What’s HIDDEN in Your Body from Past Trauma? (Episode 249)

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What’s HIDDEN in Your Body from Past Trauma? (Episode 249)

To heal trauma, we need a different approach than healing from the effect of stress. Here are the 3 steps of "The Essential Sequence" to heal from trauma safely.
While stress feels challenging but manageable, trauma occurs when we feel powerless and overwhelmed. Dr. Aimie Apigian, author of "The Biology of Trauma," joins Dr. Doni to talk about how trauma requires different healing approaches than stress.

In this episode I’m really excited to introduce you to Dr. Aimie Apigian. She is the author of the book “The Biology of Trauma” and specializes in helping people recover from trauma using somatic therapy and “parts work,” which is a form of psychotherapy developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. 

As listeners know, I (Dr. Doni) have been researching and writing about stress and trauma for over 30 years. I feel it is imperative that we support patients to recover from stress and trauma, which is how I developed my Stress Recovery Protocol, and why I continue learning modalities, and teaching courses, on how to help humans heal. This is why I’m so glad to share Dr. Aimie’s expertise with you in this episode. 

Most of us are exposed to some form of stress or trauma, whether we realize it or not. The body holds memories from the past that we don’t even remember logically – it’s not even in our conscious mind, and yet our body holds the memories of all of that. This makes it such an important topic to discuss.

Even as a physician, Dr. Aimie shares that she didn’t know her body was holding so much trauma because she didn’t know to call it trauma. She had just thought she’d been stressed for a really long time. 

It wasn’t until she got very sick with burnout, chronic fatigue, autoimmunity, anxiety, depression, and weight issues that she began to understand. Even with being on two mood medications and having all these symptoms, as a physician, she still didn’t recognize it as trauma.

Dr. Aimie shares: “We didn’t learn about trauma in medical school, and even today, we still have this mindset of looking for a past event in our life that qualifies us as having had trauma.” 

What we really should be looking at is: do we feel overwhelmed in our life today? Not in the past, but today. If we had asked that question – do we often feel overwhelmed? – it would have been hands down yes, and we would have known to do something different with our body.

Understanding the Difference Between Stress and Trauma

In chapter one of her book, Dr. Aimie lays out the five steps that the body takes when it goes into a trauma response. The key difference between stress and trauma is what she calls “the critical line of overwhelm.”

She uses the analogy of working out at the gym – we lift weights to the point where it stretches and builds our muscles, but we wouldn’t want to break them. As a surgery resident, she had a patient come in whose bicep tendon was in the middle of his arm because he had lifted too much weight – that’s the definition of going over the limit.

Sometimes we think we’re superhuman machines and don’t realize we have limits, making it easy to push ourselves without recognizing when we’re at the edge. We don’t like to think we have limits, and we haven’t known our limits, so it’s been very easy for us to push and push and push, thinking we have reserves and buffer, not realizing that we’re right there at the edge. Then it doesn’t take much for us to cross that line and go into overwhelm.

In our biology, overwhelm is equivalent to the trauma response. Stress is when we think, “This is hard, but I can do it.” The moment a person starts to feel “I can’t do this” or thinks “this is too much,” that’s how they know their body has crossed the line into trauma biology rather than stress biology. Based on this definition, many more people are experiencing trauma than we ever realize.

Until we know that we’re experiencing trauma rather than just stress, we keep trying to do stress management and self-care, not realizing that won’t touch it when it’s trauma because trauma is deeper than stress. 

You may not see it overnight, you may not even see it next week, but a year from now, ten years from now, that’s when you’re going to get diagnosed with autoimmunity, that’s when you’re going to get diagnosed with an inflammatory condition, that’s when your body just can’t keep up anymore.

The Five Steps of Trauma Response

1. The Startle Response

The first step the body always takes is a startle response. Everyone is familiar with startle – when someone jumps out at you and you jump, it’s an uncontrollable response, like going to the doctor and having them tap your knee with a reflex hammer – your knee is going to jump, you can’t control it.

