In short
Difference between stress and trauma; how trauma is stored in the body at cellular/mitochondrial levels; why people stay stuck despite “doing the right things”; how to heal without re-traumatizing by staying within a “window of tolerance” and working mind, body, and biology together.
Guest backgrounds
Dr. Aimie Apigian (double board-certified physician). Advanced training in biochemistry, public health, functional medicine, and multiple trauma therapies. Her model was shaped by (1) being an adoptive mother during medical school to a traumatized child and (2) her own health collapse from chronic stress.
Key claims
Trauma is “anything that overwhelms our ability to respond,” and it can be emotional, psychological, biological, cellular, and mental. When perceived danger exceeds capacity, the nervous system shifts to survival shutdown; mitochondria “hunker down.” Healing requires completion of overwhelm with safety, not intellectualizing stories. Re-traumatization happens when people go too fast or dive into trauma before building connection/regulation. Trauma burden correlates with oxidative stress; DNA oxidation (guanine) can be measured.
Notable examples
Dr. Apigian describes her NICU/birth trauma recapitulation and a patient case (“Elena”) who developed autoimmunity after a car accident as a “final straw.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Trauma
0:33 to 2:29
Exploration of the definition and various aspects of trauma.
“Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad.”
Understanding Trauma
4:00 to 5:00
Exploration of the definition and various aspects of trauma.
“I absolutely loved this conversation, and it's such an important one.”
The Biochemistry of Trauma
5:00 to 7:50
Discussion on how trauma affects the body at a biochemical level.
“So from your perspective, what the hell is trauma?”
Stress vs. Trauma
7:50 to 9:19
Comparison of stress and trauma, with a focus on physiological responses.
“So what is the response happening when something is stressful versus a trauma?”
The Impact of Childhood Experiences
9:19 to 13:51
Examination of how adverse childhood experiences affect adult health.
“And this is going to be true whether this is an actual danger or this is a demand like a physical exercise, marathon, or some intense activity where you're needing to focus more.”
Understanding Trauma Imprints
14:00 to 15:00
Explore how past traumas create lasting imprints on our biology and emotional state.
“just how we respond to any stress in our life.”
The Disconnect Between Mind and Body
15:00 to 17:33
Discuss the disconnection people experience between their mental awareness of trauma and their physical reality.
“Because then we have, there's so many questions I have.”
Fragmented Care in Trauma Treatment
17:33 to 19:48
Examine how the medical system often fails to address the emotional components of trauma.
“And this is where as a physician I started to see a lot of coping mechanisms.”
Navigating Personal Trauma Stories
19:48 to 24:19
Hear personal stories about confronting childhood trauma and its impact on life.
“So like, let's say you have identified a trauma and then you want to sit with the trauma or you want to acknowledge the trauma or listen to the trauma finally.”
The Challenge of Processing Pain
24:19 to 26:01
Discuss the difficulties of facing and metabolizing trauma instead of avoiding it.
“to learn a language that I was, that I, I, I wasn't really clear about.”
Show all 31 chapters
The Challenge of Processing Pain
26:20 to 27:36
Discuss the difficulties of facing and metabolizing trauma instead of avoiding it.
“But did you know that you can reduce your chance of heart attacks by 51 % and stroke 62 % just being in a sauna four times a week?”
Avoiding Re-traumatization in Healing
27:47 to 28:00
Learn about the risks of re-traumatization during trauma work and how to navigate it.
“key messages that I would want people to have is this idea that it is so easy to do too much too fast.”
Understanding Birth Trauma and Its Impact
28:00 to 29:51
Explore how birth trauma affects brain development and emotional connection.
“What does that look like if you're doing it because you're like, I'm the kind of person I'll go all in on something and then beat myself up.”
The Cycle of Overwhelm and Trauma
29:51 to 31:41
Learn about the cycle of overwhelm in trauma work and its physiological effects.
“So in my definition, overwhelm is the word that I interchange with trauma.”
Moments of Terror and Their Long-term Effects
31:41 to 32:10
Understand how moments of terror imprint themselves on our bodies and behaviors.
“That's what imprints itself on our body.”
Survival Mechanisms and Their Consequences
32:10 to 34:19
Discuss how survival mechanisms from traumatic experiences affect current behaviors.
“I am hell bent on letting myself feel that there's that terror.”
Connecting with the Body and Overcoming Trauma
34:19 to 36:40
Explore how to reconnect with the body while managing trauma without feeling victimized.
Micro Moments: Building Body Awareness
36:40 to 39:54
Learn about using micro moments to build awareness and connection to the body.
“I feel like we're on a like a our own plant medicine journey without the plants because Is it like if you really feel, this is a crazy, this is, there's a lot going on here.”
Mind-Body Connection Misconceptions
39:54 to 40:18
Debunk misconceptions about the mind-body connection and how to focus on sensations.
“So I have to give them something specific.”
Initiating Healing: Body Awareness First
40:18 to 42:04
Understand the importance of body awareness before diving into trauma stories.
“and I just have them feel their heart rate.”
Understanding Trauma and Its Bodily Effects
42:04 to 46:08
Learn how trauma manifests in the body and the importance of addressing it through somatic work.
“when we work on the story, just like you with your birth story.”
The Complexity of Relationships and Trauma
46:08 to 50:39
Explore how trauma impacts relationships and the necessity of personal healing for healthy connections.
“So I see it as three different levels that need repair.”
Reconstructing Trauma Education for Future Generations
50:39 to 56:00
Discover the vision for trauma education in early childhood to foster healthier emotional development.
“And then when it comes down to it, you'll fight tooth and nail to be like you if you wouldn't have done that.”
Teaching Somatic Practices to Children
56:00 to 57:40
Learn how teaching kids somatic practices can help manage emotions and trauma.
“Being able to model healthy expression and movement through emotions, because that is where it all really starts.”
Mind-Body Connection in Trauma Healing
57:40 to 59:30
Discover the importance of mind-body connection in addressing trauma.
“I would start them with three, four weeks.”
The Science of Oxidative Stress and Trauma
59:30 to 1:01:10
Understand how oxidative stress relates to trauma and physical health issues.
“And knowing how much the oxidative stress will cause other conditions, PTSD.”
Impact of Trauma on Health and Relationships
1:01:10 to 1:03:40
Explore how trauma can affect health, beliefs, and relationships.
“intellect to then grok the idea that you're under a stress, that you're so disconnected that you're like, well, this is just me, right?”
