Episode 261: How to get out of Survival Mode With Dr. Aimee Apigain
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You know that feeling after you push through a big event or deadline, the letdown that leaves you tired, unmotivated, and usually sick? Most women assume that it’s either burnout or laziness. But according to my guest, Dr. Amy Apigian, it’s actually a trauma response. Dr. Amy is a medical physician, a trauma expert, and the host of the Biology of Trauma podcast.
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She’s here to explain why our bodies store trauma and how that trauma quietly drives brain fog, fatigue, autoimmune disorders, and even nightly drinking habits. In this conversation, we’re gonna unpack how you can tell the difference between a stress response and a trauma response based on what you’re thinking and why extended periods of stress without recovery, AKA survival mode, actually cause trauma.
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We’re talking about what it looks like to complete the trauma response instead of storing it and give you simple ways to give your body time, safety and energy so it can reset. I’m also going to share my own story of the crash that I had after a recent retreat that I hosted and what changed when I treated my trauma response with compassion instead of the usual bullwhip. You’ll hear Dr. Amy break it down in real time.
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If you’ve been blaming yourself for not having enough willpower, for being too tired, or for never getting it together, you’ve got to hear this episode. Your body isn’t broken. It’s protecting you. You just have to learn how to return the favor.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober, it’s not about the alcohol.
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Dr. Amy, I am so tickled to have you back on the show and do a follow-up episode. I didn’t feel like we got to go deep enough last time, so I appreciate you rescheduling and coming back. But let’s just reintroduce you to the audience. Can you explain who you are and what you do? I am Dr. Amy Apigion, and I am a medical physician, and I help address stored trauma in the body and its chronic impact on our biology. All right.
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Well, I’d love to just dive right in. You I am a big fan of your podcast and I have learned so much from you as well as your guests. Can you just give us a broad overview on the biology of trauma? Yes. And how do you give a broad overview of such a big topic? And for me, there’s two parts to this. And the first part is that trauma impacts our body and biology.
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We know that, we know the science of it. Well, at least we’ve understood that there’s that connection. We haven’t understood the mechanisms, which was why it was important for me to write my book. But there’s this second element to the concept, which is that then that biology creates a feedback cycle. And our own biology is what keeps us stuck in those trauma patterns so that we can be 10 years, 20 years, 30 years into
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this experience and we’re still living under the impact of what happened to us earlier. And whether we think that our mind has healed and we’ve done all of the knowledge work, but our body is still sick or we’re still developing physical health issues, sometimes even all the way to diagnoses, that’s not true freedom from the past. True freedom from the past also includes
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this repair of our biology. Okay, so you talk a lot about physical symptoms that most of us don’t associate with trauma, know, brain fog, fatigue, even autoimmune disorders, but you’re saying that they are trauma related. How do you know if physical symptoms that you have that are unpleasant are related to trauma versus just any other fatigue or brain fog? Like, how do you differentiate?
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That’s a really good question. And when I look at the nervous system, I look at is the nervous system in safety mode or is it in survival mode? Those are very different states. And what state we are in is going to be determining everything about the rest of our physiology. And when I look at whether we are in safety mode or survival mode, a safety mode does not have brain fog.
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Safety mode does not have health. It’s the survival mode that has all of these health issues starting to happen. And there are two levels to our survival mode. We have a stress level and we have the trauma level. But either way, when we’re in that survival mode, our healing strategies are not being engaged. Those only get engaged when we’re in the safety mode. So when we are recovering, and I like to use the analogy,
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of an Olympic athlete. When they are in the middle of their training and their workout and their exercise, they’re in stress mode. They’re not in recovery mode. Recovery mode happens after their workout. But yet that recovery mode is just as important as their workout. In fact, some would argue it’s more important than their workout. And they emphasize the recovery that is needed for them to be at their best. Why?
