Why Trauma Disrupts Immunity & Keeps You in Survival Mode with Dr. Aimie Apigian

Aimie Apigian 

Autoimmunity is the manifestation of I don’t like myself and I see that I’m the problem. And when we look back as children, these are the beliefs that we form about ourselves. If our parent is unhappy

I remember how much I would need to correct my patients because they would come in and they would say, oh, my anxiety has just been terrible lately. My depression, let’s not claim that let’s not become our diagnosis. It is anxiety, it is depression. It’s not mine. When we don’t know how to reset back to safety after such an experience, those three survival mechanisms become chronic and they become five patterns that we can recognize stored trauma. And these are what show up in our biology.

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 guest 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 therapist. And through my work I’ve seen that healing happens when we 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 returning Allstar, Dr. Aimie Apigian

I’m saying it correctly. I hope I’m going to call her Dr. Aimie for our series. She actually offered an awesome episode, episode number 124 on the biology of trauma. Your issues are stuck in your tissues, and she’s back today. She has just released her book, which I got to see the digital version, but I got my hard copy last night. Literally last night it got dropped off at 9:00 PM Here we are bright and early the next day, and I already started going through the hard copy as well last night. The biology of trauma, how the body holds fear, pain, and overwhelm, and how to heal it. So Dr. Aimie, welcome back.

Aimie Apigian 

Thank you so much. And again, I just so appreciate what you’re doing in the world. Thank you. You do such amazing work and you reach so many people with this important message. So thank you.

Lorne Brown

I appreciate it. And thank you for accepting my invitation to talk the first time and to come back. I kind of wanted to talk about autoimmunity. I’m seeing it more and more in my practice with women’s health. So my practice is majority women’s health. We do have men when they’re looking to conceive and there’s a man and a female in the relationship, but it’s fertility. Everything related to gynecology, postpartum, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause. This is our audience. And since COVID actually in the last couple years, I see more, and I’m going to call it autoimmune. And this is where I want to ask you a bunch of questions. And I think it ties into your book. There are some that are totally diagnosed. They’ll get a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s really common in our reproductive world. But I have to say almost the majority of the women I see have all these autoimmune like symptoms, but the labs often don’t confirm it, but yet they’re struggling and suffering and I think it’s because of the biology of trauma. So you have your own personal story. So would you like to start with your story of autoimmunity, why you wrote this book? So we’ll give a little review to our audience, who haven’t listened to episode 124 yet. And then let’s dive into what are the symptoms, what’s the personality trait and what are some of the approaches that may not be yet mainstream but are evidence-based to support the healing?

Aimie Apigian 

So important because there has been an increase in autoimmunity over the last few years and the studies are showing it is also showing up in younger and younger people,

But it’s also showing up in women who tend to be high functioning and they are often perfectionists. So there’s no coincidence to that. And yes, this is a big aspect of the biology of trauma. So I wrote the book really for people like myself who are experiencing chronic health issues and don’t think that they’ve had trauma. The title is the Biology of Trauma, but I wrote it for people who don’t think they necessarily had trauma. It will definitely be helpful for those who know that they did and it will confirm a lot of things and show the science. But I was looking at how there are so many people who have this biology that they don’t know its connection with their past with emotional wounds and with how their body adapted at that time and is still living in a sense of danger.

Lorne Brown 

Oh, I want to unpack that part. So when you said they don’t realize they have trauma because people often think, well, I haven’t been in a car accident, I haven’t been raped, I haven’t been in war. What do you mean? I have trauma in my cells. And in episode 1 24 and in much detail, you go into this in your book, but you just said emotional wounding. So there is stuff that, and the body is, I always call it the subconscious work here, the autonomic nervous system is doing its job of trying to keep you safe. And you said the personality type, which is interesting because that’s what I see, personality type a perfectionist driven the ones that often will develop well-educated that are developing these signs and symptoms. You seem to know this person. Is there a reason why you kind of relate to this personality trait in this story?

Aimie Apigian 

I have been that person 100%. This was me. And to speak to your point around this idea that there’s this autoimmunity without the diagnosis of autoimmunity, and that was me. And we went in and we found labs that were, I had high anti-nuclear antibodies, but I didn’t have all the other symptoms. And so they didn’t give me the diagnosis, which was fine. I certainly don’t need the diagnosis, don’t want the diagnosis. And being able to see that there are many, many people who have autoantibodies and either don’t know that they have autoantibodies because we’re not doing those specific tests or they don’t have all the other stuff or their numbers aren’t bad enough. And so we call this window predictive predictive autoimmunity, and it’s this idea of no, you have autoimmunity. It’s not an official diagnosis, but you have autoimmunity which is just your cells, your immune system is attacking yourself.