Healing Trauma: Lessons from Dog Studies
1:03:40 to 1:08:20
Learn from dog studies how trauma can be unlearned through movement and connection.
“I'm like, no, that's not, that's, he didn't have it.”
A Movement of Hope in Trauma Recovery
1:08:20 to 1:10:02
Discover the hope and movement for healing from trauma and not being paralyzed by it.
“We can intellectualize and we can say, wow, there's treats over on that other side.”
The Movement of Hope and Healing
1:10:02 to 1:10:56
Discover the importance of recognizing trauma and the hope for healing.
“And I hope you express this movement as big as possible.”
Liberation from Trauma
1:10:56 to 1:11:25
Learn that while trauma is a part of life, it doesn't have to define us.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.
0:32Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.
1:21Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, but the easy ones that I use every day and I'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle. And it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.
2:07Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth, and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E, forward slash Darren20, or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. Today's guest is Dr. Amy Abigan, a double board certified physician and the leading voice behind the biology of trauma.
2:57Darin Olien:With advanced training in biochemistry, public health, functional medicine, and multiple trauma therapies, Dr. Amy bridges the important gap between trauma science and physical health to accelerate healing at the deepest cellular level. Her path was shaped by personal experience, first as an adoptive mother to a traumatized child during medical school, then through her own health collapse brought on by chronic stress. These experiences drove her to develop a model that addresses how trauma gets stored in the body and how we can finally release it. In this episode, we unpack the difference between stress and trauma, the role of the nervous system in healing, and why so many people remain stuck despite doing, quote unquote, all the right things.
3:54Darin Olien:This conversation will change the way you understand your body and what it truly takes to heal. I absolutely loved this conversation, and it's such an important one. So tune in to this amazing work by Dr. Amy Abagin. Thank you for coming here on the Super Life Podcast. I'm really excited for this. I'm really excited to talk toxins, trauma, everything that makes us sick. Yeah, let's do it. I mean, this is, you have such an interesting background, and you are kind of flagging some missing elements in the kind of the healing journey. What was some of the first kind of indications that we were missing some stuff around trauma?
4:52Darin Olien:Because there's an obvious question I want to ask too is like, what is trauma? What is trauma? Because it is perception. It is physical. It is chemical. It is biological. It is cellular. It is mental. It is emotional. So from your perspective, what the hell is trauma? It's a great place to start. And what I love about trauma and especially how it presents in the body is that we can go as deep as we want to into the biochemistry of it at the cellular level. But for some people who don't know that stuff, we can stay at the emotional level and the mental level because it's all really going to be the same definition, which is anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed our ability to respond.
5:54that can happen emotionally we can be flooded with emotions that feel too confusing too big for us to respond to in the moment this often happens when you get an unexpected news someone has passed away and there's just this overwhelming feeling that can paralyze you right but then we can also look at that psychologically but inside of the body there is this biochemical process it's happening. And that goes down to the cellular level. So our cells are experiencing this overwhelm and inability to respond just as much as we're feeling it psychologically or emotionally. Wow. And when we look at the role of the nervous system in keeping us alive, we see how the nervous system has to keep track of all of the different elements that affect our capacity to respond.
6:49And when it senses, and here we go into perception, when it senses, whether it's real or not, true or not, that our capacity to respond to a demand, to a danger, to a threat is not enough. It's not going to be enough to overcome that. Then the survival strategy is to shut down. And there's an element of let me conserve my energy in order to wait it out because that's probably the better way to survive this than if I'm not able to overcome, but I still try to overcome and use up priceless energy in the process. So we look at this is happening at the mitochondrial level, which is in so much of where your work comes into play, because toxins and our environment, what we consume is directly going to impact our capacity, which means directly impact our threshold for what will just be a stress for us and what will be a trauma that breaks us.
7:50Darin Olien:So what is the response happening when something is stressful versus a trauma? Yeah. Inside of our cells, we have this machinery that keeps everything running. And when we look at the mitochondria specifically, they are the ones that make energy. They do many other things. They also signal. They also are the major influencer for determining our capacity. because our mitochondria, depending on how many we have, depending on their efficiency, depending on how much we have built them through practice and exercise, they have a certain capacity for how much energy they can make. And when they reach their threshold, if the demand, if the danger, if the threat feels bigger than what they can adjust to, then they switch strategies.
8:44So when they are first confronted with what would be a stress, they're going to hunker down. In the microscope, you can actually see them hunkering down. They change shape in order to be able to make energy more efficiently and make more of it. And so they're literally turning all online. If you could see inside the body, it's like all these lights are turning on. Go, go, go. and they are all responding in order to help us respond to this danger or threat.
9:15Darin Olien:In an acute situation. In an acute situation. And this is going to be true whether this is an actual danger or this is a demand like a physical exercise, marathon, or some intense activity where you're needing to focus more. Those are all demands, and so we move into this higher energy state, which is what stress is. Stress, I liken it to a sprint. A sprint is something where you are going to be focused. You're going to be intense. And it's not bad. It's not good. It just, I don't know why you're sprinting, but it's a sprint. And everything in your body is responding, both at the cellular level, but at a systemic level.
9:56So your whole digestive system changes. Your whole immune system changes. Everything in your body changes based on the state that your nervous system is in. And in the stress state, everything changes to literally help you have the most energy possible.
10:12Darin Olien:For that particular situation. And so breaking apart like stress, that and kind of going back to the first thing you said, like that goes from a childhood situation that you couldn't deal with and that was acute. but there was an overwhelm. And so I guess I'm going to go into that right now in the sense that if something happened and that was overwhelming, you didn't have the capacity or you just did the best you can all the way down to the mitochondria, did the best it can, but then it only lasted for so long, and therefore it's impossible to understand sometimes those traumas as they happened.
11:05Darin Olien:call it like not to be weird but like if you were hit by your parent or whatever that traumatic situation is so after that acute situation what happens then this is one of the most amazing things in medicine i think and this really goes back to the work from Dr. Vincent Folletti in the 1980s, where he started looking at why some of his most successful patients in his obesity program were dropping out of the program and regaining all of their weight back plus more. That's when he started to ask them about their life, their life experiences, and found that so many of them had had adverse childhood experiences.