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because that’s when their body engages its own natural healing and growth strategies. So it’s going to turn on all of those detoxification pathways that we want running for us because if we don’t have our detoxification pathways running, we are accumulating toxins. And so even just that simple fact, if I am living mostly in fear, if most of my day I am spent worried, anxious, overwhelmed,
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my body is not detoxifying the everyday toxins I’m being exposed to. And then we get to bedtime and well, my sleep’s not optimal. I don’t really have my environment set up for just the right container environment for my body to get the best sleep, which means I’m not actually fully recovering during the time that I’m sleeping either. So now I’m waking up and I haven’t actually cleaned up all of the mess
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from yesterday, meaning the oxidative stress. Again, these toxins that we’re exposed to just from the water we drink, the food we eat, they already breathe. I mean, we can’t avoid toxins in our world today, let alone the emotional toxins. What about the emotional toxins that we’re exposed to by the people around us, our family, our coworkers, maybe even ourselves if we are doing all that negative self-talk? We haven’t cleaned that stuff out yet.
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And so we’re waking up and we’re back in survival mode from the moment that we wake up. And as long as we’re in survival mode, our body is not able to have that recovery that actually allows it to be in its best health. And so you take that and multiply that by years, because that’s how we live. We live years like this. That will only lead to disease.
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So yes, the brain fog, the exhaustion, the fatigue, and even diagnoses, IBS, digestive system issues, skin issues, migraines, it’s all going to be as a result of a nervous system that never had its chance for recovery and reset and safety to allow
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the human mechanisms to be in place. Okay, so I have so many questions and I want to start with the felt experience and the story of reality that you think you’re living in because it is just now becoming clear to me like I had a retreat that I did two weeks ago and post retreat, a lot of clients were talking about just the let down after the retreat and how they were feeling and I was like,
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what are you guys talking about? Because I didn’t really come home from the retreat. I came home and went right into this hyper manic state because I wanted to create a new course feed based on the retreat to give to everybody else. And so I went through the entire week flying high on what would be adrenaline. My experience was excited. I felt really positive. I was just going to push through a hundred foot brick wall prior to
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allowing myself to come down. And I know that’s probably stress and not trauma, but it never occurred to me to label that I was in a stress response. Can you talk about why we don’t see these states that are not safety and connection parasympathetic, why we don’t see them as being physiological? This is so true. And this was actually most of my life.
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And I was a physician. I thought I knew the body. And yet I would identify these as exactly emotional states rather than actual inner physiology. And this was one of the hardest things for me as I wrote my book. Where do I put in the actual physiological steps that the body takes to go into a full trauma response? I wanted to warm people up to the idea that you can have trauma, that it becomes stored.
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And eventually, Colleen, I put it in the very first chapter, like this is how I start my book. This is how your body experiences a trauma response because then everything flows from here. And we recognize it as emotional because that’s what we’re mostly aware of. We’re not aware of the noradrenaline underneath the surface with the start of a response. We’re not aware of when that changes to adrenaline and now we’re in that stress response. We’re not aware of when
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Cortisol starts to come online 15 minutes later. We’re not aware of the switching from the sympathetic to the dorsal vagal signaling that will take us from the stress response into the trauma response. We’re just not aware of all of this stuff happening underneath the surface, which is why I wanted to write the book that says here’s actually what’s happening in your body. It is not about what’s happening outside of you. It’s about what’s happening inside and not just emotionally.
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physiologically, which is why we need to talk about what’s happening at the biology level to repair that, because otherwise we will continue to focus just on the emotional work that we do need to do and neglect the biology repair. Okay. So before I ask more questions, let’s just bring the audience in to basically, how do you know if you are in a parasympathetic state? How do you know if you are not?
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either stressed or trauma? Like, is there a simple way to take a test right now as you’re listening and be like, okay, I’m turned on, I’m activated, or I’m actually where I’m supposed to be? The way that I have people assess this is their energy level. And it was how I learned about my own nervous system states was doing this deep study into what do I notice in the different states that I seem to go into where sometimes I’m
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very alive and I’m creative and I want to connect with people and other times I do not. And when I don’t, am I stressed? Am I high energy? Am I low energy? So there are these three states and what I do is actually I have people fill out what I call a nervous system journal. It’s one of the resources that I share for those reading the book is I say, hey, go to this webpage. I’ll share my nervous system journal with you so that you can start to track it as well.
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but they do need to have some level of awareness of their inner state to be able to know what state am I in. And so the ventral vagal or parasympathetic, as you said, is one state. And that is the words that I use to describe that is feeling calm, but alive. And I use that calm aliveness to differentiate from calm and numb. We’re not talking about you being numb.
