Transcript - Releasing Trauma for Optimal Health With Dr. Aimie Apigian

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Releasing Trauma for Optimal Health With Dr. Aimie Apigian

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 537 of Live Happy Now. We talk a lot about how trauma can affect our mental health, but have you thought about what it’s doing to your physical well-being? I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m talking with Dr. Aimie Apigian, author of The Biology of Trauma. Dr. Aimie is revolutionizing trauma healing by showing how ourselves, not just our minds, are storing trauma. Join us today as she explains some of the ways stored trauma can be wreaking havoc on our relationships, our health, and even our careers, and then tells us what we can do about it. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:40] PF: Dr. Aimie, thank you so much for joining me here today.

[0:00:44] AA: Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be here, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

[0:00:47] PF: You have such a great topic. It’s one that I’ve seen addressed personally in my life, but it’s not something that I’ve seen widely addressed for the mainstream. Let’s start at the very baseline and tell us what you mean when you talk about The Biology of Trauma.

[0:01:03] AA: This is so true. It’s not yet mainstream, and yet, I see it everywhere. I am so excited to talk about this. First and foremost, because for me, it’s a message of hope. When I talk about trauma, it’s not a message of doom and gloom and heaviness and sorrow. I get excited, because once we understand the science of it, it allows us to have tools that we haven’t had before. It allows us to have a path and a framework and places where we can now work with intention, rather than just, well, let me try this, let me try that, and don’t really know what I’m doing, and then we get stuck and we get lost, which is what happened to me.

My journey actually started truly when I became a foster parent. Then I adopted. That experience showed how little I knew about trauma. I thought I knew, and I’m in medical school, and so it’s something that it shocked me that the traditional therapies, the evidence-based therapies, this idea that time heals all, or that my love would be enough. All of that was just wrong. Absolutely wrong. It took me back to really, trying to define not just what is of trauma, because there’s lots of language around big T trauma, little t trauma, and really understanding what makes something a trauma that I can use those words, and then why does the body hold on?

That really became a driving factor for me to try to understand as a physician. Why does the body hold on? We have the book, The Body Keeps the Score, why does the body keep score? Not just, okay, I understand that it does, but why does it? Because whether it’s now talking about me, because my son started to help me see all of the pain and emotional wounds that I was still carrying from my past, or if we’re talking about my son. He didn’t like to be that way. He didn’t like to be experiencing triggers all the time and go into his rages and hurt people, because he had been hurt. But we always ask, why can’t I move on? Because we want to move on.

Realizing that what I had been told around, oh, it’s just a mindset, oh, you need to say your affirmations and say your mantras, and it’s this idea that we can control our trauma with our mind. That is so wrong.

[0:03:45] PF: I want to talk about that. How is that damaging us further if we think I can therapy my way out of this? If we think, now it starts feeling like, well, I must be doing therapy wrong, I can’t even do that right, because I can’t heal my trauma doing these things that I’ve been told will heal me.

[0:04:03] AA: Yes. Yet, this is what we’ve been told, right? We’ve been told like, oh, you should go talk to someone about that. As if talking to someone about that is going to actually change how we respond to that. That really is how the body is holding on to trauma. People ask me all the time, where does the body store trauma? Is it in my liver? My kidneys? I’m like, no. It’s in your responses. So, that when there’s a trigger and whatever that trigger will be for you, I’ve got my triggers, whatever that trigger is, that’s the idea of that trigger creates a response. The trauma gets stored into our nervous system that dictates our responses to where we’re having a response that is not something that we are logically choosing to do. That is not our conscious control.

We respond, or we might use the word react, we react, and then we think about our reaction, as opposed to being able to think about our response and then do a more thoughtful response. When we just go and talk about things, often, what’s happening, to your point, is that it stirs things up without being able to resolve it. That’s a form of trigger. We’re literally poking the bear and then we’re surprised that the bear wakes up and growls at us.

