The Secret Behind True Healing: Your Body Must Feel Safe with Dr. Aimie Apigian

Aimie Apigian

This racehorse was programmed to lose and he had been forced to lose so many times in order to help train the larger sleeker racehorses that he didn’t believe that he could. And so even then when they raced him, he did what he was trained to do. And I see that as part of this trauma response that our body has gone through is often starting in childhood. It has this experience of overwhelm so many times and that experience of overwhelm reinforces the idea that, yeah, you’re not good enough. Yeah, you’re not strong enough yet. You’re not able to do that. Other people are, but not you.

Lorne Brown

By listening to The Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when you remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

I want to welcome back Dr. Aimie Apigian to the Coherence Code Podcast. She’s the author of The Biology of Trauma. And we’ve had two episodes already with Dr. Aimie. So I do encourage you to go check out those previous episodes. And we have so much fun together and she shares such great pearls of information. I wanted to have her back because people are looking for peace in their life. People are trying all these different things and some of them are not getting the satisfaction, the results they want. And I think her book, The Biology of Trauma, the programs that she now offers online for the public and professionals is kind of that solution that we’ve been looking for. So Dr. Aimie, welcome back to the podcast.

Aimie Apigian

I am so excited to be here and I love that you’ve called it the Coherence Code Now. Just love that name. Great job with that.

Lorne Brown

Perfect. Thank you. Well, and that’s what you’re talking about, coherence in the body, right? So it’s perfect. Now we should let our audience know who hasn’t listened to the first two episodes. As I said, you’re the author of The Biology of Trauma. She is a double board certified physician in preventative and addiction medicine and has advanced degrees in biochemistry and public health. She’s the founder of the Mindbody Biology Institute and creator of the Biology of Trauma, a pioneering framework that integrates medicine, neuroscience, and somatic therapies to address how trauma is stored in the body and how it is and how to heal it. And I love the fact that you bring in biology and somatic because this is what we’re going to talk about today. Talk therapy is kind of a top-down approach. And then a lot of the somatic work is a bottom-up approach.

And I imagine that a lot of people that are doing things are struggling because they’re only doing a top-down. Now, I’m not saying don’t do top-down. I’m saying bidirectional, top-down, bottom-up. And since there’s so much top-down stuff in medicine, I thought we would go to the bottom-up approach and just start with this kind of question or idea I have. In your book, you talk about how you can’t think your way through this. This is something like, oh, I’m just going to think positive thoughts. You can’t push your way through this. This actually brings up more burnout and you get even more tired. So you can’t think your way through it, you can’t push your way through it, but you start talking about how this trauma overwhelms, another good term, is living in the cells. And so the question I have is, can you give from your medical background in the book that you’ve written, why is it that some people are doing all the right things?

Maybe some people are even following your book and yet they’re still finding that they’re not coming to that place of feeling themselves again.

Aimie Apigian

And thank you because there are so many people, Dr. Lorne. I mean, when we look around the world, we see so many people stuck. They are working hard. They’ve tried a lot of things and they’re still just not able to get that health, that sense of security, that sense of inner calm and peace that we all want to have. So what is going on? And as I was studying the nervous system and the human body, it really became clear that there is this implicit memory stored in the muscles and our tissues. And that’s why I talk about there being three levels, mind, body, and biology. And the top down approach is very helpful for those mind aspects. But if we neglect the body and if we neglect biology, and I see those as two separate though connected things, if we neglect those, our body, our nervous system is still stuck in survival mode.

It’s still seeing the danger that it thinks is there, even though logically we can say, “This is silly. I know that I’m safe.” And so being able to understand that that perception of danger happens at the cellular level. And while we know that our thoughts change our biology, actually it does go the other way around and what’s happening in our biology does often create ongoing signals of danger, not of safety, of danger. And so what’s happening at our cellular level, whether it be toxins, whether it be depletion and balances, all of the lists that can come both from chronic impact of trauma and from other things, those become signals of danger. And those are the things exactly like you’re saying. You’re not going to be able to think your way through a mitochondrial imbalance. You’re not going to be able to think your way through a magnesium deficiency.