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and that’s why you’re calm. We’re not talking about you being calm because you’ve just had an alcoholic drink and it’s created this calmness by numbing some aspect of your nervous system. We’re talking about true calm and yet alive. That is the parasympathetic. That is this recovery stage where no matter what our genetics, no matter what our past, no matter what our diagnoses, we will be in our best health.
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when we are in that state naturally. We won’t have to force it. And that’s exactly what it feels like when we’re in the other states. We’re having to force ourselves. We’re having to push ourselves. So let’s talk about the stress response. The stress state is the highest energy state that we have. This is not overwhelmed. Overwhelm is the next stage. So this is where we feel high energy. Now that high energy can either because
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We’re excited about a challenge that we’re working through, or it can be a real life danger where a mother’s lifting a car off of her child. It’s high energy and you have the ability to do superhuman things sometimes because of this high energy state. It’s fueled by adrenaline. Then we have this third state, and this third state feels the opposite of that.
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It feels like the lowest energy state. So imagine those times in your life where you have felt depressed. You just felt heavy. You felt overwhelmed. You had to keep going, but you were having to push yourself through to keep going. You were having to find ways to get through your day, to try to keep up with the responsibilities. But you definitely weren’t feeling well or feeling at your best.
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There was a background heaviness and exhaustion. So that’s this third state where it feels heavy. You feel the exhaustion, you feel the overwhelm and to varying degrees, you can push yourself through, but that’s exactly what it has to be. You’re having to push yourself through rather than naturally just having all of this energy that it doesn’t feel like a push. just feels like I’m in the flow, for example. Yeah.
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And that’s what happened to me. So I had put on this retreat, which of course took weeks of planning. You get there, you’re on, you know, 15 hours a day, FaceTime helping. Then I come home and I go into this project that just had to be done immediately. No Sunday off for you, lady. And then what happened is I got it done. And then let’s say it was the Sunday morning. think the next week it was Sunday morning. And instead of feeling like,
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this euphoric sense of relief, it’s done. All of a sudden, I just immediately dropped into like, I don’t even care about any of this. I can’t go to work anymore. Like I don’t even, and it was such a weird thing because I expected to feel so good about my accomplishment, which is what alerted me to the fact that just perhaps maybe I had been in a stress response for an extended period of time, weeks.
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And then I pushed over, you I got it done and I pushed out, but instead of going back into parasympathetic, I guess maybe I’d pushed myself into the trauma response. You know, what you’re describing is in my book, I call it the critical line of overwhelm. And we can do a stress response, but a stress response is like a sprint. A stress response is like a sprint. If we were jogging, we could jog for a long time.
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But if we’re gonna do a sprint, a full on sprint, well, we can’t do that forever. That’s why it’s called a sprint. Because we are all hands on deck at our highest energy level. That is unsustainable. But what we can often do as human beings is we can push those limits. We can say, no rest for you. You have to keep going. You have to keep going. And we cross a line.
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that we often don’t notice that we’re crossing at the time. We don’t often recognize it until afterwards where our body has said, no, I’ve got to switch survival strategies to help us keep going at this pace. And that’s when we know, okay, I’m feeling that there’s a bigger letdown, a bigger collapse, a bigger shutdown than what I thought there would be because now I recognize I crossed the line for the amount of stress
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that my body could hold for that amount of time that I asked it to hold it for. Okay. So then what would be, let’s say, the response to this exact scenario where then that Sunday moving into Monday, I didn’t have any, any fucks to give and I didn’t feel excited about going to work. Like now that we understand that my, my,
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pushed my nervous system too far. What does it mean to have respect to that? Because what I think I tend to do is I rest, and I’m using air quotes for the listener, rest in trauma response, and then I go right back into the stress response and push, push, push. And then at some point I feel like, you know, that’s not necessarily a great... Talk to me about the difference between vacillating between stress and trauma.
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and actually going into a phase of recovery. And that’s exactly what you’ve just described. You’ve described the cycling between stress and overwhelm. In my book, I call it the body trauma loop. It’s the loop. And we’re either in stress or we’re in the overwhelm. And we come out of the overwhelm and we go into stress until we cross the line again and we’re back in overwhelm.