[0:05:29] PF: Does this apply to all types of trauma? You mentioned big T trauma, little t trauma. You might want to, just for our listeners, define if they’re not familiar with that, what those two mean? Then talk about, do both those types of trauma affect the body?

[0:05:44] AA: Yeah. What a great question. It takes me back to when I first started learning about the adverse childhood experiences. Coming from it, from the angle of a medical physician, I’m looking at it in terms of they’re being now a score sheet. I’m being told that I need to ask questions about, were you ever hit as a child? Were you emotionally made fun of, or berated as a child? Did any of your parents use substances? Did any family members go to jail? It’s like, this score sheet. If you get enough points on your score sheet, well, then you’ll be able to say, “I’ve had trauma.”

[0:06:33] PF: Do you get a badge for that?

[0:06:35] AA: Right. It almost feels like, the event needs to qualify. What qualifies you to be able to say that you’ve had trauma, that almost then became this excuse for why I am the way I am? The whole focus of that is on the event. The whole focus of that is on what was your environment, instead of really, what trauma actually is. Whether we want to talk about a big T trauma and people label a big T trauma as having a family member who did something bad to you, or a natural disaster, or something big that everyone can look at and be like, well, that definitely qualifies you as a trauma survivor.

[0:07:21] PF: You may enter the arena now.

[0:07:23] AA: You may enter. Exactly. Here’s your badge. We’ve had other people who’ve said, “No, no. But I’ve had trauma too, because I’m having those kinds of reactions, but I can’t look back at my life and see that I’ve had that qualifying event.” We’re now going to call this little t trauma, because I want to be included, too. so now we’ve said, OK, well, little t traumas would be things like, just not having your parents emotionally present for you. Those things that aren’t big, but yet, they had an impact on you and still were a form of you feeling all alone, and you having these experiences that your body has held onto.

We’re still focusing more on the outside environment, the external event, rather than what trauma is, which is just didn’t create a trauma physiology in your body. This is where I started to dive deep with my work. It came out of my own experience of me developing multiple health issues that I knew were related to the adverse childhood experiences, but I didn’t see any of that qualifying stuff. I would never have used the word trauma from my childhood. Never. Especially compared to my son. With the foster care system since age nine months. Now he, he qualified. He got the badge. Not me.

Really, what we’re looking at then is being able to define trauma by the inner experience of the body. There are very five distinct steps in our physiology that will happen if we go into a trauma response. If we do not have that physiology happen, well, then it wasn’t a trauma response. It may have been a stress response.

[0:09:27] PF: I want to ask, what is the difference between stress and trauma? Because we know so – have so much information coming out about how stress is affecting our health. That is different than what you were talking about with trauma being stored in our body. Can you tell us that difference between the two?

[0:09:44] AA: That is one of the things that I say is a misconception, is that stress is what makes us sick. Stress is not what makes us sick. Stress is what makes us superhuman. It’s trauma that makes us sick. The difference between those two really comes down to the physiology, so that until you know the science, you would confuse one for the other. You might call stress trauma and you might call trauma stress, and be missing what we need to actually give the body differently when it is stress and when it is trauma.

I had a patient in my general surgery residency, and he came to the VA hospital where I was doing my rotation at the time. When he came into the emergency room, his bicep, which normally, right, there’s your bicep, his bicep was no longer attached to his shoulder. It was sitting in a lump right in the middle of his arm.

[0:10:40] PF: How?

[0:10:41] AA: Exactly. I talk about this in my book, because for me, this is the difference between stress and trauma. He had gone to the gym and he had lifted weights that were heavier than what he could lift that day. Rather than being able to take the stress and grow his muscle, it snapped, it broke. That’s what happens to us. When we experience stress, it can grow us. It can stretch us. When we experience trauma, it breaks something inside of us.