Lorne Brown 

And I like to talk about what are some of these signs and symptoms that somebody could understand and they maybe have biology in their trauma. I want to do a little quick tangent. You said your lab test, it’s not bad enough to get the official diagnosis, but it’s predictive. I just want to share that I practice Chinese medicine in my practice. We have naturopathic doctors, something very interesting in our practice style, and I know you practice this way based on your book and your training in functional medicine as well. We don’t treat the labs, so we treat the individual. And so if your labs say normal and you have headaches and you have fatigue and you have rashes and you have infertility and you have brain fog, that’s not healthy. That may be a normal lab, but nobody wants to go through life that way. So we still work with the individual.

And like you said, it’s not bad enough. I often think a lot of our labs are, you’re really sick, we need to triage you to a hospital. And Chinese medicine and naturopathic medicine, their focus is vitality, not just survival but thriving. And that’s what you do as well. What are the signs and symptoms then? Because some of them, the labs may say, you’re fine, right, fine is not good enough from how you and I look at health, but what are some of the things that you would suggest? There’s trauma in the biology. How would people notice this?

Aimie Apigian 

I have seen that many of the women with autoimmunity have the I’m fine syndrome.

You ask them how they’re doing and they’re like, I’m fine, I’m fine and we’re going for more than fine. And it’s this idea that we often tend to push ourselves through. So that goes back to the trauma patterns and how it becomes autoimmunity. We have three survival mechanisms that kick in when our autonomic nervous system decides our life is under threat and it’s to the degree of threat that my life does feel that threat and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. In that instance, our autonomic nervous system engages three survival mechanisms, and this is dissociation, immobilization and energy conservation. When we don’t know how to reset back to safety after such an experience, those three survival mechanisms become chronic and they become five patterns that we can recognize stored trauma. And these are what show up in our biology and we look at how disconnection is so much a part of our life, especially for someone with autoimmunity.

They’re disconnected from their body, they don’t like their body. They’re pushing their body through rather than being able to support their body. So I’m always looking for that. I’m also looking for this sense of disruption, this disruption of movement or stuckness. And it’s always been apparent in some area of a person’s life with autoimmunity, where are they stuck in life? And that goes back to the survival mechanism of immobilization, that paralysis or that freeze response that we have that does become chronic and we can look at our life and say, yeah, there are areas in which I just can’t seem to move forward. I can’t seem to make progress in that area of my life. But then we also look at the sense of depletion and that’s the energy conservation and fatigue is the most common symptom of those with autoimmunity. There’s lots of reasons for that. It’s both a chicken and an egg.

Lorne Brown

Can you share a bit about why they would be experiencing fatigue? What would be happening?

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah. When our trauma has become a chronic state, it changes our metabolism. It changes our mitochondria and their ability to make energy and make it efficiently. And for these reasons, we will have this background exhaustion. What we’ve learned to do is to push through. And that is why many people will not feel that. And they’re trying to not allow it to affect them. They want to get things done. Remember, these are your perfectionists, these are your people who are highly driven. And so we definitely cannot be slowed down by our body. Let’s push it. And then we develop this underlying exhaustion that builds over time because we’re not addressing it when we’re first feeling it. And then this accumulates more damage to our mitochondria, especially in the form of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a natural byproduct of us making energy. It’s like when we drive a car, when we drive a car, there’s exhaust.

It’s just part of the process of the combustion of the gas. So it’s not bad except when that exhaust is going into our own car and we’re not letting it out. So that’s the oxidative stress. It’s not bad because it’s a natural byproduct of this process of making energy. It’s when we can’t clear it out and we can’t clear it out because as we are in a state of energy conservation, our body is not prioritizing our detoxification pathways. And so these toxins build up oxidative stress being one of them, and that oxidative stress is going to damage our mitochondria, which further deepens our exhaustion because now we’re not even able to make the energy that we used to make. And also it goes to our DNA and starts to attach itself to DNA. It causes breaks in our DNA strands, which normally is not a problem.