You can want to run the race and your body’s going to say, “It would not be safe. And we are going to shut you down so that you don’t kill us in the process of trying to do something that we just don’t have the resources at the cellular level to do. “

Lorne Brown

So there’s two things I’m picking up from what you shared. One is, which really resonates is that even though you think you’re okay, your body says, “I’m not safe.” It’s in a very stressful, sympathetic fight or flight, survival mode state. And I have a perfect memory of this when I was on a virtual reality set at a mall with my children when they were young. And in this virtual reality set, I’m safe on the floor of Microsoft, but I’m on a tall skyscraper. Actually, I’m on a construction beam way high up in New York City and I’m being told to turn around. And from my perspective, I’m high up and I am sweating, my palpitations are going and my kids are young at the time going, “Come on, daddy, turn, come on, daddy turned because of the game.” And I know I’m on Microsoft floor and that there’s people watching me and I’m wearing goggles and yet I can’t turn.

I’m mentally moved and I cannot move my body. So there’s a perfect example of, “I know I’m safe, but your body’s saying, “Uh-uh, uh-uh, it’s having a different…” So you’re saying a lot of this stuff is stored in our body. So thank you for that part. The safety part then, this is key. The body doesn’t feel safe. Can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by that from the cellular aspect? What is happening in the body when it doesn’t feel safe? And something I loved about one of your analogies is because you differentiated between stress and trauma and I think you use the word overwhelmed sometimes for trauma because some people go through trauma, so call it overwhelmed. And I loved your car analogy of the emergency brake and the gas because you got two systems going and there’s kind of a shutdown. Can we go into if that’s fair enough to talk a bit about that?

Aimie Apigian

Absolutely. I’ll come back to this idea of if we were going to run a race. So if you and I were going to go out and we’re going to race each other, I wonder who would win actually.

Lorne Brown

You would, trust me.

Aimie Apigian

Perfect. Then let’s do it. So we’re standing on the start line and we have this idea of how far we want to run and how long we want to run, but this is all something that’s in our mind. We decide goals that we want to do. We have dreams of what we want to accomplish, which is all fine. But then what happens is that when we go to do it, our body is assessing, do we have the capacity? So it’s looking at the start line, the finish line, seeing how far that is and being like, “You know what? I know you want to, but … ” And then it goes down the list of, I’m getting the information from your cells that you don’t have very much B6, you don’t have very much zinc, you don’t have as much magnesium, and we need those in order to sprint and reach the finish line.

How would we know those things? Because that’s on a cellular level. And so here’s the idea that we can be thinking that we want to do something, but our body is the final decider of whether that is safe. And when I talk about safety, I’m really referring to homeostatic capacity and that terminology is referencing this idea that I have a window in my physiology, this window of blood pressure, this window of sodium levels, this window of how does my body keep me alive. And as long as I’m in that window, I’m going to survive. I’m going to survive anything as long as I stay within that physiological capacity. And that’s what my nervous system is assessing. So it doesn’t care how I feel about it. It doesn’t care that I really need to win this race against Dr. Lorne because if I don’t, I’m going to feel like a failure and all the emotional stories that we’ve attached to something, it doesn’t care about that.

What it cares about is do we have the capacity? Do we have the cellular resources to make this a safe thing to do? And if not, that’s when our body will throw on the emergency break. Our foot will be on the gas pedal because we’ve decided, no, I want to sprint. And our body says, I’m going to throw on the emergency break because it’s not safe based on the resources that I see that we have. And that’s why it’s based on perception. When you had the goggles on, your information was that I’m in danger. And so our body doesn’t make up information. Our body is being given information. And when we notice that our emergency break is being put on, rather than getting frustrated, now we can say, “What information is coming in that tells my body this would not be a safe thing to do?

” And now we can work with the body rather than get frustrated and further misalign or go into incoherence between our mind and our body.

Lorne Brown

A few things I want to unpack from that. So it’s not what’s happening to you, but how you perceive it. So you’re saying it’s not so much the event because somebody can say traffic is traumatic, but they use the word loosely, but what is the perception going on inside of you? I often say that we see the world through the lens of our subconscious and that’s how we perceive our reality and your work and what we’re going to discuss more about is when you change that lens, you now have a new perception, new filter, and therefore it’s a new experience of reality, meaning the biology responds differently because it filters the information differently. So a lot of it is just some people were born this way, right? Transgenerational stuff has come in. We talk about transgenerational trauma. Some people are the way they’re related to as children, just absent parents or actually abusive parents or caregivers.

All that can create the nervous system. So some people today as adults are like, “But I’m an adult. Now, why?” Because in your cells, they still have that set up and they’re filtering the world that way. So to unpack that part.