[0:11:21] PF: It’s really interesting, because it feels like there is a shift within the medical and the psychological community in that observance of stress. Because we’ve had two guests on recently, Dr. Alan Rosenthal and Dr. Rebecca Heiss, who both talked about the benefits of learning to leverage stress. It’s no longer our enemy, but it’s something that we can use as a tool for rebounding and becoming more resilient.

[0:11:45] AA: Exactly. This is what we see when we also study the Olympic athletes. They are going through stress. Their workouts are intended to create stress. They want the stress, because that’s how they grow their, and there’s a big word for me in my book, their capacity. Their capacity. It all comes down to our capacity. My patient, Kenneth was his name. He exceeded his capacity of his muscle. If he had stayed within his capacity, he would have been able to stress and rest, stress and rest, and that is the recipe for growth and resilience. Instead, what we do is we come along and we say, “I can do more than that. I should be able to do more than that.” We push ourselves beyond our capacity to prove something, to try to be something. That’s when, because we exceed our capacity, our body has to shut down to protect us. That’s what happened to Kenneth’s muscle.

His body said, “We are going to have a bigger problem on our hands if we don’t do something to protect you. We’re going to break that, so that it doesn’t tear off your entire shoulder.” We can sometimes see the reactions that our body is having, whether it be a form of a physical health condition, fatigue, autoimmunity, chronic pain. What we’ve seen as the problem, our body would tell us, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s a solution to the real problem. If I don’t create this fatigue, you are going to continue to try to do things that are not safe for us to do. If I don’t create this autoimmunity, you are going to do things that feel dangerous.” Because our nervous system has come to the belief, especially for those with autoimmunity, for example, it has come to the belief that it is dangerous to be the real authentic us.

Well, if it’s dangerous to be authentic, then my immune system is going to say, “I’m going to attack you, so that you don’t be authentic, so that you continue to try to be somebody that that you’re not. You’re only showing people the safe side of you, not the real side of you.” This idea that then, even in our biology, our body is creating symptoms to be the solution to the real problem, which is life is overwhelming, and I can try to do too much. My body says, “that’s not safe. It’s dangerous. I need to keep you back and hold you back.”

[0:14:50] PF: Is that something that builds over time? It normally isn’t something that just all of a sudden one day, we start having chronic health issues, right? We start having all these health problems. How does that, how does the body start integrating these health issues into who we are?

[0:15:08] AA: This was the question that I asked when I was a physician and then had my own health issues. I’m like, how did this happen? Where did this come from? I had a patient, Elena. She came with me with autoimmunity. It’s actually a very common condition for those who are perfectionists. Mm-hmm.

[0:15:25] PF: Really?

[0:15:26] AA: Yes. Yes. You take a high-achieving woman who’s a perfectionist, and three out of five of them are going to develop autoimmunity in their lifetime.

[0:15:39] PF: Can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like? What do you mean by autoimmune diseases, or conditions?

[0:15:43] AA: Yeah. Autoimmune diseases. There’s actually over a hundred different kinds of autoimmune diseases at this point. It’s becoming much more common, and the studies show us that people are getting autoimmunity even younger and younger and younger, which I think is an expression of the generational trauma that we are passing down. Autoimmunity is this idea of auto, meaning self, auto immunity. My immune system is attacking myself. When I discovered autoimmunity, we discovered antibodies. My immune system had formed antibodies that are attacking my own DNA, my own nucleus.

If you think about the DNA, the DNA is the core of who we are, that the very – it is the most protected element that we have in our body. We protect our DNA more than anything else, because that’s our life. The idea, the idea that it, my immune system was attacking the very core of who I was. There’s so many emotional correlations with that as well. This idea that our body creates these, well, it’s a manifestation of what I call the biology of trauma. To your point, it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the idea that we experience overwhelm in our life. Often, if it’s autoimmunity, it’s in our childhood where it first starts. We would never notice it though, because it’s building underneath the surface.