If we have all of the repair mechanisms and we have so many repair mechanisms that come in and be like, oh, it looks like you’ve got an owie, let’s repair that. Let’s fix that. And it’s not a problem. What becomes the problem is that when we are in this chronic state of energy conservation, chronic survival state that our body says, oh, I see that you’ve got damage, but I shouldn’t use my energy up for that. I’ve got to still run away from this tiger. So I’ll come back to you later. Except later, never comes because we’re still in survival mode. And as you can see, this accumulates over time, which is why a person with autoimmunity can often look back and find a moment a trigger in which it precipitated symptoms that just spiraled out of control. And they can think that, oh, that was what triggered it. Well, yes, and it would not have triggered it if it had not had all of this biology of trauma already underneath the surface. Itches was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

Lorne Brown 

That’s an important point. It’s an accumulation. So this has been going on for a long time. And then there’s finally an event, like you said, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You talk about this stuckness. It’s so interesting because Chinese medicine calls for stuck energy, cheese, stagnation and on an emotional and physical level. And when the cheetahs do not flow freely and smoothly, you start to feel pain and then eventually disease manifests. And this is kind of this idea, right? You’re feeling stuck emotionally and physically. You shared a few things. I just kind of want to unpack a bit, and I’m thinking of my patient population and a lot of them in their forties and beyond. So perimenopause, menopause, and we talked a lot about this in your episode 1 24 on our about inflammation and about how these hormonal changes are another stressor on a body that doesn’t have the resilience.

So that’s why they struggle and suffer with symptoms, not because the hormones are changing. That is a normal process for these hormones to change in your forties and fifties, but your body can adapt. And I’m saying because it has all this trauma in the cells, it’s lost its resilience and ability to adapt. So now you have symptoms from this internal change which are hormonal changes. The patients I’m seeing, the common stuff I have is, so there’s chronic pain, there’s digestive issues, and I kind of want you to tie this into autoimmunity like or predictive autoimmunity. So we got fatigue, we got pain, we got digestive issues and brain fog or poor clarity or can’t remember words. And a lot of people say, oh, because you’re perimenopause, it’s too, to me, that’s too simple, right? Yes, you are in your forties. That’s a fact, right? But not everybody in their forties has all these symptoms or a variety of them.

So can you also connect this then from the book you’ve written on the biology of trauma, these symptoms, why are people having the digestive symptoms? You kind of hinted on the metabolic issues, the mitochondria oxidative stress, but can you tie this into these symptoms that they’re experiencing? What’s going on in the brain? Because in your book so wonderfully, you talk about emotional instability, that’s not the word you use. There’s trauma in the biology and how it causes dysregulation and nervous system, and then it goes out to everything. So can you help us understand that a little bit more?

Aimie Apigian 

This is so fascinating to see the wide effects of this state on our different systems of our body, and this is what I cover in detail in chapter five, where I go through the systems and their different effects. Let’s look at the gut, the digestive system. Now what’s interesting, and most people don’t know this, is that the vagus nerve is what communicates the freeze and the shutdown. And oftentimes we’re thinking, no, the vagus nerve is only parasympathetic. Vagal stimulation, for example, is good. And no, actually the vagus nerve is just the train tracks. It’s just the train tracks. That’s all it is. So which train is going down the train tracks? That’s what we need to look at. But this vagus nerve comes out of our brainstem and comes behind our throat, behind our esophagus and then spreads out through the digestive system.

So it controls the digestive system, and it’s also what then takes messages from our digestive system back up to our brain. And so when the vagus nerve communicates, we are in such life threat that we need to shut down and surrender in order to try to survive this, it’s going to shut down the digestive system to a much greater degree than if we’re just in stress. Stress is going to shut down our gut to the degree that there is a temporary kind of transient and intestinal permeability or that leaky gut, and it definitely will decrease our digestion and people may feel nauseated or they may experience needing to go to the bathroom. There are some changes that happen with stress, but when the degree of danger that we perceive is so high, which is what people with autoimmunity feel, they feel that their sense of danger is constantly a life threat because it ties back into their attachment.

Their gut is going to be impacted on a much greater level. The intestinal permeability or that leaky gut is so much more than when we’re in stress. There’s a stuckness to our gut as well. Things aren’t moving. There was that immobilization aspect of the trauma response. So that’s being communicated through the vagus nerve. So every aspect of our digestive system is going to go into the deepest state of hibernation. And if your gut is hibernating, of course it’s not going to be producing the stomach acid that is healthy. Of course it’s not going to be producing the bile that helps us release toxins and bring in healthy fats. So there’s all of this that happens, and then we look at how this connects with the brain and the brain fog. Now what’s been very interesting is to see that the immune system is so closely connected with the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, that when we are in that state of danger, you’ll see that in the immune system as well. And when we experience something that feels like a life threat, we’re talking about that level of not just anxiety, we’re talking about terror. I’m terrified, which is often a question that I ask my autoimmune patients. By the way, what’s going on in your life where you feel terrified?

Lorne Brown 

And this is to clarify a perceived or perception, not necessarily a terrifying external event, but could be you think you may lose your job or your spouse may be leaving you. That kind of perception.