Aimie Apigian

Yes. And this is where especially the subconscious becomes so interesting in its involvement with the information that it’s giving our nervous system. As a scientist, I would love to think it’s only objective data coming in. It’s the only thing that I can measure so that I know what that dashboard on my nervous system is saying. So what do you mean that it’s also my perception of my abilities, my perception of my worth, my perception of my belonging? And that’s where I also share that story of Sea Biscuit in chapter 18 where this racehorse was programmed to lose and he had been forced to lose so many times in order to help train the larger sleeker racehorses that he didn’t believe that he could. And so even then when they raced him, he did what he was trained to do. I see that as part of this trauma response that our body has gone through is often starting in childhood.

It has this experience of overwhelm so many times and that experience of overwhelm reinforces the idea that, yeah, you’re not good enough. Yeah, you’re not strong enough. Yeah, you’re not able to do that. Other people are, but not you. And then when we go to do something hard, those subconscious beliefs are still at play. So even if we had all the cellular resources,

Even if we have all the cellular resources, even if we’ve done all the red light and the biohacking and the cryotherapy and the supplements, we’ve got all the cellular resources we can still be programmed or having been trained by life to lose.

Lorne Brown

And that’s why you talk about an integrative holistic approach. So there’s rewiring the subconscious. So there’s working on the thoughts and beliefs. Then there’s making sure the cells have what they need. You talked earlier already, you mentioned magnesium, the vitamin Cs, the Bs, the CoQ10, red light therapy. There’s all these things that you have to do on all levels. One of the things that stood out for me in the book, and it makes me think of a lot of the women I see in perimenopause and menopause. And I got to rehash the story of capacity, resilience. We’ve talked about in the past that I see the symptoms not because of the hormone imbalance as the underlying cause. I agree with what you say, it’s a capacity issue. So when the hormones fluctuate and drop, which it’s a normal physiological process in women’s late 40s and 50s, if there’s not a capacity to deal with the internal change, we go into shutdown.

We have the brain fog, we have joint pain, we have hot flash night sweats, we’ve lost the homeostasis because we don’t have the capacity to deal with internal change. So in this work, I realized so many of these women I see, they’re drinking more coffee because they got stuff to do. They’re executives, they’re partners of the law firm. “I’m gaining weight, so I’m going to just exercise a little bit harder. I’m going to consume a little bit more energy. I’m going to eat a little bit less because I’m gaining weight. “And it has the opposite effect. What happens? They gain more weight. In your book, I love that because I’ve heard this and I’ve used this between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic, but in your book on trauma, you talk about that trauma, this overwhelm is when you surpass your capacity. So it’s not the event, all of a sudden your body’s like, ” I don’t have the capacity to go and just shut down.

“But what I picked up, which was really, it’s new for me, is you still have your foot on the gas. So your body’s still trying to go. So you are still consuming all your resources, but you’ve pulled on the emergency brake and now you have the brain fog, now you’re exhausted. And so do you want to unpack that a bit for our audience? Because that was a big thing. I often thought they just put on the emergency brake and now they’re in shutdown, but you’re like, no, no, the sympathetic’s still going. You’re just not noticing it because the shutdown is so in your face.

Aimie Apigian

Yes. I love this aspect of understanding physiology because it’s not what you and I were taught in our training and understanding this allows us to work with the body in a very different way. And so when we look at the five steps that the body goes through in order to go into that overwhelm or that trauma response, there is a very distinct moment in which our foot is on the gas and our body has put on the emergency break. Now this moment, there’s lots of ways and words that women especially use to describe this. A common one is like, ” I’ve had enough. “And you can hear the tone of voice. There’s the stress of like, okay, this is stressful. And then there’s just the, okay, I can’t do this anymore. And that’s the shift that happens. And in that unique moment, it is true that we call that the freeze response.

And what it is is this internal paralysis when our body has just put on the emergency brake to say,” I’ve got to protect you because you are falling off of a cliff right now and yet our foot is still on the gas. And what does that mean physiologically? That means that we are still pumping out adrenaline. That means that we are still pumping out cortisol and the emergency break makes the adrenaline and the cortisol no longer be effective. It blocks them in order to stop us from further action to stay within that homeostatic capacity and help us survive this moment. But that’s why we can still test our labs and see like, oh my goodness, your cortisol is so high. “And we’re like, ” But I’m tired, but I’m exhausted. “It’s because when our body shifts into that emergency break, it’s not going to let the adrenaline and the cortisol be as effective, which is why then we reach for those things that will then only increase the levels of adrenaline and cortisol.