That’s why with the adverse childhood experiences, they found that even though these adverse events were happening when people were children, they weren’t getting sick until adulthood. Did that just magically appear in adulthood? No. It happened, it started with that overwhelm and that overwhelm creates damage to our biology. It creates damage to our cells. It creates damage to our ability to even make energy. It damages our metabolism, everything, digestive system, hormones get imbalanced, thyroid usually takes a hit. All of the systems are now being affected by us having experienced that type of overwhelm, or a trauma response and not having known how to resolve it to return back to a sense of safety.

Then, that’s what the body holds on. The body holds on to this background sense of danger. The danger might come back. The danger might still be there. I don’t know. Even when times are good, I’m still waiting for the next shoe to drop. That’s that background sense of danger that we continue to hold on to, when we have not completely resolved or reset back to safety after our body has gone into a trauma physiology response.

[0:18:46] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:18:56] PF: Now, let’s hear more from Dr. Aimie.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:18:59] PF: That’s interesting, because I have someone in my life, a relative who has just an ongoing string of issues and ailments, and it’s like, as soon as one thing, like OK, we got the gallbladder fixed, well now something else is going to go haywire. It’s just like, oh, my God. At what point does this stop? Because it’s like, you replace one ailment with the other. Is that common?

[0:19:25] AA: That’s incredibly common. In fact, that’s one of the hallmarks of it being a trauma biology, and how a person would know that their body is holding on to trauma. Because it will always express, or surface in one way. Then we often spend so much energy, time, medical treatments, whatever it is to solve that one issue, thinking that that’s the issue, not realizing that, no, that’s just the downstream effect. If you stop that, if you plug that, well, it’s going to pop up somewhere else. You plug that now, and then it’s going to pop up somewhere else, because it’s being driven by a nervous system that still sees danger everywhere. That’s where we need to go. That’s the real root of what’s driving all of these aspects.

When I’m looking at a person and I’m seeing like, is your body holding trauma? Do we have a biology of trauma? I’m not even just looking at their health. There are three areas in which this will show up in their life that we can recognize. It will show up in their relationships as well. What are the emotional reactions and experiences that you have with relationships? How are you with conflict? How are you with healthy anger? Boundaries. Let’s talk about all of these, because if your body is storing trauma, it will also be inevitable that it’s showing up in your relationships, because that’s what our nervous system drives our interactions with other people as well.

It will show up in your life. Whether this is professional, career growth, or your personal development, or just your general sense of tiredness and exhaustion, or your lifestyle and how you get through every day, those are places in which I’m looking for patterns of stored trauma. And it’s their physical health. When I see patterns in all three of these areas, I’m like, we’ve got some work to do. The good news is that we can do a lot of work.

[0:21:28] PF: How do you identify if it’s a physical condition that isn’t related to trauma, or if it is something related to trauma? Then, I want to get into, once you determine that, how do you start treating it? Because we’ve already ascertained, you can’t just therapy your way out of this.

[0:21:44] AA: Yeah. When we’re looking at physical health conditions, we get to see the wisdom of the body, and its complexity for how it navigates life. When we look at ourselves, again, I’m going to come back to this terminology of capacity, our cell, take an individual cell, an individual cell has a certain capacity. Going back to Kenneth’s muscle, it had a certain capacity for how much weight it could lift and not break. Our cells have a certain capacity for how much energy they can make and not shut down and fall apart.

Really, the key aspect comes down to, are we experiencing symptoms of overwhelm that suggests that at a cellular level, we’re asking more of our body than what it can realistically give us. This is where we will be asking about, what’s your first thought of the day when you wake up? If your very first thought of the day is, “I don’t want to get up. I wish that I didn’t just wake up. Can I sleep more? Can I just stay in bed all day? Do I have to face the day? Do I have to face the world?” That’s a thought that comes from an interstate of trauma physiology. Many people are waking up in trauma physiology.