Aimie Apigian 

And that’s often the answer that I get, right? I’m terrified that my marriage is falling apart. I’m terrified that my boss is going to fire me and then have this.

Lorne Brown 

We get, I’m terrified. I’m not going to have a baby right, in our fertility clinic. \

Aimie Apigian 

I’m terrified that I’m not going to have a baby. It’s not just the level of well, I’m a little nervous about it. That’s the stress response. That’s stress biology. When we’re at the level where we could say, yeah, I feel terrified about this, then that’s when we know it.

Lorne Brown 

Have you found that? You talked about dissociation. Some of the women mentally they think they’re fine, so used to it or numb, but their biology is telling them you’re terrified. There’s that too, right?

Aimie Apigian 

Absolutely. And this is a great conversation starter for me when I’m seeing someone with autoimmunity and they’re telling me, well, no, I mean I’m fine. Then I know that you are so used to living in terror that it’s become normal for you. You’re not even recognizing it. That’s how far your level of disconnection has gone, which makes this work even more important for those people.

Lorne Brown

Now, I took you off track. You’re talking about the gut and then brain and I think immune cells in the brain for the brain fog. I’d love to hear more about this. Yes.

Aimie Apigian 

So this was one of the primary symptoms that I was having when I noticed that I would go into this overwhelming place and I thought, how interesting. And I started studying it, doing this deep dive study of what triggers my brain fog and what I found, of course, this is not going to surprise you. It was the emotional stress that was leading to a sense of terror. And I thought, how interesting, because I thought that this was only biochemical. I thought that this was only when a toxin was triggering my immune cells in my brain and having the cytokine unleashing that created the brain fog. No, my immune system. And there’s a specific cell in the brain called the microglia. It’s an immune cell and its job is to be the guardian of our neurons. And so it’s got its surveillance and whenever it senses danger, it’s going to unleash all these cytokines in order to keep that danger away and protect our neurons.

And the emotional response when we feel overwhelmed triggers those immune cells. It doesn’t need to be an infection. It doesn’t need to be bacteria. It doesn’t need to be though. It will be those things as well. It can also be, I feel under attack emotionally and it was triggering those immune cells and all of a sudden I’m back in my brain fog and wondering, how did we get here again? And of course at that point, it’s very hard to think your way through because that’s what it’s doing. It is doing this to protect you so that you don’t think you just hibernate. You just kind of surrender because that’s what it believes is the best thing to do when we are under that degree of threat, even emotional threat.

Lorne Brown

Again, I’d love for you to continue here on your approach because you talk about safety a couple of times today, and this is what’s happening then on a cellular level, they don’t feel safe. And the emotion I see in patients when I distill it down in my conscious work with them, it comes down to a form of shame. Shame as there’s something inherently wrong with me, which means I’m not lovable. Now I’m talking about conscious work. When we get into this subconscious, so people come in, I want to have whatever they want, we start with what it is. We regress. We find things often in their childhood, but we find beliefs or programs that have nothing to do with why they think they came in. And if I distill down all the stories, the narratives are very different, but when I distill it down, there’s something wrong with me. I’m not enough. I’m not lovable. There’s this form of shaming, guilt. I’m curious about your research, the book, your clinical experience, your personal experience, I lived this too. Is that aligned? Are we onto something?

Aimie Apigian:

This is it. And especially with autoimmunity. Autoimmunity is the manifestation of I don’t like myself

And I see that I’m the problem. And when we look back as children, these are the beliefs that we form about ourselves. If our parents are unhappy, maybe they’re moody, whether they have a mood disorder or not, but we as children are so narcissistic, we always think it’s about us. Oh, I did something. Oh, I’m not good enough. It’s my job to make my parents happy. These are normal thoughts that a child will have. And unless a parent is recognizing that and being able to see, oh my goodness, my child is taking on responsibilities that they shouldn’t be at that age, then these are the beliefs that we form about ourselves. And this is even Bruce Lipton says, biology of belief. This is what then becomes our biology, and it’s a representation of what we feel and believe about ourselves and others. A lot of autoimmune patients also have this belief that I can’t trust other people, got to do it myself

Lorne Brown 

And this dysregulation. So I want to summarize what I think I’ve heard then is you have trauma, emotional dysregulation in the body. Something’s happened. We are not going to talk today about it. We did in the other episode about intergenerational. So it’s even coming before your birth that there’s signs behind this. It’s not just airy fairy talk. There’s science about that. And then through this, it develops oxidative stress, which can impact the mitochondria. So now you have chronic fatigue, the body’s not healing well, it’s showing up in the gut, inflammation in the brain, brain fog, and there’s just this vicious cycle of oxidative stress, poor mitochondrial function, and immune dysregulation coming from your nervous system. So how do we heal this? Because you talk about how you heal it in reverse. And one thing I’d love clarification, you talk about you using Mind Body biology, right? Those are the three terms I hear. I always think of mindbody, soul or mind, body, spirit. I would love for you to differentiate for me the difference between body and biology. So when you say mind, body and biology, to me, body is biology. So I want a clarification on that and your way of healing and how you address it at all levels, not at one level.

