymes are not going to be able
to keep up with the volume of damage that is
(32:04):
being created. I'm sure we'll swing back to this later,
but this is why it is so important to be
able to complete our trauma responses and return to a
sense of safety. A trauma response is normal, it's natural.
In fact, it's part of life. There's no human being
that can avoid a trauma response. But what we want
(32:28):
to do, and especially what we want to be teaching
our children, is the resilience part of how to complete
those responses so that they're not staying stuck in that
danger mode because of the impact that it will have
on their body and their physical health. The other way
in which the oxidative stress builds up though and damages
our DNA is As I've mentioned, we can have a
(32:51):
biology of trauma, and in this case, we can have
a biology of trauma that predisposes us to traumas and
packed on our body. In this case, I'm referring to genetics.
We can have the genetics that are clean up mechanisms
our repair enzymes are not as effective. We can run
(33:11):
a twenty three ande meters and see what our genetics
are for our oxidative stress repair enzymes, and some of
us have snips or those single nucleotide polymorphisms, which means
that these mechanisms are not going to be as effective.
And so if I am going through life and I
(33:32):
have enzymes that aren't able to work as well, I'm
only able to experience so much stress, so much trauma
before my body is like, ohh, this is too much
for us, because we're just not as good as cleaning
up as other people perhaps. And so this is a
fascinating topic that as we look at generational trauma, there
(33:52):
can be a genetic component in the sense that we
can have genetics that we pass down to our children
that make them more predisposed to overwhelm. I'll give one
more example, which is neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the brain chemicals
(34:13):
that help us feel and do different things in attachment
and bonding. Serotonin and dopamine are essential for healthy attachment formation.
And we can have genetics. For example, I have an
undermethylation status as an undermethylator. Oftentimes, not all under meth lads,
(34:37):
but many undermeth lads we have lower activity of serotonin
and dopamine. What does that mean? That means that my system,
my nervous system, is not as available for attachment and bonding.
So we can have had the best mothers in the
world who were very good at attuning, but we can
(35:00):
have low serotonin and low dopening that as a baby,
it made us more predisposed to developing an insecure attachment
or attachment trauma simply because our nervous system, our own
biology is setting us up for that unavailability because I
(35:20):
don't feel as well or I don't get as much
joy from connection that dopamine gives us. So there's this
idea of generational trauma that can be certainly passed down
through epigenetic changes, through the oxidative stress and that damage.
And there's this whole world of what imbalances, what deficiencies
(35:44):
are we passing down that will also in a sense
create generational trauma because I'm setting my child up for
having a biology of biochemistry that makes them more predisposed
to overwhelm. That's the idea of the end utero experience,
And is a mother taking enough folate or is she
(36:07):
taking too much fulliate? Is she being exposed to toxins?
And we now know I don't know. I'm assuming you
saw this study because you see everything, but there was
this lead the study that came out around microplastics being
found in the umbilical cords. And so our toxic world
and environment can be part of the generational trauma that
(36:30):
we're passing down to our kids. Not intentionally, it's just
the environment that we live in.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, And as you just explained so beautifully, like, there's
so many factors that come into play into this. And
of course, especially with trauma, it's very personalized and very individualized,
and I feel like one lesson. I've gotten to learn
it very personally the last ten years especially, and I
guess might feel very true for you as well. As
I believe the body is infinitely and amazingly capable of healing,
(36:57):
I've learned that the body is always on our side.
So even if we're having symptoms that are uncomfortable, it's
actually the body doing whatever is in our best interest
to keep us safe, to protect us, to help us.
In fact, I got to learn to rewrite that whole
my body is attacking itself to realize if my body
were trying to kill me, it could do it literally
in less than a second instantly, my body's always on
my side, So instead, if I can get curious, what
(37:20):
is it trying to tell me? And I feel like
this ties in really well with your approach and you
really actually help people very practically learn and go through this.