Then, what they do is they’re reaching for things that will give them energy, to pull them up out of that state, because that’s a low energy state. They’re looking for things that will give them energy, lift them up, and it picks them up into the stress state. These are things like coffee. These are things like, even some foods will create this adrenaline due to the food sensitivities and the histamine that it will release. We find ourselves reaching for things that we may not even understand why, or they just become part of our normal daily habits that we’re not realizing. I’m actually using this coffee, not just to have a nice cup of coffee in the morning. I’m using this to survive. I’m using this to actually pull my body out of this sense of heaviness and exhaustion and danger to be able to be productive and get things done today. That’s a very different state. That’s what I’m looking for.

When I’m looking at, does someone have a health condition and is it trauma related? I’m still looking at all of these other areas in which the patterns of trauma will show up to know, is this connected or not? At the end of the day, even if we’ve had an exposure, like a virus, or toxins of some sort and we can see, what does that have to do with trauma? Well, if our body were in its best state of health, it would have been able to clear that out usually. The body is designed to be able to be exposed to things and clear it out. If it’s not doing that, something’s blocking it. Oftentimes, most oftentimes, what’s blocking that is stored trauma. Stored trauma impacts our detoxification pathways that shuts them down.

As long as we’re not getting exposed to any toxins, that’s fine. The moment that you do, you’re going to start having physical health symptoms, whether that’s to mold, or Lyme, or plasticides, or glyphosate in your food. There’s all kinds of toxins around us. Normally, that’s not a problem if your detoxification pathways are working. What shuts those down is stored trauma in the body. That is why trauma and toxins are two peas in a pod. They always run together, because –

[0:25:50] PF: That is so interesting.

[0:25:50] AA: – you have, the more trauma physiology that your body has. Becomes a chicken and an egg.

[0:25:58] PF: How do you treat that? Because I think of the people I know who deal with a lot of issues, shall we say. I know that the doctors that they are going to see are not going to be taking this approach. They’re giving more medication. They’re saying, “OK. You’re going to not go to work for six weeks.” That’s not the approach. How do you start treating this in a body?

[0:26:27] AA: There’s what I would like to be able to do. Then there’s the reality of what has to be done.

[0:26:33] PF: Two different worlds.

[0:26:33] AA: What I’d like to be able to do is have people come to me before they get sick. Because then, there’s so much more that I can do. The reason why we can do more before they get sick is because they have a greater capacity. Whether you call it trauma work, or therapy, or personal growth, whatever label you want to put on it, it still takes energy. It takes energy. If you don’t have any energy left, because you’ve let your body go so far down this track that you’re now fully in energy depletion mode, then it looks different, because we have to actually create the energy first to then be able to reinvest that energy. It’s so much longer. It’s so much slower if a person waits until their body is really burdened down to come in for help.

Ideally, I love to work with people who are not that sick. They’re just noticing, “My life is not what I wanted to be. I am not who I want to be. Let’s get some work done.” I’m like, great. Let’s do that. Because we’ve got energy to work with. But most people are coming in, waiting, thinking that, “Oh, this isn’t that bad. This will get better.” Then, they wait and wait and wait. Then they realize, this is not getting better. Now they’re coming in.

What needs to happen at that point then is really opening up a little bit of space. The way that we open up space is through three different integrated approaches. If we come at it all on one side, wow, we’re not going to be able to create much space. The body responds better when we’re coming in and surrounding it with this container of safety, but also pressure to be able to move it and shift it over here to something different. What does that mean? That means that I am going to be integrating modalities that address our mind, or our inner child, address our body, or the somatic implicit memories, and the biology. When I’m first working with someone, I’m going to address, I’m going to have them do one or two things for each of those levels. That’s about all they can handle. They don’t have the energy to do anything more. If I try to give them more, they look at that long list of, for me, right, is often supplements, since I’m the medical physician. They look at the long list of supplements and I’m like, this is all the stuff that you need to do. They’re like, “Yeah, no. Not going to work out.” It’s just not possible. They don’t have the energy to make those kinds of changes.