When processing trauma later, it’s helpful to understand what startled us by asking, “When was the first moment that I felt something might be wrong?” Many of us have good gut intuition that tells us when something’s off or when a situation or person might hurt us. Often, we can look back and say “I knew it,” even though we didn’t do anything about it at the time.

2. The Stress Response

After being startled, our body moves into a stress response, which means taking action. We think, “Oh my goodness, this is a big problem, this is a big challenge, this is a big danger – I need to do something.” 

Our biology changes to help us take action – blood moves from our gut to our muscles and brain so we can move and think. Our mitochondria in our cells make more energy, happening instantaneously through the sympathetic nervous system, a chain of nerves running down the sides of our spine.

This system is so fast at communicating that it can immediately get us moving in response to danger, like getting out of the way of an oncoming car, even before our brain can consciously recognize there’s an oncoming car. That’s how fast the sympathetic nervous system is. But here’s where it can turn into trauma.

3. Hitting the Wall

The third step is what Dr. Aimie calls “the wall.” Imagine driving a car trying to outrun a tornado or hurricane, driving pedal to the metal, and then hitting a wall with no possible escape. 

You look for a way out, over, or through, but there’s no way around. The wall traps you, and the danger is still there. This wall makes us feel powerless. At this moment, our nervous system decides we need a different survival strategy because if we can’t outrun it, out-fight it, or outsmart it, we need something else – the trauma response.

As Dr. Aimie thinks of that feeling of feeling trapped and powerless, she thinks of so many people who feel that way in their life – in their marriage, their work, their relationships, their life responsibilities. 

They’re not equating that with trauma; they’re still calling that stress. But that is not stress, and the impact that has had on us is that there are things happening in our biology with trauma that unless we recognize it’s trauma and not just stress, we don’t know to support our bodies in that way.

4. The Freeze Response

The fourth step is the freeze response. While many people may be familiar with “fight, flight, or freeze,” it’s important to understand that fight or flight happens first in the sympathetic high-energy stress response. 

If your body responds with freeze, you are going into the trauma response – there’s no way to freeze and then come back to stress. That’s where you’ve crossed that critical line of overwhelm, and there’s no turning back once you’ve crossed that line.

The freeze response happens due to the shock of realizing we’re trapped and powerless. It hits us like a shock and stops us in our tracks as we realize we’re at the mercy of whatever is against us – there’s nothing we can do. 

This is where shame starts to hit because we start to have this internal message of “clearly I’m not good enough” because we couldn’t respond – we weren’t big enough, strong enough, or smart enough.

5. The Shutdown

The final step is shutdown, where we feel our energy literally deflate, as if someone’s pulled out our batteries. It brings a heaviness that settles over our body, and it’s so uncomfortable. 

This is where many people find themselves fighting this state with caffeine, emotional eating, or excessive exercise because they feel lazy, tired, and exhausted. They might think they need to exercise more and lose more weight, developing various strategies to deal with being in a chronic trauma response.

Our body needs very specific things to come out of that shutdown, and then it will be able to engage its own healing strategies, and we won’t need all these other strategies just to try to function. Sometimes getting a diagnosis makes us feel trapped and powerless. 

We develop all these strategies to deal with and live with basically being in a chronic trauma response and being shut down, not realizing that our body needs very specific things to come out of that shutdown.

The Three Levels of Trauma Impact

Dr. Aimie explains that trauma impacts us on three levels, each needing specific messages of safety. The key is being able to give our body the direct message that the danger is over. The problem is that we live in a world and society where we’ve created lives that constantly give messages that we’re still in danger, not that the danger is over and our bodies can relax, rest, and recover.

This is what Dr. Aimie calls the reset. Our nervous system needs a reset when it’s gone into a trauma response, and it needs specific things to know that the danger is over. If it doesn’t get that message, it stays in that loop and cycles between stress and trauma, stress and overwhelm – high anxiety, high energy, and then the collapse. 