11:53So this idea of what happens in our past, why does our body hold on to that? Why doesn't it just resolve it after the acute experience? And we can go on, we can move on, which is what a lot of people have said that they wanted to do, find themselves unable to do so. But when we look at the body and the body's response, especially to overwhelm, that is crossing the line. And once we cross that line into overwhelm, there does need to be a sense of completion of that response, which would require a return to a full sense of safety. So if we want to look at a person's childhood, if they were hit as a child, they didn't understand it.
12:37They were a child. How could they understand why is my parent hitting me? Because they are a child, because they're still living in that home, because they're dependent on their parent for survival, did they ever return to a full sense of I'm perfectly safe? Likely, no. They're waiting for the next time that it might happen. And so it keeps the body stuck in danger mode. Now that will often have it be in stress mode, stressed about I'm waiting for the next thing. Are they going to hit me now? Or what do I need to do to not have them hit me? There's all that stress. But the longer that that stress builds, the more it drains our capacity, the more it creates these biological changes that decrease our capacity, making it easier for us to go back into overwhelm when anything else happens.
13:33And then that neural pathway gets reinforced. and then we look at even learned helplessness being part of our programming that has now been wired in through neuroplasticity because we've done this pattern so many times our brain knows what to do it knows that with any stress now even a small stress I'm going to just go into overwhelm I'm not even going to try to overcome it my nervous system has been programmed that this is just how we respond to any stress in our life.
14:09Darin Olien:I mean, this, I love this top. I love all of this stuff because it's, it's like starting to poke at something that has been very elusive in a sense. And, and cause I think about using the same example. Um, okay, let's say you're, you're aware now you're an adult you're aware of this situation and you go yeah it happened and I'm fine see I'm fine no nothing wrong and and yet there's a now an imprint for my lack of understanding it and and yet this continues so how does one then truly unpack that for lack of a better word, or reorient the body in biological ways. Because then we have, there's so many questions I have.
15:10Darin Olien:Because you have this mental, emotional state, you have this biology state, but from what I'm gathering from you, it's all wrapped up into this whole thing. So you can't intellectualize yourself just because you're aware of it and you want to talk your way through it, it's not working for people, right? It doesn't work for me. That's where I found myself. So my experience was I had gone from six years of parenting a child that I had adopted from the foster care system who had experienced a lot of childhood trauma, talking both neglect and abuse. He came to me when he was four, and I mean, it took me down to my knees because I didn't see him making progress with even the evidence-based treatments that I knew were the best researched ones.
16:10But then I got several chronic health conditions. And as a physician, I'm now understanding that, wait a second, These health conditions that I have are all related to adverse childhood experiences, but I had nothing of a childhood like my son. Why would I have these? I didn't have trauma. Or people can look back at their family and know that they did have trauma, but at least think or want to have been able to move on. But as a physician, I'm seeing them just like I got into that situation. You have autoimmunity. that is not your body having moved on that is your body still stuck with this imprint the metabolic syndrome the toxin overload this is all your body still with this imprint your body has not moved on and much of what a person has to do in order to survive childhood trauma or previous trauma that they didn't resolve in the moment is to disconnect their mind and their body so that their mind thinks a certain way and their mind says, we are past that.
17:24It's in our past. We should move on. And the body is like, well, that's a great idea, but that's not my reality. But there is so much pain and then dis-ease in the body that the mind starts to find ways to escape, not actually feeling their body. And this is where as a physician I started to see a lot of coping mechanisms. People getting dependent on sleep pills, anxiety pills, pain pills, the overeating, the binge eating, everything that they could possibly do to distract themselves from actually being still and being with themselves because that's often when it surfaces. And so we can look at how the body does not just move on.
18:11The body needs a certain thing, and until it gets that, it will continue to have this imprint and this default way of living life and responding to life. So one's health conditions is one way that we can recognize whether you think you've moved on or not. Your body has a different story. and as we look at what the body needs so much of what has been missing is this cellular repair we have many modalities for repair of the mind and your thoughts and how you think about yourself and the beliefs that you've now formed about yourself about not being good enough not being lovable being defective broken there's numerous beliefs that people hold about themselves that keep them stuck.
18:56We can then look at their emotional states and just this feeling depressed or feeling anxious. And we've developed different modalities to express that. And even the somatic work, being able to work with the body movements that were not completed that will keep a body stuck in that danger mode. But the cellular repair has not been included because, well, that's the medical department, but yet the medicine people don't see it as trauma. So they're just trying to treat it as the symptoms missing the emotional component. And so that's where we've developed fragmented systems that then that fragmented care doesn't allow us the integrative simultaneous approach that a person needs to truly be able to help their body process, resolve, repair, and heal?
19:48Darin Olien:Because it's a tricky thing, right? So like, let's say you have identified a trauma and then you want to sit with the trauma or you want to acknowledge the trauma or listen to the trauma finally. It's hard to do. It is so hard. Why would you ever want to do that? Exactly. It is much better to avoid, distract, numb. Totally. And our society is actually built upon that. This is true. It is. And I do feel there's a somatic merge or upswell happening. I think people are starting to, at least certain circles, The medical system is still, you know, pretty much the same. But I think there's all of these things.
20:45Darin Olien:And so, I mean, listen, I'll use my example. Like, I was doing my best sitting with my pain and asking questions. And I had a lot of awareness that was popping up around my childhood, around the pain. Like, I'll just be vulnerable here. that along my, I was, I went all the way back to my birth and my birth was, I was premature, 1970. I didn't know that about you, Darren. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was three and a half pounds. And so I had a spontaneous in my master's psychology course, we did this regression stuff. and with my eyes closed I had a spontaneous non-intellectual recapitulation of my birth and saw it and experienced it and I had fluid and surge of trauma release as best as I can explain it that happened and I couldn't control it like it just came out and so and I saw all this stuff and I knew that all I wanted was my mom, but I was put in an incubator and shoved away.
22:01Darin Olien:So my trauma went as far back. And it was probably in the womb trauma. My dad was an alcoholic. It was probably all this other stuff, right? But I, in that pain, we had to cancel one of our, you know, doing this podcast because I couldn't even sit. And so, so this is on the nose for me right now with trauma. And I didn't want to feel into it more. But at the same time, I knew an awareness I needed to. So at moments when I was less pain, in less pain, I would venture into these areas inside myself mindfully. And I would start to unpack some of the trauma that also led to more trauma along the same line, right?