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What we need to do in order to get out of that loop is actually allow the deep rest that our body needs in order to really feel like it has reset back to safety. And this is uncomfortable for those of us who like to be busy, who like to accomplish things, because we can feel like we’re being unproductive, useless, lazy.
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But what the body needs when it comes, when it goes into that overwhelm are three things. It needs time, which we’re often not giving it. It needs time, but it needs to feel safe. And we’re often not creating the safety. We’re just piling up the to-do list so that when we have the energy again, we’ll go right back at it. That’s not safety. That’s not feeling safe. So it’s time and safety. And then the third thing that we need is energy.
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And this is what I experienced in my own body is that I had run my nervous system for so long in survival mode, it was depleted of many of the nutrients that it needs to make energy. And so it didn’t take much stress anymore to push me across that line of overwhelm and I’m back in the collapse. I wasn’t able to hold as much stress or for as long as I used to because my cells literally didn’t have enough things like
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magnesium, like zinc, like B6, and it was surrounded by all this inflammation, which drains our energy to have to clean that up. So we look at energy, time, and safety as being the three things that it needs. So when I notice my body going into a trauma response, that is when I know that the best thing that I can do at that time is to stop trying to push my way through. It’s actually just to
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push everything away and say, this is my time to rest. I found that if I tried to push my way through and still stay productive and at least try to still get some things done, it didn’t get that full reset. It didn’t get that time in safety. So it would come out and would come back out in stress and we’d go right back into overwhelm again. this idea that recognizing that I need to allow my body to just be
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So I started experimenting with, well, what does that even mean? So laying down and providing sensory rest is going to be important. What does that mean? Our nervous system is what gets overwhelmed. That’s what sends us into a trauma response is our nervous system getting overwhelmed. So what are all the things that our nervous system does for us that we can minimize during this specific time so that it can have space to breathe and reset?
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Our nervous system is collecting information about the light, about sound, about what we are feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, right? Like these are the senses, even the sense of the energy between me and another person. And so sometimes when I’m in this state and I need to give my nervous system complete rest, I need to go away from everyone because otherwise I notice my nervous system still trying to tune into them. Are they okay?
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Is their nervous system okay? Do I need to do anything for them? And it’s like, no, right now, right now, it is only and all about coming back to ourselves. And so we need to remove ourselves from that energy sense because it drains my nervous system. But what about the lights? Yes, like I put myself in dark lights. I don’t turn on any of the artificial lights. I just let myself have the natural light. I will even sometimes wear sunglasses to protect my light because
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I can decrease the drain, the energy drain on my nervous system by reducing the sensory information coming in. And I know that this is not permanent. I know that this is just for this period of time to allow my nervous system to have the reset that it needs to then come back out and enjoy life again. I think of it like a turtle who’s gone into its shell. Yeah. A turtle who’s gone into its shell. I know that it’s not permanent.
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And so I no longer worry about that. used to worry about that. I used to worry that, my goodness, am I letting myself go too deep into this heaviness and this collapse that I’m never going to come out again? I actually had that worry. I hadn’t done these experiments with myself yet. I didn’t know if this was even safe for me to do. being able to see that this is the time that it’s like my inner turtle just goes into its shell because it got so overwhelmed with the danger around it.
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that it needs to just withdraw and withdraw from everything. So even during this time, like I will protect myself against loud noises. I’ll often wear my earbuds so that I can block out other noises and just be playing calming, relaxing music. That’s not anything that’s too stimulating for my nervous system. This is not the time to listen to podcasts and audio books because that’s forcing my brain to try to pay attention. And this is the time to just rest.
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Just rest. That’s so interesting and also validating because I kind of recognized that I should feel more relieved and energized and I was over it. And really by allowing myself to do exactly what I think I just laid on my bed and watched my fan rotate that Sunday and decided taking it slow Monday. I still went to work, but no fires to put out. And by Tuesday, I was back to my peppy, busy self.
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where I think this has been a learning process, but it’s been subtle, where giving yourself some actual time and space actually goes pretty far. You’re refilling your gas tank there, lady. And how hard is that to do yet, right? Like for people like us, that is so hard to do. Just let myself lay here and watch the fan, or what I will do is I’ll lay outside of my hammock and watch the clouds. People are like, what are you doing? I’m watching the clouds. Yeah.