Let me drink more coffee. Let me push myself harder at the gym. Sweets. Sweets, the sugar. Oh my goodness. Or the foods that we’re actually sensitive to and they cause a histamine response and that will increase adrenaline. There’s all of these coping mechanisms that we’ve developed that we often don’t even realize how they’re helping us. We just know that, it helps me get through the day, helps me get through my workday, helps me get through this meeting, helps me get through this difficult conversation that I’m having with somebody. And what it’s doing is it’s actually increasing the amount of adrenaline, which helps pull us up out of that heaviness of the emergency break, but that doesn’t go away either, which is why then at the end of the day, they find themselves on the couch completely exhausted, not able to do what they really wanted to do.

They really want to go out and now be social and have normal life and normal friends and they can’t. They just don’t have the energy. And this is the classic sign of unresolved stored trauma in the body and in the nervous system is this looping between stress and then overwhelm. And the longer that we’re in that loop, the longer that we will start to spend time in the bottom part of that, which is the overwhelm and the exhaustion simply because our body can’t even generate that sympathetic activation anymore. It’s run out of fuel, it’s run out of resources and that’s often then when people start to come in because now they can’t override that exhaustion with coffee or all the other things that they’ve been trying, it’s not working as well as it used to. And that’s also one of the changes that happens during premenopause.

Lorne Brown

We use the word trauma and like everything in the West, we find something and then all of a sudden the word becomes used very loosely by everybody. What I do want to emphasize though is that’s why I like the word sometimes overwhelmed. In Chinese medicine, energy is stuck energy. You talk about a little over a long time or too much in a little time, right? So it could be something that’s just been over a long period, it’s become a traumatic event to the body. It’s not so much the event, it’s how your body perceives it. And the way your nervous system is, you can change it. Sometimes the event that comes up for people is they were bullied at 13 or 12 and bullied as in the girls isolate her, wouldn’t let her play with them, didn’t invite her over for the play date, so she felt not belonging.

Somebody was picked up late from daycare. So just to share, for me anyhow, I don’t get so caught up on the story. I’m more interested in how the body is sending me messages because of your story. And I think you’re kind of aligned to that as well.

Aimie Apigian

I love that idea because the body’s always giving us messages. I didn’t listen to those messages for a really long time until I had to, but this is when our body’s just responding to the information that it is being given, the output is a message to us. I love that we can have this communication with our body rather than trying to be wondering what the hell is going on because it seems to be falling apart and I don’t know what to do. Actually, we do know. We do know based on the output what the body is perceiving.

Lorne Brown

I want to talk a little bit about mitochondria because my practice has been around fertility and menopause. I got into medicine because of chronic fatigue when I was an accountant. I used to, I don’t know if you remember, I used to be a CPA, now I’m a doctor of Chinese medicine. The mitochondria is really important when it comes to fertility and just health in general. It’s the battery of our cells. But when we’re having this constant overwhelm, what is happening to mitochondria? You touched a bit about it, but you said it kind of goes into shutdown hibernation and that’s where you start to see that fatigue, right?

Aimie Apigian

Yes and the heaviness. So the mitochondria are really the drivers of our survival responses. And when we are feeling secure and safe, we are in that parasympathetic state and our mitochondria, which really have the largest effect on our metabolism are operating at their best, which is why when we are feeling safe and secure and connected, we are going to be in our best health always. That is what promotes our best health. And when we become stressed, meaning there’s now a perception of danger that I need to do something about and that I can do something about, my mitochondria say, I’ll help you do something about it and they upregulate their energy production. They change shape to be able to make more energy. They switch to the most efficient way to make energy. They do everything for me to help me overcome danger. But the moment that my body senses this is too much for me, I’m not going to be able to overcome this.

And I experience any of those aspects that create that hitting the wall, which is, I can’t believe this is happening. This feels unbearable. I need to disconnect from myself and my reality and what’s happening to me right now. I feel so utterly alone in this overwhelming experience. That’s when our mitochondria get the message from our nervous system, stop making energy because actually the best thing for us to do at this point is to stop trying to overcome the danger. And when that’s the survival strategy, the mitochondria have to change. They can’t. They shouldn’t try to create just as much energy as they have been because now that would make it dangerous. And so what they do now is they shift and they say, okay, well, then I’m going to just shift gears and I’m going to go from sixth gear down to first gear. In my book, this line has been one of the most common ones that people write back to me and say, “This one hit me.