22:52Darin Olien:And so getting, I got hurt playing football in high school and I was hell bent on still playing. And so I, I, I, I, I beat out a bunch of guys in college and I started playing there and got hurt again. Uh, and, and it was this whole like trauma bond that I had with all of this stuff, which led me to some of the worst pain I've been in in a long time. And so it's hard to go in, quote unquote, into the pain. So hard. Is that, how do we do that? How do we start to do that? You know what I mean? I do know. I mean, because you wrote a book on it. And I was there. That was where I was. Yeah. How? Like, because it isn't, I feel like it, for me, of course I didn't want to do it.
23:47Darin Olien:but yet when I allowed myself to do it I knew I needed to I knew that on on a very deep soulful level I didn't want to hold on to this stuff I want to release it I want to learn from it I want to expand from it I I don't want to be a prisoner to it and at the same time I felt alone in it. Uh, and I didn't feel like I had the instruction book. So I felt like I was trying to learn a language that I was, that I, I, I wasn't really clear about. So as people are listening, cause we all get, there's trauma. Like, I don't know about you, but coming into a body, you're getting trauma. Like it's part of being alive on this earth in this world.
24:38Darin Olien:So how do we bridge that? How do we start to and not intellectualize it, somatically allow it? I think women are infinitely better at this. I don't know. You can correct me if I'm wrong. I think they have a men. We are certainly like, get through it. Like for me, I just like keep working out, keep doing stuff. And the next thing I know, I'm broken. and I got a dislocated knee. I've got 30-year trauma from football, and my things aren't working anymore. They're my little tricks to keep going. Luckily, because I have an addictive personality, my dad passed away with alcohol, if I started to go down that road, I'd be messed up.
25:28Darin Olien:So luckily I stayed away from pain meds and from my life, but I'd figure out ways to do it. So anyway, it's a long way of saying, how do we start learning this language, this necessary language and this disconnect, pun intended, really, that we still have as people with bodies and people who want to have a happy life? How do we metabolize this trauma? I love that you use that word metabolize because that's really what it is. I think that there's been this idea that when you're ready to do your trauma work, you go to a therapist and you talk about it. And actually, so much of what you're saying is we need to learn how to move through it, metabolize.
26:20Darin Olien:and so i want to take a quick break here and this episode and thank my other sponsor thera another incredible group of people doing some great things for the increasing of your vitality on this planet using electro medicine in a lot of different ways from portable sauna and a thera 360 pro that i've been using for years the infrared pads that i sit on and meditate on every freaking day helps to detox and boost your immune system reduce inflammation help you recover and repair and restore helping weight loss to come off because of higher functioning of your cells even shows to potentially help with detoxification of molds and sometimes we don't even realize we have that increases energy and improves sleep especially before you go to sleep oh my gosh so good.
27:13Darin Olien:But did you know that you can reduce your chance of heart attacks by 51 % and stroke 62 % just being in a sauna four times a week? Incredible. So there's advanced earthing technology and many other remediations of EMFs, shielding, blocking, all of that stuff. So many benefits to these devices. So go to therasage.com and you get 15 % off or go or use the code Darren, D-A-R-I-N, and you will love what they have to offer. As we look at how to open up safely, that is one of the key messages that I would want people to have is this idea that it is so easy to do too much too fast. And in the process, we end up re-traumatizing ourselves.
28:03What does that look like if you're
28:05Darin Olien:doing it because you're like, I'm the kind of person I'll go all in on something and then beat myself up. So what does that actually look? What is, and that's actually part of your birth trauma. So, uh, birth trauma specifically, it creates a gap in your pons level of your brainstem development where you are naturally more disconnected from your body, which means you can push your body more and not feel that your body is giving you messages of that was enough back there. Right. Check. I've done that a lot in my life. So Pons level gaps, part of so much of what a lot of people carry as part of their trauma package.
28:47So this idea that re-traumatization happens quite frequently when people go to do trauma work. And what that looks like is we finally commit to feeling it, to doing it, unpacking it. And it's like we dive into the swimming pool without stepping into the swimming pool and making sure that we're only doing as much as our mind and body can tolerate at that time. We go back to this idea of capacity. Your mind has a capacity to connect with your body because it's lived in disconnection for so long, it can't fully connect and feel safe to do so. We actually have to baby step our connection with our body.
29:36And when we try to force that connection too fast and we go into stories before we have the skills to keep ourselves within our window of safe enough, we end up re-experiencing that overwhelm that we're trying to shift. So in my definition, overwhelm is the word that I interchange with trauma. And so what I tell people as they're coming into work with me is we no longer do overwhelm. We no longer do overwhelm. That's so often been of what they have done in every area of their life. They go until they are exhausted. They go until they are overwhelmed. And now we're going to do less than what we think we can do just to make sure we are keeping our body within its window of tolerance.
30:26And whether you want to consider window of tolerance physiological, homeostatic capacity, we can talk about that window of tolerance. We also have an emotional window of tolerance. It's all the same thing because we're really talking about the nervous system's perception of how much we can handle. And our nervous system has a perception of how much emotion we can experience and still be okay. For many people, likely your nervous system, it has had the belief that if we feel too much, we might die. We might fall apart. I can't let that happen. So let me remain disconnected. Let me remain intellectualizing.
31:08Let me remain busy and focused on exercise or work or anything else in order to not let myself feel too much because I might fall apart.
31:20Darin Olien:The interesting thing to add to that, another aspect, because as you're saying that, my imprint, if there was an emotion, was fear because there was a legit 50-50 chance of me even living. Darren, that wasn't just fear. There's a specific emotion that that was. That was terror. Yeah.
Read the full transcript
31:54Yeah. That's what imprints itself on our body. Moments of terror. We didn't know if we were going to make it.
32:07Darin Olien:And the, and the way that shows up too, is if I feel weak at any point in my life, I am hell bent on letting myself feel that there's that terror. Yeah. So I will go and push and produce and oftentimes I've lost, I've pushed too much or I haven't even acknowledged a moment because I'm not in the moment. I'm pushing through it because I don't want to feel the terror. Yes, and Darren, that is literally how you survived that NICU experience. If you had let yourself relax, you would have died. You kept yourself alive by saying, no, I must keep myself strong. I must keep myself hypervigilant. I must keep myself in this activated state.