And I love how you talk about kind of that
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any order. What stood out to me and what you
just said as well, was completing the trauma response. I
think that's a really important piece that maybe gets overlooked
often because trauma responses are uncomfortable and negative emotions aren't
very much fun, and we want to like just resist
them and get rid of them as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
So I would love to hear more.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Explanation from you on that, and just to share vulnerably
my own experience with that. So I was actually assaulted
in high school and I thought I had totally dealt
with it. I had really just like shut it down
and built walls. And then years later I was actually
preparing for a podcast, a guy did a thematic rolfing
therapy on me. Didn't expect that to have any impact whatsoever,
(42:02):
and immediate, like I went back into the relived the
trauma like all over again, Like it felt like a
psychedelic experience. No psychedelics were involved. After that, I shook,
like nervous system shook for hours, and I realized animals
do that naturally. If an animal almost gets killed, when
they get to safety, their body immediately processes it and
they don't go walking around with PTSD. I had, as
(42:24):
a human been able to override that response and instead
internally subconsciously go I will never feel emotions again, I
will never feel helpless again. I will never let myself
be hurt again, and suppress all that for like a
solid over a decade while I lived in pure sympathetic
nervous system response, thinking I was perfectly well adjusted and
my body, my body processing that day actually began the
(42:45):
healing cycle for me, and it showed me, oh, this
was actually in my body even though I was ignoring it.
So I would love to hear you talk about how
do we actually complete the trauma response because I didn't
even know I had suppressed it until it came back.
But how can we be aware of that in little
ways in our day and in our kids so that
we can hopefully not create that same thing I did
for a decade.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
It is amazing that the body holds on to this,
and it holds onto it until we're ready. And one
of the key concepts that I teach those who come
to my courses is that we don't have to be archaeologists.
We don't have to go excavating our past and looking
for what else needs to be healed, because when it's ready,
(43:25):
our body will bring it to the surface. That's how
wise our body is. What does it mean then to
complete a trauma response, Because, as you've just said, we
can complete it years later. We don't have to do
it in the moment. However, the sooner that we can
do it, the less impact it has on all aspects
(43:48):
of our life and health and body. When we go
into a trauma response, that means something very specific. It
means that we felt powerless, alone and trapped and trapped
(44:14):
in the face of something that felt like it could
kill us. And so this comes directly from Steve Porgies
and the polyvagel theory, where this trauma response is going
to be used by the body. Whenever we feel that
(44:35):
we are up against an inescapable life threat, as long
as that life threat feels escapable, we will be in
the sympathetic mode and working to escape. But the moment
that our body, and by our body I mean our
autonomic nervous system, there's a specific skill that it has
(44:58):
called neurosception, and it is perceiving everything, perceiving the size
of the danger and our capacity. This it's a big
concept I share in my book around our capacity and
the perception of the size of danger is what makes
a trauma response a trauma response, and so as it
(45:20):
is sensing this danger, it will decide when it moves
from feeling escapable to the moment that it feels inescapable.
At that moment, our body shuts down in order to
protect us, and there's no amount of willpower or logic
(45:42):
that can override that. It is more powerful than even
our adrenaline. We can have adrenaline pumping through our blood,
but our body has shut down and that's communicated to
the vagus nerve. So if this is where we're at,
how do we come complete that and get back to
a sense of safety. We have to undo all of
(46:07):
those three things that we just talked about. You need
to no longer feel trapped. You need to no longer
feel powerless. You need to feel like you have your
power back, your agency, your ability to say no, I
don't want this. You need to be able to not
feel alone. How do we do that? There's very scientific
(46:30):
aspects that are involved here. If I cannot move, well,
then I don't have my power back and I'm still trapped,
which is why the movement is really important. And for
some that will look like shaking. What is really important
is at some point to be able to go back
and actually do the self defense that you would have
(46:52):
wanted to do. Do the self defense movements that you
would have wanted to do, even though this is years
later and I with people who are doing those decades later,
and still we go through the actual movement. So it
can't just be something that you imagine. It needs to
be the actual movement. So maybe the movement needs to
be pushing someone away or for me, I also had
(47:15):
a sexual assault story when I was twelve, and there
was all of this idea of like the self defense
movement that I would have wanted to do included like
fighting and clawing and pushing and kicking him away. So
whatever self defense movements that we could not do because
we were trapped, we now need to do because that
(47:36):
forms a muscle memory in our body that actually creates
learned helplessness if we don't go back and complete it.