” And it’s the idea that at this moment, the strategy for the mitochondria is don’t die but barely stay alive. That’s the survival strategy. Let me hide, let me become invisible, let me even go cold so that if there’s a monster walking around, it won’t hear me because I’ve stopped moving, I’ve paralyzed. It won’t hear me breathing because my breath has now become very shallow but very slow and my heart rate has also decreased and my metabolism. So metabolism generates warmth. It’s not safe to be warm because predators will sense your warmth and they’ll find you and they’ll eat you. And so all of these become these survival strategies at the mitochondrial level.

Lorne Brown

It’s like a form of hibernation.

Aimie Apigian

It’s a form of hibernation. It’s like dimming down the lights. If you have one of those light switches where it can be all the way off or all the way off, you’re not turning them all the way off because if you turn them all the way off, you die, but you’re going to dim down those lights of the mitochondria just enough so that you don’t die but barely stay alive so that you don’t get seen and heard and caught.

Lorne Brown

So in my practice, our fertility patients, and I got to talk a little bit about fertility and perimenopause because my patients listen to my podcast. Thank you guys for listening. We talk about the mitochondria because of how important it is for fertility. And so when I was reading your book, when you talk about this overwhelm, this state of trauma, when the body doesn’t feel safe, as you described on a cellular level going to hibernation, I often describe it as what happens when your body’s in this unsafe mode, your resources get mobilized for, like you said, just survive. Therefore, those resources aren’t available for healing, creativity, digestion, and reproduction. And through your book in this process and what I do in my practice is conscious work or energy psychology, if we can put the body into safety on a cellular level, on a biology level, now we free up those resources for healing, creativity, digestion, reproduction, which is why I always check.

So what’s your digestion like? Do they have the IBS? Do they have the SIBO type symptoms? The bowel’s changing. What’s your body temperature? Always cold, cold hands and feet, get headaches, neck tension, poor sleep. I’m looking at that sympathetic tone. I’m looking for messages from the body and here they tell me I have unexplained infertility, but from a Chinese medicine perspective, and I would say from the biology of trauma, it is not unexplained. Mentally, you’re like, “Look at me. I got a great job. I have a great husband. I got good money.” You could have everything perfect on the outside, but you’re cold, your digestion’s off, you’re not sleeping, you’re getting headaches, neck tension pain. Your body’s telling you it’s in survival. Your external world may say it looks great, but internally it’s saying no. And so this is what we talk about when you talk about mind, biology and body. The mind part looks great, but you’re talking about the body and biology, correct?

Aimie Apigian

Yes, exactly. And I would even challenge that when I work with these kinds of women, I poke around at some of their beliefs that they hold about themselves. And I know that you find this to be true as well, that there is still this mind aspect because the mind aspect of, I don’t believe I deserve this or I don’t believe I could actually be a good mom. Whatever it ends up being that we find

Lorne Brown

I’m not good enough. I might be a good mom.

Aimie Apigian

Yeah. It’s part of this picture because the picture is the state. And so when our body is in this stuck energy or chronic trauma state, it’s a whole state and the state also includes the thoughts that we have because the state creates our thoughts. And so I can look at the thoughts that they have, the behaviors that they do and also these very measurable things like their temperature and their digestion and see all of this as consistent information that gives me a message from their body. And so like you’re saying, this is not unexplained, this is very predictable. When we are in that state, our body is not going to add more work because it’s already overwhelmed.

Lorne Brown

In your book, you bring up the story of Sea Biscuit and the dog analogy, which I’d like to bring in. So with Sea Biscuit, if I can summarize it, you start by talking about Sea Biscuit. As I heard in your story, ended up winning a whole bunch of horse races, but she was trained to lose races against the bigger horses so they would have confidence to win races. She learned to play small. Then a jockey bought her, took her own over and he trained her because he could see in her that she had the potential to shine in her light and this horse went on to win many races. So from that story is just because you’ve been trained this way, because we’ve been trained and there’s no blame here. You talk about in your book in my work, we don’t blame people. It doesn’t serve you to be a victim.