Aimie Apigian

So when we look at the center is the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and it drives everything. It’s the conductor of our life from our actions to our thoughts to our health. So if everything really is about, well, what does my nervous system perceive right now? Is it perceiving safety that it’s going to be then giving an output of safety or is the input danger and it’s going to be sending an output of we’re in danger and this is what we need to do when we are in danger. So this feedback loop that you’ve talked about then is where our own sense of danger has created a biology, and that biology now creates more of a sense of danger keeping us in this dysregulated state and how do we disrupt that? There are three phases of the healing journey, and many people will jump into the third phase not realizing that they’ve got to create a foundation before they do the deeper work. So they’re jumping in thinking, I need to process my past, I need to talk about those stories and not yet, let’s create a sense of stability in the nervous system first because then with that sense of stability and safety and security, we can approach those stories and actually create a different outcome, have a resolution of those stories rather than just a reliving of those stories.

Lorne Brown 

I love this part. I made a note because it’s something through my own personal experience and working with my patients over the 25 plus years, I call it, we’re going to do this. So some people come in and if you’re a young kid and your parents get divorced, there’s a good chance there’s trauma living in yourselves. As you said, we’re narcissistic as children, we take it as our fault, and why can’t I keep them together and we become the people pleaser. Or sometimes it gets really messed up and the role reverses and the child becomes the parent. It’s all messed up. That’s a whole other thing to unpack that you guys can do with Dr. Aimie. We’re not going to do that today, but the bi-directional part is when people come in, I go, we’re going to address this both ways. We’re going to use conscious work and issues ecology in my practice to unpack what’s going on in your life, this trauma idea. But you have to have the biology, the physical body has to be able to contain and deal with the energy that you’re releasing. So we’re going to, we do our functional medicine testing, we look at diet, we’ll use supplements, movement, we’ll do things to help the body so it can metabolize and help transform the stress. So, and we’re still addressing it.

Aimie Apigian 

So I call it let’s not be archeologists. We don’t need to excavate our past. The body will bring it up when it’s ready. So let’s talk about the difference between body and biology. 

The body for me refers to the somatic piece. And the somatic piece is this idea that our body will have a reaction that’s coupled with fear. It will also be coupled with lots of things, but this is an example that we can look at. If someone is in a car accident and they’re driving down the same stretch of road where that accident was, their mind can say, this is clearly a different day. This is clearly a different drive. I am not in danger. And yet their body starts to sweat, their heart starts to race. They start to have this body reaction that is not able to be controlled by their logical mind.

Lorne Brown 

Do you know we have women often say when they drive by the street, the IVF clinic’s on, they have that body reaction.

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah, this is what our body does. It is quite incredible actually. It’s a memory that gets formed in our muscles, in our tissues and in our autonomic nervous system. So we’re not talking about mitochondria and oxidative stress. That’s the biology level. We’re talking about a response at the

Lorne Brown :

Visceral somatic level

Aimie Apigian 

Visceral somatic level. And that also needs to then be, I want to say untethered

And unwind because that stretch of the road has been coupled with fear and danger and life threat. It’s still coupled, which is why your body’s still having a reaction when you drive down that section of the road. We need to uncouple it. And so this is where I talk in my book about how our somatic level can still be giving us cues of danger, even though our mind can say, no, this is a different day, a different drive. So we do need to be able to work on mind level the beliefs that we hold about ourselves, but also this somatic body level and the biology level. These are the three levels that can continue to give our nervous system signals of danger regardless of the other levels that we may have healed.

Lorne Brown 

And this is where, so mine, this is what I call my conscious work energy ecology, working on those beliefs, those thoughts becoming, and my listeners will know the notice, accept, choose again. So we start to notice we’ve been triggered. So you’re noticing because you’re having a body response. So you’re noticing that I triggered the idea here. Dr. Aimie is like, we see the world through the lens of our subconscious. So that’s what has been imprinted on us. We didn’t choose these programs or beliefs. We came into the world with them and they got imprinted. No blame. It’s just how it happened. And we perceive the world that way. So everything is neutral and we give it meaning. So we’re meaning makers, and when you believe in the story, you’re at the effect of it. So now you’re suffering. So first, just notice you’re triggered. It’s not happening to you, it’s happening for you is the same.