We’ve got to be able to get our body out of that loop, but the only way to do that is to give it these direct messages of safety.

1. The Mind

We need to address the thoughts that tell us we’re not safe. However, thoughts are never going to be enough because our thoughts are actually fed by our body’s sensations and nervous system. The narrative work helps process what happened by explaining the story of when we went into the trauma response in very specific, tangible ways. 

Our brain needs to know there’s an ending to the story; otherwise, even as adults, we can still feel like a small child who’s trapped and powerless by an older adult who’s hurting them.

2. The Body

This involves our muscles and self-defense movements. When we’re in a stress response, we’re supposed to be making self-defense movements. If these movements get blocked, our body remembers that. 

This is why after a car accident that we haven’t actually processed and healed from, we can be driving along the same road and feel our body having a response. It’s our body’s somatic memory and tissues responding. 

We need to engage in the self-defense movements that were blocked and ineffective at that time – breathing alone is never going to be enough.

3. The Biology

This is the piece most people miss. When our body has experienced trauma without a reset to safety, our biology stays in a state of fear. We need to look at the impact on our biology – are our cells getting the message that the danger is over, or for them, is the danger not over? 

Maybe they’re still depleted of essential nutrients, maybe their mitochondria are still compromised, and maybe toxins and oxidative stress have built up from past stress and trauma, impacting their ability to make energy.

All of these factors in our own biology send messages to our nervous system that we’re still in danger because we don’t have the nourishment and reserves that we need. 

This will be another reason why we just can’t overcome our past, and our biology stays in a state of fear, which means our thoughts will stay in a state of fear, our emotions will be ones of insecurity, and we will find ourselves doing things we don’t want to do anymore, like stress eating, and not be able to stop ourselves because our body is literally saying, “I know you don’t want to do this anymore, but I need this to survive.” 

Our survival patterns will always override any logic we try to throw at it.

The Essential Sequence for Healing

One of the most helpful masterclasses Dr. Aimie teaches is called “The Essential Sequence.” This process ensures safe healing rather than re-traumatization. When we follow the process, we end up being able to do it safely and actually heal rather than re-traumatize ourselves. 

There are three steps to this essential sequence, and the third step is the step of expansion, where we’ve built our foundation and can start expanding our capacity. That’s the phase in which we start processing things because we have the capacity for it.

As we’re working with the nervous system, one of the principles of neuroscience is consistency. That’s why there’s data around how long it takes to change – it doesn’t happen overnight because that’s not how the nervous system works. The nervous system thrives on consistency, and anything we do consistently, our brain and nervous system recognize as our new way of living life.

There are exercises that can shift your nervous system in under two minutes, but unless you do them every day, it’s going to keep reverting back to your fear place because that’s your default. 

You need both something you can do in the moment when you start to feel like you’re losing your cool, and something you can come back to several times a day, every day, to build that consistency your nervous system needs to make this your new default.

Dr. Aimie’s Personal Journey

Dr. Aimie’s understanding of trauma healing began when she adopted a son during medical school who was severely traumatized in the foster care system. At four or five years old, he was already talking about trying to kill her – that’s the degree of reactivity they were dealing with. Traditional therapies weren’t helping; they were only making things worse by activating trauma without resolution.

This led her to explore what she was missing about trauma and therapy to help him, as the practitioners didn’t seem to understand the missing piece. Medication was offered, but she knew he didn’t have a medication deficiency – he had a trauma problem. She was looking for the missing piece for his trauma healing. 

The last piece that helped him was parts work, a type of therapy which was so powerful that it shifted him within five days. He went from being very reactive and unable to look her in the eyes, punching, kicking, and biting when she got close, to reaching out to hold her hand and looking in her eyes to tell her “thank you” and “I love you.”

When she saw how powerful it was for him, she got trained herself, wanting to understand what made it so powerful for the nervous system that it could shift someone who was so stuck into just uncovering his beautiful heart. Then when she got sick herself and discovered she also had trauma she just didn’t know it, she needed some other pieces that he had not needed as much.