So that anything that reminds our body of that moment,
and whether that is a smell, a sound, something that
we see or hear, like, all of these sensory information
(47:57):
is associated in these memories, in these implicit memories in
the body. So anything that fills closely associated with it,
and our body is going to be like, oh, we
know what that means. That means that this is an
inescapable life threat and we should shut down to survive,
and it will shut us down rather than being able
to stay engaged and stay curious and move into action
(48:21):
to solve the problem. So we don't want that learned
helplessness to stay as a memory in our body, which
means we need to actually do the movements. This is
why talk therapy will only go so far, because if
it's not involving the body level and those movements that
were blocked, that were we were not able to do
to defend ourselves, it won't reach that level of implicit
(48:45):
memory in our body. But let's talk about the mind
for a moment, because we have these beliefs that form
during these experiences, and these beliefs can be ones of
I'm different, I'm broken, I'm now forever flawed, and these
(49:07):
beliefs become self evident truths. They're not just something that
we think. They become a truth for us, which also
means that whenever anything hard comes our way, we fall
back to those beliefs and say, oh, well, I can't
do hard things or maybe we have the belief that
everyone is always against me, or maybe we form the
(49:29):
belief that our body is attacking us, and this is
the lens through which we see the world, and so
that needs to have a reset where we do a
form of art narrative therapy if we're doing it years later,
where we rewrite that story. It's the same story, but
now we put it into its context. Oh I didn't
(49:52):
do anything wrong. I was just in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Oh I didn't do anything wrong.
They were just high on substances and lost control of themselves.
I just happen to be in their way. And we
reframe it so that those beliefs can be reset so
that they're the proper context and understanding of the story
(50:16):
and not these ongoing beliefs about how we are broken
and defective. But there will be one more way in
which we need to reset to safety and complete these
trauma responses. And this last way will depend on how
soon or how much later we are completing these responses,
and that will be looking at the impact of trauma
(50:38):
on our biology. Because our body holds on to pain
and fear from the past, it will hold that on
in the nervous system, which is connected with every other
system in our body, whether it's the metabolism, the indocrine
system and our hormones, the immune system, the digestive system.
(50:58):
It is connect with all of that. So the more
time that we have gone holding on to these experiences,
the more it will have impacted our biology. And like
you say, the body has such an incredible ability to
heal itself. And what I started to do was teach
my patients some very basic simple somatic exercises. Somatic just
(51:25):
means body based, so they're more involving again movement or
touch in such a way that I'm creating a different
experience and sensation inside. And that was allowing their body
to experience moments of safety. And even just that was
changing their biology. Because as much as I still will
(51:45):
need to repair the immune system, and let's look at
the digestive system, we may need to take some enzymes,
we may need to take some lions made, we may
need to do these things. In acetyl system is great
for that brain information. And one of the most important
things is also to get our nervous system out of
that danger mode and back into a sense of safety.
(52:09):
We call this ventral vagel or parasympathetic or rest and digest.
That is the state in which our own body can recover.
And if we can shift our nervous system into that state,
it will it will be able to do so much
of the work by itself. It's just not able to
(52:30):
do that when it's still stuck in danger mode, whether
that's the sympathetic anxiety or whether that's the trauma and
shut down. And so being able to show my patients no,
like you can, you can shift your nervous system, and
you can even do it within sixty seconds, and having
them do these somatic self practices throughout the day because
(52:51):
I didn't even want them to depend on me. I
wanted them to be able to be in their home,
be out in the grocery store, be driving, feel that trigger,
and be able to do something about it right here,
right now, shift that nervous system back to a place
of safe enough, and that by itself sorted changing their
health more than any other medication that I was prescribing.