I have to come at it very gently. This is what I see most people do wrong with doing their trauma work is that they try to do too much too fast. Just like Kenneth, if we’re going to therapy, or any other treatment, I see people trying to do breath work, or maybe bio-hack their trauma, and let’s do cold plunges, whatever it is for them –

[0:29:47] PF: I will freeze the trauma out of my body.

[0:29:49] AA: Exactly. Freeze the trauma out. Or I’ll shake the trauma out. There’s all these kinds of stuff these days. It’s quite interesting. They’re trying to do too much for what their body has the capacity for. Even when it’s a good thing, we can do too much too fast. Like Kenneth, break our muscle, rather than grow our muscle. We end up needing to do less in order to be able to accomplish more, if that makes sense. We do less, and we also make sure that it’s integrative, so that we’re creating that whole container and not just only one side of. Let’s only do therapy. Let’s only do mindset work. Let’s only do the functional medicine approach.

It’s like, now we got to combine those now. That’s what I think is the practitioner of the future. The practitioner of the future, the truly trauma informed practitioners of the future will be able to have basic skills in all of these areas, since they all affect each other. You can’t do the supplements and have them work without the inner child work and the somatic work. If you’re trying to do somatic work, or inner child work and you’re not doing the biology work, their body doesn’t have this capacity to even do that processing. You’ve got to give it the magnesium, you’ve got to give it the NAD, you’ve got to give it all of these things that it needs to actually have the energy to change the neural pathways that have been formed over decades of this being our default response to problems.

[0:31:27] PF: How does that work in our current environment? Because I know a lot of people are feeling traumatized and triggered on a daily basis right now. When that is added to existing situations, existing stored trauma, do you have to separate what’s going on now with what’s already stored, or what’s the solution here?

[0:31:51] AA: That’s a great question. What I have found most successful in the people that I work with, and it started with my patients and addiction medicine, helping them detox off of substances, and now course members going through my trauma healing courses, I have found that what works best is being able to just start with the here and now. Creating skills for them to have, that they can learn how to shift their own nervous system out of overwhelm, out of stress, and into that safety window by themselves.

One of the reasons why this became so important for me was because I am an addiction medicine physician. I first started working with people, who, they felt safe with me, but I wasn’t going home with them to make them safe at home. What would happen is that with me, they were like, “I don’t ever need to use again, because I now feel safe.” But then they’d go home and they’d get a phone call from their family member, or the triggers around us in our world are everywhere. You can’t avoid them. Good intentions would still lead to, I’m falling apart, I’m spiraling out of control. I know what would help, whether it’s that bottle of alcohol, or the heroin shot, whatever it is, or the anxiety pill, I know what would help and it helps me immediately. Tell me why I wouldn’t use that.

I realized that I had to give them something else that they could use, that would work so fast that they wouldn’t need to then reach for their substance and relapse. That couldn’t be me. I couldn’t have them rely on me. I see a lot of practitioners, we tend to put ourselves in that position, where we are so good at what we do that then our people depend on us. That wasn’t working for me, because my patients are relapsing as soon as they leave me. That is where I started to then develop somatic self-practices. That’s what I call them. Somatic, meaning referring to the body, we’re going to work with our body, not be up in our head. We’re going to work with our body, and these are self-practices. You can safely do them by yourself. You don’t need me to guide you with a practice. You can do this specific practice by yourself.

I started practicing and sharing different ones and found 21 different ones that were so effective that it would even be able to help them not relapse. That’s then what I took to my online courses, and that’s now what I teach in my online courses. What’s been fascinating is to see that when I start a person there, we’re not even talking about their past yet. I haven’t even asked about their past yet, and honestly, I don’t let them talk about their past yet. We’re not talking, we’re just doing. This surprises most people. They sign up for my course thinking it’s going to be the same thing as everything else they’ve ever done. Then they get to my course. One of the very first things I say is, no stories. They’re like, “What? How do I heal without telling my story?” I’m like, that’s exactly how you heal. You heal by –

[0:35:20] PF: I love that.