33:16And so when that is how you survived, of course your body has that encoded memory. and it's going to continue to tell you this is how we survive life because it was a truth for you back then and I guess it was necessary it was necessary it's what kept you alive yeah you know the just adding that point my dad I mean disconnected from my mom which is just gnarly
33:41Darin Olien:we know now I could have easily died just from that just from that and and my dad I mean they brought me home my dad brought me home and I was this big but he remembers the moment where he saw me choose to live oh I get goosebumps right and and because it was you know 1970 they didn't know but it was traumatic as hell because whatever that experience was I feel like I've completely recapitulated it and there was no it was just chaos um so that's a that's a good orientation of realizing that that mechanism was absolutely there to to to allow me to live yeah you know and and I guess then the question is um and I think it's produced a lot in my life of course because I'm I'm as soon as I I don't stop when I want to I'll stop when something doesn't completely align anymore or something then it's just like but if I'm on to something I'm not going to stop and but I also that will go against me too because I'm not even listening anymore and to your point like I'm I have a lot of empathy I can feel a lot but there is a I am learning like I'm trying to learn as much as I can to just feel and understand this how do we it's a big question i mean it's an individual question as well as a societal question so how do we how to bring this together because on the one hand i'm just aware now of how incredible how deep it goes yeah yes and how we get to have this sensory perceptive giving and receiving vessel right and experience this this absolute miracle um and and i'll put my hand up saying like i blew past a lot of moments and i don't want to do that i want to i want to take things in and and so how do we how do we number one bring that connection back that somatic relationship and at the same time not be a victim to the pattern that and patterns because we have infinite traumas right wow this is such a I feel like we're on a like a our own plant medicine journey without the plants because Is it like if you really feel, this is a crazy, this is, there's a lot going on here.
36:52There's a lot going on here. There's a lot going on in individuals. There's a lot going on around the world. This is a topic that really needs to be discussed more. Yeah. And I was faced with this same question when I was working with my patients. I initially started in surgery, which gave me a great understanding of physical trauma to the body and how the body comes out of a trauma response. And I would watch my patients wake up from anesthesia, and I would see this same pattern happen that fascinated me. And then when I moved and I switched careers and became an addiction medicine physician, now I'm working with people who have so much inner pain, they're having to numb it just to survive their life, just to be willing to get up and do this thing called life another day.
37:46They're not choosing that because they like it. They're choosing that because they don't know how else to keep going. And detoxing them off of substances is very much like opening up to life again with stored trauma. It's painful. and there are phases that we go through and if we try to jump phases it's gonna all go bad right and in the addiction world it goes bad in the sense that my patients were relapsing and so i realized that i needed to create the safety for their body to slowly start to be able to feel again because that's what they were trying to avoid was feeling. How do I do that? And what I learned was that there's just phases and we just take one phase at a time.
38:42We don't skip phases. There's no cutting corners. And that allows then everyone to really have a clear path forward if they're finding themselves thinking I might have stored trauma. The first phase is this idea of building the connection and the awareness. And we do that in micro moments. We already kind of talked about that a bit of how it's hard to connect. And so I'm not going to ask someone who's never been connected to their body to now go 24 hours and stay connected with your body the whole time. I'm actually going to be doing it in micro moments, 10 seconds at a time. That literally is sometimes where we have to start, Darren, 10 seconds at a time, just feel your body, and then we'll stop.
39:27And then I'll let you go back into your head and intellectualize the rest of the day. Do what you do. And tomorrow we're going to do 10 seconds, and then we'll do a second 10 seconds later on in the day. And the way that I found that I needed to help my addiction medicine patients is often the same way with people with stored trauma. I have to give them something specific to focus on in their body, because otherwise if I just tell them, feel your body,
39:51Darin Olien:They're like, what body? What the hell does that mean? So I have to give them something specific. So often what I would do, I wouldn't necessarily start people here, Darren, because it brings up threads of so much of the terror that they've experienced. But one way to show an example of this is to have them feel their heartbeat. So I have them feel their carotid artery in their neck. It's a major artery, sometimes easier to find than the radial artery in their arm. and I just have them feel their heart rate. And then they have something to focus on. They have something to do rather than this general vague direction of feel your body.
40:30Darin Olien:And it's very mindful. Very mindful. And this is a big misconception that I've seen in this idea of mind-body connection is that you're kind of sending your brain off to do something else and you're just connecting with your body. It's like, no, you're going to use your mind's attention to focus on how does my knee feel right now? Do I even feel my legs right now? Many people who have a lot of store trauma, they don't really feel grounded because they don't actually feel their feet on the ground, their legs much. And that's because of the vagus nerve and it ends in the pelvis. And so a lot of that downstream stuff just kind of gets cut off from sensations.
41:10Just literally numb. Literally numb. Yeah. Wow.
41:13Darin Olien:Mm-hmm. so that's the first step the first step is me just coming in and saying let's feel your heart rate let's feel this let's feel that I often have them go to their stomach again just because there's so much emotions that is that are stored in our stomach that every time that I've taken a person to their stomach they have found a knot they have found pain they've found a place of tension And so it's an easy place for me to start with saying, this is how you feel your body. That is not what most people do, Darren. Most people come in and they're like, I want to work on the story. I was abused as a child.
41:52And I'm like, we are not going into story. We need to start with awareness of your body. Because if you're not aware of your body, it's not safe for you to go into a story. because your body is going to be having experiences and feelings and emotions of that story when we work on the story, just like you with your birth story. It was a body response that you were having. And if you're not able to actually feel your body yet, it's not safe to allow those things because you're going to be afraid of it. You're going to run away. You're going to shut it off.
42:28Darin Olien:Retraumatize. Retraumatize. We're back where we've started. So I don't let people work on stories and do the deeper work until they've done these first two layers. The next layer is going to be the regulate level. This is where we can use a lot of the somatic work. We can even bring in some parts work where we would work with the different parts of us, the part that likes to push itself and the part that's terrifying if it's going to live at all. And the idea here is that we can learn to shift our own nervous system states. No longer are you going to be at the mercy of whatever your body is doing.
43:08Darin Olien:You are going to be able to say, hmm, I noticed that you've just went into survival mode. Let me shift you back into feeling safe enough right here, right now. People don't have these skills, Darren. They don't have the skills to shift their own inner state. they often reach for the pill or they reach for the chocolate they reach for the alcohol and it's so slippery too so slippery because if you don't have any gap you're just completely reacting and you're autumn almost automatically reaching yeah this is the trauma pattern trauma patterns become automatic yeah you don't have to think about it you don't even have to know why you're doing it they're so unconscious i was shocked when i discovered how much emotional eating i had done since childhood.