(53:12):
They started experiencing twenty six percent decrease in their daily
physical pain just after twenty one days of doing these
soumatic self practices. Their depression and anxiety went down by
thirty percent, they started sleeping better, twenty eight percent decrease
in insomnia issues, digestion, Their system was working better. They
had twenty eight percent less digestive symptoms whatever those symptoms were,
(53:35):
twenty eight percent less just after twenty one days of
these basic Yes, a certain, very specific sequence of exercises,
but it doesn't take as much for the body to
shift back into healing and safety than all the years
that it's taken us to get here living in danger mode.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
Yeah, which is definitely encouraging. I think of that idea
of especially when it comes to trauma and the nervous system.
It's not even so much just what happened to us,
but actually those beliefs that we adopt based on it,
like you talked about that become part of our identity
and part of our story long after the event itself
is far past, and it like really impact us so
deeply in daily life. And I love how you talked about, like, yes,
(54:19):
there's things we can do to support the body and
the brain in this like nac or like For me,
coaling was really helpful because I have a lot of
genes that need a lot of coal eid, and I
didn't need eggs for a solid decade or whatever. Those
thigs are. Those are great switches, but for me, for
a long time, those were the only ones I looked at.
And I was doing all of the supplements and all
of the biohacks that all of the things I could
possibly think of to support my body. And it wasn't
(54:41):
until I did these pieces that you're talking about and
the nervous system work, and felt the emotions and made
peace with my body and my emotions and my mind
that actually anything started to actually heal. And that was
when all the physical things also shifted for me without
changing any of those physical levers I was pulling. And
I know this is really truly like your passion and
(55:01):
your life's work, and that you have so many resources
for people in all of these things that we've talked
about in this podcast today, and of course I will
link to all of them in the show notes, But
can you briefly give us some starting points for someone
who might want to begin to do this work and
to make friends with their body and their nervous system.
From all the resources you have available in front of
you guys listening on the go, they will all be
linked in the show notes as well.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
One of the most comprehensive resources that they can grab
is my book. So my book is coming out for
those who know Gobermante, he wrote the forward, and so
this is this manual for the nervous system of understanding
how does the body experience trauma? What does our definition
of trauma need to be? And then why does it
(55:44):
hold on? And then what does it need to heal?
So it's broken up into those three sections and will
walk people through these concepts and help them see how
much of a trauma burden their body is holding, but
be able to move into solution and say, here is
practically what we need to do, because as you've said,
we need to do all the levels. We need to
(56:04):
do the mind level and the beliefs, we need to do,
the body level, and these somatic movements and self defense movements,
but we also need to do the biology. If we
miss one of those pieces, we're not going to be
able to experience the healing that is possible for each
of us. I also have a few guides on my
website Biology Offtrauma dot com for those who want to
(56:25):
check that out. And I now run a twenty one
day journey for those who want to take that with me,
and happy to provide you that link, Katie, for people
to be able to check out the twenty one day
journey and these specific sequence of somatic self practices that
I taught my patients and now bring to the.
Speaker 1 (56:41):
World amazing Well, like I said, all those links will
be in the show notes. I know that you have
a tremendous number of resources available, including your book, including
your podcast. You have so much out there. I'll make
sure those are all linked. I also know how busy
you are, doctor Amy. Thank you so much for the
time and for all that you've shared today. This has
been truly phenomenal and I know very helpful to many people.
So thank you. Thank you for the work that you do, Katie,
(57:04):
and thank you as always for listening and for sharing
your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your
attention with us today. We're both so grateful that you
did and I hope that you will join me again
on the next episode Adulanaswama podcast. If you're enjoying these interviews,
would you please take two minutes to leave a rating
or review on iTunes for me, Doing this helps more
(57:27):
people to find the podcast, which means even more moms
and families can benefit from the information. I really appreciate
your time and thanks as always for listening.
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