I have a process where I bring in many tools, somatic tools, where you accept what’s happening. You’re not resigned to it. We’re not saying you like it, we’re just helping get present with it and observe it. So rather than fighting it, which amplifies it, you’re just noticing it and observing it. This is somewhat detached, being curious and compassionate, but you’re feeling it. You are feeling it. It’s still uncomfortable. You have to be willing to feel it. But there’s some agency because you’re choosing to experience it and notice it. And we use tools then to help metabolize it. Really, the tools are to help you stay present with it. By being present with it, it releases. And then once the resistance drops, because the resistance comes from fighting with what is, you feel more at peace, you resist the resistance lowers, you have more flow and receptivity.

There’s that chief flow. You have flow again. So you’re no longer in survival mode. You’ve come out of the sympathetic trauma reaction because the resistance drops, there’s a sense of almost relief. And then you choose again, how do you want to be in this world? Now you move forward, and again, in my practice, needles help with somatic. I do acupuncture, low level laser therapies, helping with oxygenated stress, mitochondria health to give the biology the opportunity to heal, and we’re working on it. Now that I understand your words, we’re working on it from a mind level, your thoughts and beliefs, working on a body level. We’re feeling these experiences somatically, viscerally, and we’re using acupuncture, herbal supplements, everything to help with that. And then the biology kind of starts to take care of itself when you’re taking care of the mind and the body, the biology, I think you talk about the epigenetic aspect of this work, which means the genes turn on and off differently because they can either be going towards poor health or they can go towards vitality health. If you want to talk a little bit about that, maybe.

Aimie Apigian

Yeah. So I do want people that as they’re doing acupuncture, and I just had my acupuncture treatment yesterday, and it was just like, oh, this is so much support for my body. The more that we can address all three layers, the more we can experience these shifts in our whole being and how we’re showing up in the world. So as someone’s working on the beliefs, as someone’s working on the somatic level, I would also want them to be eating more antioxidants. I would also want them to be using less plastic and more glass. I would also want them to be doing these things that will decrease their physical biochemical burden of toxins, because that will also then open up energy for them to do even the emotional work and to be resetting and reestablishing this flow that needs energy to,

Lorne Brown 

So you’re talking about what we call the free therapies or the pillars of life? So movement. So move, rest, sleep, diet. By the way, shout out on the ACU balance.ca website, free low-glycemic index diet, so that’s beneficial. So movement, sleep, rest, exercise, diet, and then reduce as much as possible the toxins in the environment that put a load onto your body. So that’s always expected that you’re doing that. And then you can add supplements and herbs and acupuncture and the mind body work, all that stuff. But I don’t think any of these modalities can override smoking and excessive drugs and alcohol, not sleeping, no movement, eating processed foods. You do need to do your part. Then your body’s ready to do the emotional work.

Aimie Apigian 

That state of readiness, and I think people downplay how much energy is required to do the emotional work, and yet that’s exactly what it takes. Change takes energy. We know this from Einstein, right? Change takes energy, and yet when we have been in a state of energy depletion for so long, that’s exactly what we don’t have. We don’t have the energy. So that’s why it all plays together. Well, we do need to do the biology work so that we have the energy to then do the beliefs and do the hypnosis and do all these other things that need to be done without energy. We find ourselves still stuck.

Lorne Brown 

And when you unstuck and you feed your body on the mind body biology level like you’re sharing, then you have energy to clean up the oxidative stress. I call that body rust. Right?

Aimie Apigian 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown

You talked about the gas, the car putting, I love it. The exhaust in the car is out. I often look at it as when you mow a lawn and you don’t have a bag on it, it’s a mess. There’s leaves, right? So that’s the oxidative stress. Eating antioxidants, doing meditation is like putting the bag around the lawnmower. So as you cut the lawn, that oxidative stress, all those cut grass it leaves in a bag, it doesn’t mess up your yard. So we’re talking about dieting that way, an antioxidant. So then the brain fog is in there because you have the energy and the inflammation. So basically we’re giving the cells rather than the cells. When the cells feel unsafe on a cellular level, then reproduction gets dampened down, digestion gets dampened down, and your resources are going to fight or flight. When you let your body feel safe again, you’re freeing up those resources for healing, for creativity and reproduction.