43:52Darin Olien:Why? Because my logical brain had given us a different reason for why we're eating. You must be hungry right now. No. Emotionally hungry, I was very lonely. I was dealing with a lot of sadness, a lot of grief. It was much safer to bury that with food. But my brain is going to tell me, no, no, no, you're not emotionally eating. You are actually hungry. It will even produce physical hunger signals. Isn't that weird, though? It's like... I use the word amazing. Yeah, okay. So it's amazing. It's a good... Thank you. It's amazing that the brain will come in to support the crazy habit or the challenging habit.
44:36Darin Olien:The survival. The survival mechanism. So it's, again, so it's the survival mechanism that it's... My brain is just trying to help me. Yeah. So it's always been trying to help me. Always been trying to help me. It just hasn't been, quote unquote, healed. Right. Yeah. Right. And so trauma, would you say if it were to be somewhere, is it, I'm going to say this for a reason, is it always in the body? You can't escape it. Trauma is always residing in the body. trauma trauma gets stored in the body yeah so whether it started there or or it's here in your head trauma is an inner experience of the body that's what trauma is trauma is not what happens to us outside of us so you have to use the body have to to release the trauma have to you have to integrate it have to integrate it let me just that alone and and being that you're someone who's trained in in so many different ways and a doctor and saying this that's revelatory because you can say almost then anyone's pain that they're intellectualizing is somewhere in their body and somewhere and so if you're not if you're not then this is part of the brilliance of what you put together in the book is if you're not bridging that then you're you're almost without a doubt re-traumatizing and or supporting the pathway that started in a in a quote-unquote call it good way um but it's now not in a good way and it's just causing more and more pain and ultimately not getting what you want because no one wants to go, I'm signing up for more pain.
46:38And that's exactly what it creates. Trauma creates more pain. Right. So I see it as three different levels that need repair. Mind level, body level, and biology level. Each of those is giving signals to our nervous system of either safety or danger. So if you focused on the mind level, but you've neglected the body level and the biology level, those two levels are still sending danger signals to your nervous system. All three levels need to have this reset to safety in order for you to truly have moved on and resolve the past.
47:19Darin Olien:You have to work together. Have to work together. Is there anyone doing this kind of work? Not that I know of. See, that just blows my mind. Isn't this crazy? We're in 2025. I know. It blows my mind. You know, I have these conversations in different ways all the time where I'm like, we have to, the society is so weird because we silo everything. and then we have parts of our consciousness that that then manifest things like more of the siloed situation like social media like it's it's it can create silos and there's back and forth our political system silos our our legal system is basically a a legal form of revenge and so it's just all of this fragmented stuff.
48:16Darin Olien:And ultimately, no one wants to choose pain. And we're sitting here having this conversation and yeah, moments of people going, I'm doing this somatic healing, I'm doing this. But it's just, it's these one pieces of things. And if you don't acknowledge the other then it's just going to keep pulling you back it's it's it's it's wild it is wild which is why honestly i wrote my book because so many people look to others as they're the ones to fix me they're the ones to heal me whereas the way that i'm seeing it there is so much that each person can do and needs to do for themselves. So truly healing begins with me, my relationship with myself, my ability to regulate myself, my ability to create my inner safety.
49:17Not wait for you to do that for me. It's my responsibility to make myself feel loved and worthy. It's not for you to make me feel loved, for you to make me feel worthy. It's my job.
49:32Darin Olien:Yeah, but then you have, it's so seductive because then you have all of the relationships. Right. Talk about trauma. I mean, how is it even possible that we have any sort of successful relationship, whether it be romantic or loving or marriage or whatever it is? Any healthy relationship. Yeah, and it's just a projection of like, fill this up for me. I mean how do we even how have we even gotten here it's amazing but you're just you're just bouncing off of each other
50:13yeah so in order to be in a long term relationship you either need to find someone who their trauma plays well with your trauma
50:23Darin Olien:because you're getting trauma you're going to share trauma or Or the other option is you're both taking responsibility for your own healing journey. Oh, that's a tough one. It is a tough one. You want it. You want it. Like I want it. Like of course that's what I want. And then when it comes down to it, you'll fight tooth and nail to be like you if you wouldn't have done that. You know what I mean? We're insane people. It's insane. It is insanity. It is insanity to expect a healthy relationship when these are the dynamics that we bring to the table. Right. So how do we break those cycles? How do we, I mean, I want to be better at not projecting onto someone going, well, you did that.
51:16Darin Olien:And I'm pissed because you did that. And there's, you know, obviously there's times where those things are actually true. but not when they're re-traumatizing and you're bouncing off of each other so like in turn like oh my god the way that i see it is you're responsible and i'm responsible for my responses yeah responsibility response it's even the same word derivative right i'm responsible for my responses and if i have not reached a level of my healing that i can't change my response to when you trigger me well then maybe i just need to distance myself at this time in my life until i my personal responsibility i can develop a stronger sense of self-regulation creating more of a pause between a trigger and a response but that's my responsibility i'm not going to blame that on you i'm responsible for my responses and so i'm looking at what do i currently have the capacity for.
52:28And there are some people in our lives that we may not have the capacity at this time, at this stage of our healing journey, to be around them, to be exposed to them and not have a different response.
52:41Darin Olien:It's just not safe enough. It's not safe enough. Sometimes that's hard medicine. It is very hard. You love them and there's a lot of other good stuff. But if you can't self-regulate and you're just triggering each other, that's just not healthy. Right. Another key principle is to stay out of the story. And that's a lot of where the triggers are coming from. We only get triggered when there is a story about what that means. If you give me a look, it's only a trigger if I have a story about what that look means. And what if we could stay out of the story and we could say, it was just a look. I'm responsible for my nervous system.
53:21Let me shift it back. And then maybe I can have a conversation about it. Is this what you meant? What are you going through? What did that mean? Did it mean anything at all? But there's so much of our stories that we are stuck in that we create meaning when there is no meaning. And we amplify the trigger unnecessarily.
53:43Darin Olien:And we convince ourselves that it's true. Of course. And that's the tricky thing. That can be tricky. Yeah. Which is why then I bring in parts work because that really helped me be able to change my language around. There is a part of me that really got triggered with your look. And that way it's not all of me. It's just a part of me. And now I can work with that part knowing that it's not all of me. There's a part of me that is feeling really lonely. okay well that part of me used to be all of me and it would drive me to the kitchen and the refrigerator in order to not feel lonely but now that it's just a part of me i can take care of that part what does that part of me need right now right and it's a lot different than i am sad i am angry i you're and you're also affirming all of that in that moment too which is just not going to be helpful.