She really needed the somatic piece, and as she started getting trained in somatic experiencing and other somatic work, she found her biology was holding her back. She experienced brain fog, mental fatigue, flare-ups of joint pain, and gut issues. It was so bad that it was hard to even get through the training. 

She realized she was getting triggered by her patients sometimes too, and her body was responding – it wasn’t just her thoughts or emotions, her body was physically responding with sensations and symptoms.

The Path Forward

Understanding trauma healing isn’t about carrying a boulder forever – there are actual steps we can take to heal. While it’s not an overnight fix or a single pill solution, the fact that we can heal from trauma is exciting. When we’re stuck, there are specific reasons why we’re stuck, and we can find and resolve those reasons.

The essential sequence helps identify where we are in the healing process and what our next best step should be. Is our next best step to process something from the past, or is it something else entirely? It allows us to know what to do and in what order that will allow our body to start to unblock these things that have been keeping us stuck.

The more parts work we do, the more it opens up the body and what it needs. The more somatic and body work we do, the more it opens up parts work and biology, and the more biology work we do, the more capacity we have for somatic work and parts work.

What happens is that these different aspects end up feeding each other in a positive cycle that creates momentum for our healing rather than the downward spiral they are in when stuck in that biology of fear. 

That’s the beauty of being able to integrate these pieces – we’ve got to integrate the parts work because the more parts work we do, the more it opens up the body and what it needs. And guess what? The more somatic and body work we do, the more it opens up parts work and the biology.

Many people find themselves saying, “I don’t recognize who I am anymore. I don’t like who I am anymore. I need to find a way back to my authentic self, and I’m not even sure that I’ve ever been that authentic self.” It’s a process of learning how to get out of our mind, out of our thoughts that create more fear and anxiety, and actually create a true sense of safety, which requires that we also address the biology.

We’re not looking for just saying mantras and telling ourselves we’re safe today – but is that how your body feels? Because how our nervous system perceives ourselves, others, and the world is how it’s going to be driving our health, not what we tell ourselves. And it’s not something that just shifts overnight – it’s something that we need to come back to each and every day.

To Learn More

Dr. Aimie provides resources through her YouTube channel called Dr. Aimie Apigian and podcast, Biology of Trauma®, covering topics like parts work, somatic experiencing, and the biology of trauma. She offers free challenges online and group programs to help people on their healing journey. Find her 21 day Journey to Calm Aliveness program here. 

You can also find her on Instagram @Dr. Aimie Apigian and Facebook @Dr. Aimie

It is important to know that it is possible to recover from stress and trauma and truly heal, because you’re not likely to hear that from your standard doctor’s office. Keep in mind, they are not educated about diet, exercise, supplements, or stress recovery. 

I, Dr. Doni, am living proof that it is possible to heal from trauma, and to reverse chronic health issues otherwise considered to be irreversible. I healed myself from migraines and arthritis, and help patients to heal from abnormal results (cervical dysplasia), autoimmunity, and many other health issues by helping them to recover from trauma.

It’s possible to reset our stress hormones, detoxify, and help our body and mind to recover by phone and zoom, anywhere in the world. You can set up a one-on-one appointment.

Once I meet with you one on one, we will create a strategic plan based on your health needs, including sessions with the health coach on my team to help guide you to implement my Stress Recovery Protocol which involves optimizing cortisol and adrenaline levels, as well as neurotransmitters, using nutrients, herbs and C.A.R.E.™ – my proprietary program to support clean eating, adequate sleep, stress recovery and exercise. 

I specialize in epigenetics, methylation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and detoxification, all of which are key aspects of recovering from the effects of stress and trauma, alongside the work that Dr. Aimie does with somatic and parts therapy.

To learn more, I encourage you to read all about it in my latest book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

Thank you all for joining me for this fascinating discussion with Dr. Aimie. If you found this information helpful, please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes of How Humans Heal. 

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