It ain’t going to help. So that’s why we say don’t do it. No blame, but you now know the software or you now know the beliefs you’re running. So let’s see if we can clean them up and what beliefs do you want to run, like Seabiscuit. Now the part I want to ask you, unless you have anything to add to that, is the dog story was interesting. In the dog story, you talk about the electrical being electrocuted. I’m going to let you tell the story because it’s in your book. And I think about myself and my patients. I think about myself many years ago where I read all the self-help books I could teach. I could teach it, but I was not walking. I was not doing the process work. I was not having the experience. I had an intellectual understanding. I got it.

Like I said, I could teach it. And people go, “Well, why? Because you can become enlightened from an unenlightened master.” So they did get well even though I was struggling on the inside. It wasn’t until I had my breakdown that I had to go and implement and have the experience or the process of that knowledge. So with that background, can you tell our audience the dog story and then just tie this into this work as well about knowing is not enough?

Aimie Apigian

Yeah. And it actually ties into the Sea Biscuit story as well because what they needed in order to reprogram their muscles was the exact same thing. Seabiscuit, having been programmed to pull back and let the other horses win, needed to go out into the open fields and remember what it was like to be a horse and just to run for the love of running, not because you’re racing, but because you love to run. That’s what it means to be a horse that wins races. It’s in the heart and the dogs had a very similar experience. So the study, this is a study that was done by a psychologist, Dr. Seligman in the 1960s and the results of the study showed us learned helplessness. Now I have to admit that when I first read this study, even though I could see myself in these dogs that I’m going to tell you about, I was a bit insulted.

You were going to tell me that I had programmed learned helplessness in my body when looking at me. I’m a doctor. I have two master’s degrees. I’ve done all of these things and you’re going to tell me that I have learned helplessness. So being able to recognize that, yes, actually that is part of everyone who has this stored trauma stuck energy is an aspect of learned helplessness. That’s what it is. So it’s again, nothing to get hung up over the words and the terminology. The study was that he took a group of dogs, split them into two, and one group was free in this box cage. The other group was tied to the wall with their harness. On the floor was this electrical shock pad. And so all the dogs were on this electrical shock pad, half of them tied up, half of them free.

I think we all know what’s going to happen next. They turn on the electrical shock and they watch what happens. Now the same thing happens that us humans do. If we are at a place where we feel resourced, we start looking for solutions. That’s what the stress response is. Our mitochondria upregulate. They’re like, “We’ve got a problem and let’s figure it out. ” And that’s exactly what the dogs, all of the dogs, all of the dogs attempted to figure out. And so they saw, “Oh, if I just jump over this barrier, maybe I’ll be safe on the other side.” They didn’t know because they don’t know what’s on the other side yet. And so the dogs who were able to jump, they jumped over that barrier. The dogs who were tied to the wall tried to jump. It’s not that they didn’t try.

They tried to jump because that’s what we are programmed to do. We are always programmed to try to overcome problems and danger in our life as the first solution. But of course for them, they weren’t successful and they’re watching their friends be successful. They’re watching their friends earn money, get a great job, have great relationships, have a good life. And they’re like, “What’s wrong with me? I must be the problem. I must be different. I must not deserve a good life. I must deserve these shocks.” Of course, I’m implanting my own belief systems on these dogs. Who knows what they were actually thinking, but it’s very interesting to see what happens next in this study. He takes the same dogs, the ones that had been free, the ones that were tied up and he repeats the experiment except this time none of the dogs are tied up, which makes my heart happy as an empath.

None of the dogs are tied up. So he turns on the electrical shock again. This is where it gets really interesting. This is where I began to recognize myself. The dogs who had been free the first time, Dr. Lorne, this wasn’t even a stress for them now. It was more like an inconvenience because they knew how to overcome it. They knew they could overcome and all they needed to do was jump over the barrier and they’d already figured out what was on the other side of the barrier. No electrical shock pad. So it wasn’t even a stress for them. It didn’t stress them out. They just- I like that.

Lorne Brown

It was just an inconvenience.

They were able to metabolize the experience right away and take action.

Aimie Apigian

Exactly. Now the other dogs, the dogs that had been tied up the first time, they’re now free. But what’s different this time is that they don’t even try to escape. They don’t even try to jump over the barrier. Why? Because they had been programmed to believe they could not. Could they? Of course they could. They’re dogs. They can jump so that they could, but they didn’t because they didn’t believe that they could. And that’s not just a mind, a mental thing, a psychology, a mindset problem. This was in their tissues and how we know that was because the researchers decided that they had pity on these dogs and like Sea Biscuit, they needed to help these dogs remember how to be dogs. And so they thought like most parents or partners think, “I know, let me just incentivize the other person. Let me give them bonuses.