54:48It is not helpful. And I love that you use that word because that's the word that I use so often. People ask me all the time, my body is doing this. Is that good? Is that bad? What does it mean? And I come back to, does it feel helpful? Does it not feel helpful? That's really all we need to know. We get to stay even out of the analysis. Analyzing is really just another form of intellectualizing. So what if we could just stop the analysis and say is that helpful is that not helpful is that giving me the change that i want in my life or is that keeping me in the patterns that just create more pain and i wanted something different for my life is that helpful or is that not yeah so if you were to
55:36Darin Olien:if you were to reconstruct the I don't even know what you call it. Let's just call it like a trauma system, health system. How would you go about it so that people can truly start to be free of these trauma patterns? If I ran the world, I would start in kindergarten. I would be teaching the teachers how to lead the kids through somatic exercises, mindfulness, mind-body connection, being able to move through their emotions, not sitting at their desks all day long, starting to even practice that paralysis and immobilization of the trauma response, and being able to learn how to move through and navigate when they have a big emotion, not acting it out, but also not holding it in.
56:38Being able to model healthy expression and movement through emotions, because that is where it all really starts. It just continues on into adulthood. So if we could actually teach our kids that, if we knew that when we were kids, how much of the stuff that we had already experienced might have been released and processed and moved through and metabolized at that time. So that's where I would start. And I wouldn't make it about trauma then. I would just make it about this is what it is like to live with a human body that has a nervous system that's based on survival. And it will do things to help you survive that end up hurting you in the long run, that end up having a cost later on.
57:22And so teaching people, kids, how to have stress responses and then come back to safety. having a trauma response and coming back to safety so that they have that as a model rather than just compounding stress and trauma over their lifetime yeah bypassing it all and say sit down doing a
57:42Darin Olien:sit in a seat you know take all your energy and like if if that and if you can't do that now there's something wrong there's definitely something wrong with you right let's add shame to that right yeah now if i'm working with adults if we bypass that generation and we're working with adults, what would I do to create this system, this model, this approach? I would start them with three, four weeks. I start people through six weeks just because it's more online and teach them these skills of the first layers of the mind-body connection, the somatic self-practices, learning how to shift their own nervous system state, completely unrelated to their trauma.
58:24We're still not even working with their trauma. We are not going to touch their trauma at first. Just getting
58:28Darin Olien:in touch. Exactly, because that's what they need to safely then do the trauma work. And then when we do the trauma work, I find that working on all three levels simultaneously gives us the fastest results in the safest way. So we're going to be doing the mind work and looking at the thoughts and the behaviors, the beliefs about yourself, while also looking at the somatic muscle movements It's discharging adrenaline. These experiences that we can have where we are going and working on a story and we can feel that fluid rising and we can feel all of that, but being able to do it differently this time, to give our body that sense of that is over, that is in the past.
59:13I'm not still that little baby in the NICU. But we also then will also do the biology work at the same time. And one of the key central mechanisms around how trauma gets stored in our biology is oxidative stress. That seems to be a pretty accurate marker for the trauma burden that we have.
59:34Darin Olien:It's fascinating. Wow. And knowing how much the oxidative stress will cause other conditions, PTSD. How are you measuring that then? The oxidation. The overall systemic oxidative stress. One of the best ways to measure that is the oxidation of the DNA. So guanine specifically is one of the four bases in your DNA. That is a target for this oxidative stress. And we can measure that in your blood for the level of oxidation of your nucleus. And that's really the heart of how trauma becomes your physical health conditions. Even looking at autoimmunity, these things that we've thought maybe they're genetic, Maybe they're only environmental and toxin related.
1:00:18They are those, but they also have this component of they all have certain beliefs about themselves. They all have certain specific emotional patterns, patterns in relationships. And the coincidence is hard to miss when you work with them. So it's not just a toxin problem, though it is that as well. It's not just a leaky gut problem, though it is that as well. even looking at autoimmunity you are still going to need to do the mind the somatic and the biology level and yet people with autoimmunity and your physician is aren't going to tell you that they're going to just focus on the biology aspect and your therapist is going to miss the biology and just
1:00:59Darin Olien:focus on the somatic or the mental right yeah and and i would imagine too like if you do like that DNA test and you see the oxidation, that can break or open up the opportunity for the intellect to then grok the idea that you're under a stress, that you're so disconnected that you're like, well, this is just me, right? But then you can go, hey, you're having these thoughts and you're showing high markers so your body's literally under stress, right? So, again, there's all these different toggles to then get to the point where, because I would imagine, like, because it's easy to, if I, you know, talk to someone back home in middle America, whomever, we can just go, this is just who I am.
1:01:56Darin Olien:And you don't know that you're under these kinds of things. Like, I don't think about that anymore. Why would that be bothering me? You know? So this is why it's important to have all three of these aspects to kind of get at the same issue, right? Right. And the body can only handle so much stress before it breaks. Right. You know that from your injuries. It can only handle so much stress before it breaks. The patient story that I tell in the chapter one of my book is about Elena. She's in a car accident, and a year later she develops autoimmunity. she thought it had come out of the blue. It did not.
1:02:39She just didn't know how much trauma burden her body was already carrying. And that car was just the final straw that her body fell apart with that. And so being able to have these measurements, being able to see how disconnected am I? Because that is part of measuring how much trauma burden you are. How much disconnected have you needed to live in order to keep going. And we can look at your DNA. We can look at the, what you tell yourself, your self-talk. Those are ways in which we can look at what is the trauma burden and to have an idea of how close is your body to having a break that it's going to then develop cancer, autoimmunity, PTSD, because you've crossed that line of the amount of stress
1:03:22Darin Olien:that it could hold i have a i have a strange question maybe not so strange but i have a my dog has got an autoimmune condition and now if i think back like he went through a divorce with me he lost his home like i did in a fire and we were also separated for seven months right so i'm like oh my god how do i hate my dog like because i've tried it i've done everything and this dog is so sensitive i broke my foot the next day he couldn't walk that kind of stuff he's that connected he's that connected to me yeah yeah so is it me that he's picking up on or is it his legit probably all of it but he's probably i'm not saying that you have an answer for my dog necessarily, but, but I, but I, I have to think now because, because the doctor's like, well, you just have to, I mean, even holistic, even some best-of-the-all-all, you just have to do this for the rest of your life.