This is really why people all of a sudden will get clearer minds and start to peak potential at work. So if you’re looking to be that peak potential person at your job, now you have clarity of mind. Now you have stamina and energy because the cells have energy. You’re absorbing the food you eat, you’re eating good food, but now you’re able to absorb it. This is what you’re sharing, that the symptoms reverse this predictive autoimmune that you used that term earlier, all of a sudden they start to reverse and you don’t have these symptoms anymore. You’re no longer predictive of autoimmune. You’ve reversed the pattern that you were exhibiting. Am I getting it

Aimie Apigian 

Right? Which is what gives me so much hope, and for me, the conversation around trauma is a conversation of hope so much that we can do. I remember so many patients who would come to me and say, but Dr. Aimie doesn’t think that I have a high ACE score. I have that many adverse childhood experiences.

Lorne Brown 

Perfect. I want you to define it. Adverse childhood experiences. The ACE score,

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah, adverse childhood experiences. So this idea of how much trauma I had in my childhood, so you know that this is what I can expect. I can expect poor health, I can expect to die early, what the research shows, and I then come along and say, but no, there’s so much that we can do that is true for those who don’t resolve their trauma, that’s unresolved trauma, and yes, that is the outcome, but there’s so much resolution that we can do. I call it repair. I love the word repair. There’s so much repair that we can do, and when we know the way in which our body needs the repair and the order in which it needs the repair, then we can experience shifts even faster than what we thought possible, even faster than what we thought possible.

Lorne Brown 

You remind me of a quote by the author, medical doctor, Deepak s Chopper, when you talked about the ACEs, adverse childhood experiences are you don’t have to live that out. He said, it’s okay to believe in the diagnosis, but you don’t have to believe in the prognosis. So yeah, you have ACEs, you had adverse childhood experiences, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to develop all these diseases. That’s the prognosis because if you read Dr. Aimie’s book, the Biology of Trauma, she shares how you can resolve this and reverse that. Basically change lanes. You’re on a lane to poor health because of your history and this book and the courses that Dr. Aimie offers allows you to switch lanes. So you’re taking an exit and now you’re into good health regardless of where you started from, you’ve changed lanes and now you’re on the path to vitality.

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah, I would take that quote and I would change it just slightly. I would say you can believe in the diagnosis, but you don’t need to become the diagnosis.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, yeah. I like that. You don’t have to become the diagnosis and you’re not the prognosis when the doctor says, this is what’s going to happen. You can say, no, it’s not.

Aimie Apigian 

No, it’s not

Lorne Brown 

Because I got to eat differently. Exercise. I got to read Aimie’s book.

Aimie Apigian 

I remember how much I would need to correct my patients because they would come in and they would say, oh, my anxiety has just been terrible lately. My depression, my autoimmunity, my this, and I’m like, let’s not claim that. Let’s not become our diagnosis. It is anxiety, it is depression. It’s not mine. If it’s mine, then that’s a whole other aspect of needing to let go of that and needing to be able to see, no, this isn’t me. So even again, this is just normal society now to see this as who we are and who we have become, rather than being able to, as you say, have a certain level of detachment, not disconnected, but detachment where this isn’t me and I’m working to get to my true self.

Lorne Brown 

One last thing I want to share about your book here, when I was reading it, that reminded me of how I understand Chinese medicine is you talk about the trauma and these emotional experiences and it leads to dysregulation, dysregulation in the nervous system, dysregulation in the immune system, and then all these symptoms become really apparent. In the west, in conventional medicine, autoimmune diseases are usually treated with immune suppressants, right? We shut down the immune system. My understanding of how I was trained in Chinese medicine is how we look at autoimmune as a very strong immune system, but it’s confusing. And so Chinese medicine with herbs, acupuncture diet is to confuse the immune system. We don’t want to suppress it because if we suppress it now we’re going to have other problems because you need the immune system for survival and health and vitality. Now I get that paradigm because if that’s the only tool you have, it is a good tool versus no tool.

The beauty of Chinese medicine is it looks at the body and says, well, it’s confused. How do we confuse it? And when I was reading the biology of trauma, because Chinese medicine does not separate your thoughts and feelings from the physical, so we address resentment, unresolved trauma in our treatment with our needles, so we’re addressing it on a body level and a mind level. Always in Chinese medicine, herbally as well. They’re always addressing both, and so that’s when I was reading your book, your dietary approach, your supplement approach, the mind body biology approach, to me, you are unconfusing the immune system, meaning you have a dysregulated, nervous, therefore immune system, and now that you’re regulating it no longer attacks self. That’s

Aimie Apigian

100%. Yeah. It’s being able to have clarity on I’m not in danger right now and I am not the problem. Yeah,

Lorne Brown 

Stop hitting yourself.