[0:35:21] AA: – telling your story. But by doing something different, and doing in the sense that you’re creating a different experience for your body. That allows them to create these, what I’m calling, it’s the foundation. It allows them to create the foundation, where they have so much agency on what they can do to shift their own interstate, that then later on, as they’re coming through my biology of trauma courses, that’s when we go deeper. We go deeper into the inner child and the parts where we go deeper into the somatic work. We can do workshops that now work on a story of the past, without going into that story and all of the emotions that only re-traumatize us. Until they have that foundation, it’s not safe for them to do the deeper work and to go into stories of their past.

[0:36:15] PF: If someone’s listening to this and they are saying, “This sounds like me. I need to do it, but I just don’t have the energy right now.” They’re that person that is you talked about, they’re already exhausted by this. What do you say to them and how do they take that first step to start and to commit to it?

[0:36:33] AA: For those people who would say, “I don’t have the energy for this,” I say, that’s exactly why I do the work that I do. It is for those people who were like me. I could not get out of bed one morning. My fatigue was so bad. That’s where I started. I had to take a medical leave for three months, because the fatigue was so bad. I understand not having the energy for anything. That’s how I designed my courses. My courses are designed for people who say, “I’ve tried a lot of things. I’ve even done decades of therapy and I’m still at this place, there are still things that haven’t shifted that I want to change and I don’t know what I’ve been doing wrong. I don’t really feel I’ve got the energy to do this deep work at all.” That’s why we start right there.

We don’t do the deep work. We start by teaching them how to shift their nervous system state right now. As I lead people into teaching them these skills and these exercises, I started studying them. I’m actually doing a research study. People can still enroll in the research study now. I wanted to measure what I heard people saying was happening. My course is six weeks long, but I was noticing that in 21 days, there was something magical happening. I started studying them and sure enough, after just 21 days of these specific types of somatic self-practices, people were experiencing a 30% decrease in their fatigue.

[0:38:14] PF: That’s amazing.

[0:38:15] AA: It was amazing. Not only that, they were experiencing 30% decrease in their depression, 30% decrease in their anxiety, 26% decrease in daily physical pain, 28% decrease in their GI issues and 28% decrease in sleep issues. It was across the board. All of these different things were starting to shift them. It wasn’t just the fatigue. It was their sleep, their eating, their anxiety and their fatigue. Being a medical physician, I’ve seen a lot of drugs and worked with a lot of medications. There has been no medication that has worked that much and that fast and done this many things with no side effects, unless you consider an increase in joy and connection, a side effect.

[0:39:03] PF: Yeah, you better put that on the warning label. That is amazing. Boy, there is so much to your work. There’s so much to this book. We are going to tell our listeners how they can find your book, how they can find your online courses and how they can learn more about what you’re doing, because this is just incredible. It’s such a gift for people to be able to open up and discover a different way after all these other things have not worked.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for the way you are reintroducing our relationship with trauma and how we can recover and heal from it. I look forward to seeing what else it is you’re going to do in the future.

[0:39:44] AA: Thank you so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:39:49] PF: That was Dr. Aimie Apigian, talking about how our bodies store trauma and how we can heal. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Aimie, pre-order her book, The Biology of Trauma, check out her Biology of Trauma podcast, or sign up for her 21-day healing journey, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How trauma differs from stress — and why trauma, not stress, is what makes us sick.
Why stored trauma shows up in physical symptoms, emotional patterns, and relationship dynamics.
How somatic self-practices can help shift your nervous system and begin healing —even when energy is low.

Visit Dr. Aimie’s website Dr. Aimie’s website here..

Check out her book, The Biology of Trauma: How the body experiences and holds fear, pain and overwhelm and how to heal it.

Follow along with the transcript.

Follow Dr. Aimie on Social Media:

LinkedIn: @dr-aimie-apigian
Instagram: @draimie
Facebook: @draimie
YouTube: @DrAimieApigian

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