Let me give them treats. Let me give them whatever it is. ” And because it’s a mindset thing, because it’s a choice, they will decide that they want that treatment so bad that they will overcome their fear and jump. That did not work. They put out all the dog treats in the world on the other side and the dogs still didn’t jump because they didn’t believe that they could or that they deserved it. That’s not for me, that’s for others. They had literally been programmed to be defeated. The only thing that worked was for the researchers to come and physically move their legs in the movement patterns of jumping so that then they associated that shock and let’s move your legs to remind you how to be a dog, how to jump. And after that, the dogs could jump no problem. I mean, they became like the other dogs.

The electrical shock came on and it was just like an inconvenience.

Lorne Brown

This is what our work is. Your book, what you do, what I do, we’re moving the legs, we’re showing them how to do it. It’s not enough for me to tell you how to do it. I have to show you how to do it. And that’s what I believe is happening in my conscious work when I saw you in the book and that’s what your book shares. It’s not enough to know. And then let me show you how to do it. And so for my listeners, again, in the conscious work, once you do it and you’ve done it a couple times, you start to, just like you said, because I think the fear of feeling the feelings is worse than the feelings. And when

Aimie Apigian

You- That is something that you need to put on the wall and make into a quote, Dr. Lorne. That’s a bumper sticker right there.

Lorne Brown

The fear of the feelings are worse than the feelings, meaning that once you actually start to experience it and lean into them, relax with them, you’re like, “Ah, I didn’t say you like it. ” And I don’t say you’re resigned to it. I’m just sharing that you can handle it. Exactly. You can handle it. And now I say you go present. So we’ve talked about the notice, accept, choose again, which reminds me a little bit about your recognition, reverse and repair in your book. And I love your stuff because you give so many tools to fit into the N and the A and the C.

Aimie Apigian

And I love how you describe it as having a set point and needing to change your set point. I feel like that is so accurately described for what we’re doing inside of ourselves is we have a certain set point and we’ve got to change our set point, whether that’s our set point for the degree of uncomfortable feelings that we can feel or our set point for our physiology and how fast we can sprint. Everything can be seen through that lens of what’s our set point, what’s our capacity and how do I build that capacity to truly have the life, the relationships, and the health that I want to have?

Lorne Brown

Build that capacity. And when you have that, and that’s why we call this the Coherence Code podcast, when you have that coherence, you have the capacity now and you get to access parts of yourself that you normally don’t have access to. And some people believe you access this thing called the superconsciousness where your higher self comes through you and then you start to reach your potential in life. So you don’t have to go and give up all your material possessions and go live in an astrum. You can be in the world, enjoying the abundance, doing good in the world and you’re not attached to the abundance. That’s the beautiful part. You’re just doing it because you’re enjoying doing it. Like you said, Sea Biscuit, just run for the sake of running because she enjoyed it. And so that’s what this works about. Where can we find more of you?

And because you have a book, you have a few offerings I think for the public and professionals. Can you tell us a little bit about what your offerings are so people can learn how to either get themselves supported this way or how they can learn to support others this way?

Aimie Apigian

People can find me at biologyoftrauma.com and I have some resources that go along with my book. So for those who will read or have read my book, you’ll know that I mentioned a nervous system journal and an art narrative exercise. I have all of those resources for them at biologytrauma.com/book. They’re free. You can download them. And then I also have some other educational things. I have my podcast, I have my YouTube channel, have some free guides like the steps to identify and heal trauma in the body and that all can be found at biologyoftrauma.com.

Lorne Brown

Excellent. So biologytrauma.com, we put that into the show notes. Dr. Aimie does some professional training, so check out our website and you can learn more about that. Dr. Aimie, thank you so much again for making time. I want to remind everybody there’s two other episodes that we have with Dr. Aimie on the podcast. Also, I had a great conversation with Dr. Aimie on her podcast, so check that out as well. So thank you so much for everything you do. I appreciate you writing this book, The Biology of Trauma.

Aimie Apigian

Well, I really appreciate not only your friendship, but the work that you do in the world and how well it creates truly an integrative, holistic coherence and that’s exactly what people need. So thank you. Thank you.

Lorne Brown

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.