Aimie Apigian 

Right, exactly. And stop holding yourself to the standard of perfectionism where you’ll always come up short.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Well, so many successful people are very insecure, and I talked from experience where I was always driven as a young fella, and after every success I had in life, external success, I wouldn’t even celebrate. I would be onto the next thing. As soon as I get this, then I’ll be happy. I would get it, and the next day I’m not happy. I need to do something else. Through this kind of work, this work, I became very aware that my drive was because I didn’t feel enough. There’s a plus side to all the great stuff that’s happening in this world. It’s because so many people don’t fill enough that they’re trying to fill that void and they’re creating things. However, you can come to a place where you feel enough and create, so it’s no longer out of a need to fill a void. It comes through you because you want to share and you’re excited.

You’re not as attached to the outcome anymore, and now you’re not feeling burnt out. You’re not feeling it, it’s fun. It becomes fun, but that’s what when I look at people and they’re achieving, achieving, achieving, and I can see their health, I’m suspecting it was my story not good enough. Nothing’s ever good enough. There’s the perfectionist, and no matter how many people said, look what you’re doing inside, I was like, okay, I got to do something better, and if I had time off, that’s when I would really feel bad because if I’m not producing, then I have no value. Do you relate to that because I think from your story, that might’ve been part of your personality quirk as well?

Aimie Apigian 

100%, yes. In fact, Gober Monte decided to share that opinion of me and my accolades and all of my accomplishments in his forward. He’s like this hyper educated. I forget exactly how he put it, but that is very much true, is that the discomfort with stillness and the need for trying to find a place to belong and trying to seek validation from outside of myself rather than providing myself that validation and then getting to a place where we’re running on fumes rather than giving from a place of abundance.

Lorne Brown

I am so glad you’ve written this book, and I just want to share, I never read your bio at the beginning. Maybe they’ll put this at the front or at the end. It isn’t in your first episode, 1 24, but let’s talk about your hyper education here and then we are going to, let’s share with our listeners just where they can find you and just if you give a shout out about you have courses for the public, you have your book, public and Professionals, I’d love to talk about that just for my colleagues. Hasn’t happened at the time of recording, but I’ve already asked Dr. Aimie if she can create a special course on healthy seminars for you guys, so we’ll see if that manifests. But here’s Dr. Aimie’s bio that I did not read at the beginning, and this is from her book cover on the biology of Trauma, so I am using a different one than I did last time. I believe Dr. Aimie is a pioneering force, bridging biology and healing as a double board. There’s the hyper educated certified physician in preventative and addictive medicine, addiction medicine with master’s degree in biochemistry and public health. Dr. Aimie’s expertise extends beyond her foundational medical and surgical training into areas like psychosomatics, functional medicine, neuro autoimmunity, nutritional biochemistry, and epigenetics, which we touched on a bit of all that today.

Her extensive training in somatic art and psychodrama trauma therapies combined with her firsthand experience with trauma as a foster adoptive mother and her own chronic health issues, led her to discover a missing piece to interventions. By the way, she goes into more detail in episode 1 24 on our podcast, if you want to listen to that, and as a founder of the MINDBODY Biology Institute and creator of the Biology of Trauma Framework, she has developed a revolutionary integrative approach that addresses the full impact of fear and powerlessness through her courses, speaking and practitioner training programs. Dr. Aimie provides a holistic, structured and science-based process for repair. You talked about how important that is, repairing the impact from stored fear, pain, and overwhelm, so you can live your best and most authentic life.

Aimie Apigian

It did. No, I would not be here today without my experiences and my stories and the people who’ve been there along the way, so yeah, this is where we, I feel like get to the next level of our healing where we look back and we say, I would not have chosen it any differently as hard as it was, would not have chosen it differently.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for writing your book. Thanks for joining me again on the podcast. Everybody, check out our show notes for where you can find Dr. Aimie. Aimie, can you give a shout out to some of your social media and then where they can get your book and then what’s available? If people want to do a deeper dive for their own work and repair through you, how else can they contact you, what programs do you have available at this time?

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah, they can find me @biologyoftrauma.com and there they will find all the resources. I have a pretty active YouTube channel where they can find some free education. They can connect with me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and have my courses, which are really working with the nervous system through this integration of mind, body, and biology and showing how to integrate all three of those at the same time as we look at things like attachment, grief, anxiety, overwhelm, and being able to really reprogram our nervous systems that it can respond very differently to life’s challenges.

Lorne Brown

Thank you very much, Dr. Aimie.

Aimie Apigian 

Thank you.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code 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.