1:04:33Darin Olien:I'm like, no, that's not, that's, he didn't have it. He has something that that's not something I'm going to just go, that's okay. And we all can say that anyone like, I'm not okay with, I wouldn't take that as my diagnosis. I'm like, no, that's not the way I operate. Like it's like, it's the idea that the traditional medical model is, it's just the way it is. It's old age, it's broken. So you have to do this no so so yeah how do i have my dog i'll add to that and then i'll come back to dogs there are many patients that i've had who come to me and they have all of these health conditions and they say well of course i do look at my ace score or my average child experiences score this is what I can expect.
1:05:34I'm going to die younger. They know this and they've settled for it. They've accepted it rather than fighting. And that's part of their trauma response. Part of their trauma response is I'm powerless. There's nothing that I can do. And that's leaked into our medical system and apparently our veterinary system as well. So dogs, I want to tell you about the really important study they did. This was Dr. Seligman. He did a study on dogs that shows how trauma gets stored in our body. Wow. He took a container and he made two sides to it. One side had an electrical pad that would provide shocks. The other did not have any electrical pad and there was a small barrier that he built into it so that they had to jump over it, but they could easily jump over it.
1:06:27he took several dogs and he tied half of them to the wall on the side where they were getting shocked so that they couldn't jump over the wall. Only half of them. He turns on the shock, the half that's not tied up, they jump over and they're fine. This half that tried to jump over and couldn't. When he redid the experiment and now none of the dogs were tied up, he turned on the shock. The dogs who'd been tied up before, they never even tried again. They watched their friends jump over. They actually laid down on the mat that was giving them shocks and just whimpered.
1:07:17Darin Olien:Oh my God. It's this idea of this is how trauma impacts us but I'm going to go one step further they decided that they were going to try to untraumatize these dogs what do we need to do what what how do we heal their trauma they tried everything Darren they gave them treats they put all these treats over here on this other side if they would only jump over the wall the treats didn't change anything in fact I see a lot of people who do this where they think others deserve a good life there's something wrong with me that I don't deserve a good life I shouldn't even try how they had to help the dogs learn to jump over the wall they actually had to come in and move their legs for them in the jumping movement.
1:08:13And then the dogs remembered how to jump. This is the same thing with us. We can intellectualize and we can say, wow, there's treats over on that other side. Wow, that would be so much better of a life. Wow, that would be so much better of a relationship to have. We can see it and we still won't be able to do it because we literally have this programming that I don't know how I can see other people accomplishing it. So I theoretically know how, but I can't make my body do something different. And it has to come down to the body. We actually have to go through the motions, go through the movements.
1:08:55And we're not going to be able to do that if we're neglecting the body aspect and the biology aspect. So with your dog specifically, I can only say that I agree with you I think everything is involved he is so connected to you he is so connected to you
1:09:13Darin Olien:well I'm going to have to do some I don't know but like I talk to him and yeah but it's express itself into in that kind of and there are many dogs that I've seen who had a rough start in childhood and they've never been able to not be anxious. Not be terrified. We just don't have these great therapies for dogs yet. You can't talk to them in a certain sense. I've had psychics have all kinds of stuff. Of course. We do everything for our pets.
1:09:53Darin Olien:I love this. I love the work that you're doing. I can't wait for everyone to get this book. And I think this deserves a movement. It really does. And I hope you express this movement as big as possible. And I'll help in any way that I can. Thank you, Darren. I really do see it as a movement of hope. We're not stuck. We're not stuck with our past. There's hope. There's hope to get out of the trauma. There is. And to not just be paralyzed by it. Right. But we have to acknowledge all of these different aspects to it. And understand the science of it. Yeah. This isn't woo-woo. Like there is real science of how the body holds on and what it needs to release it.
1:10:48Yeah.
1:10:48Darin Olien:Thank you so much because this is a huge aspect of what I care about. And I want people to literally live a super life. and this is a huge huge thing that we all need to learn more about ourselves and about these these aspects of ourselves to liberate us from these things that we just we will have we will have trauma but we don't have to stay in trauma yeah you're the best thank you no thank you thank you for the work that you do give it a go we do our best that's right thank you
From the publisher
In this powerful episode, Darin Olien sits down with Dr. Aimie Apigian, a double board-certified physician and leading expert in the biology of trauma, to dive deep into how our nervous systems carry the scars of early life experiences—and what we can do to finally heal.
Dr. Aimie shares her deeply personal story of adopting a traumatized child while in medical school, how it led her to challenge traditional medicine, and the revolutionary model she's created for resolving trauma through biology—not just psychology.
This conversation is full of practical insights, emotional resonance, and hope for those who've struggled to find healing through conventional paths.
What You'll Learn:
[00:00] Welcome to the SuperLife Podcast
[01:45] Who is Dr. Aimie Apigian?
[03:20] The biology of trauma vs. psychology of trauma
[06:05] The moment her adopted son changed her path forever
[08:30] Trauma is stored in the body, not just in the mind
[11:40] Fight, flight, freeze... and "functional freeze" explained
[15:30] How stored trauma becomes a health issue
[18:45] The body's role in trauma healing: polyvagal theory basics
[23:15] Trauma vs. chronic stress: understanding the distinction
[27:00] Why somatic therapy is critical and where to begin
[32:10] Dr. Aimie's 3-step roadmap to trauma healing
[36:40] The role of the vagus nerve and nervous system regulation
[40:55] How trauma shows up in physical illness and fatigue
[45:15] Tools to move from freeze to flow
[49:35] Why high-performers often suppress their trauma
[53:20] Rewriting your biology: real healing is possible
[57:10] Parenting with regulated nervous systems
[1:00:20] The science behind how trauma affects DNA
[1:04:15] Final reflections: healing yourself is how we heal the world
[1:08:00] Where to find Dr. Aimie and her upcoming programs
[1:10:00] Closing thoughts from Darin
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Find More From Dr. Aimie Apigian:
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Website: www.biologyoftrauma.com
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Instagram: @draimie
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Follow her YouTube Channel
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Accelerate your trauma healing with her 21 Day Journey
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Pre-Order her upcoming book: The Biology of Trauma
Find More from Darin Olien:
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Instagram: @darinolien
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Podcast: SuperLife
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Website: https://superlife.com
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Book: Fatal Conveniences
Key Takeaway:
"The body doesn't forget trauma—even when the mind does. True healing starts when we stop trying to 'think' our way out and start reconnecting with the biology underneath the story."