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Why would you be watching? Because this is my nervous system getting its reset, getting its message of everything is okay. Everything is okay. Everything will be okay. We don’t know how, but we know that everything will be okay. The universe is okay. And this is the time that we do that. so knowing that once we cross the line, this is what we need to do. If we can catch it before we cross the line, well, then we can do other, what would be more?
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traditional self-care practices. Those are great for when we’re still in a stress response and we need to be able to make it more sustainable. But if we’ve already crossed that line, those self-care strategies are not gonna be enough. Even a 30 minute bath up, it’s not gonna be enough. You really need this time that you noticed Sunday and Monday really then gave you, and that’s been about my experience. Usually two to three days is what my body needs for just.
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retreating into its shell in whatever form that looks like to then come back, be good, like bounce back to my usual self. Yeah. Well, even that being said, I did bounce back to my usual self, but I have not returned to a really high level to just, it was interesting that you said like, I don’t want to listen to podcasts. Like normally I eat that for breakfast and it’s my brain’s just like, give me that, me, me, give me, give me.
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And I just haven’t had the desire or the interest. And I’m like, that’s just me resetting. Like nothing has gone wrong. I just, I’m not ready to take that in yet. Like maybe I still am in recovery, but just noticing those subtle things about my own desire and allowing myself to not cram more information down my throat for the 3,430 book I’ve read this year. like it’s okay to just like put my mascara on.
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without trying to learn a bunch while I’m doing that. But what I’m interested in is this is not the conversation about trauma that I think we normally have. We usually talk about trauma as bad things that happened to you when you were a kid. Can you even just use my situational story and explain how that’s trauma and
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What does that have to do, if anything, with like childhood trauma? So looking at trauma, we see it as an internal experience. We see it as a response of the body under certain conditions. In that sense, it’s not about the event. And that is why two people can go through the same event and one of them be okay and another not. Same event, or maybe two children being raised in the same family and yet, whoa.
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very different outcomes. Why? Because it’s not about the event. It’s about what’s happening inside of us. And we have these strategies for surviving what feels like unsurvivable. And our body is wired to keep us alive and to do whatever it needs to keep us alive. So if in any moment it says, you know, you’re pushing too hard, you’re exceeding your capacity.
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and you don’t recognize it because your brain keeps pushing us. And so since you’re not recognizing it and you’re not listening to me, then I am going to make the decision. I’m going to throw on the emergency break and we’re going to go into the trauma response. And so that’s how I like to use that language because it helps me even remember that it’s not about what happened or what didn’t happen that should have happened. It’s not about
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the abuse, it’s not about the neglect, it was my internal response. And there is a very specific physiological response that happens when we reach overwhelm, whether that is emotional overwhelm, psychological overwhelm, or I’m going to tell you, biochemical overwhelm. It’s all the same to our cells. Our cells don’t know any different because all they know is they are exceeding their capacity. And when that happens,
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They have a very specific response to help us survive that. Okay. So then how does trauma get stored in the body? Yeah. So that’s a great question. If we had this response to overwhelm and we survived something that was almost unsurvivable at the time, why does our body hold on to it? Why doesn’t it just let go, move on? Because it’s in the past.
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Right? And this is where it’s not in the past. This is not in the past. Now, I want to tell you that it is possible to complete a trauma response at that time so that it doesn’t get stored. But this is not what we’ve been taught. This is not what our kids have been taught. So we don’t know this about life. We didn’t get that manual when we were born. And so we’re experiencing trauma responses and we haven’t known how to complete them in the moment.
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And that is when the body stores onto it. And it stores it in a way because it says, I still sense that the danger might be there. We haven’t had that reset to safety. And so then this background sense of danger constantly exists because our body’s like, but is it going to happen again? Is it still there? And so we’re always now in stress mode. And when we’re in stress mode, how much more stress can we add on? If we’re already holding a lot of stress.
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just from our past experiences and the what-ifs of what might happen if something similar happens, and we have a new stress come into our life. Well, for many of us, we’re already at capacity. And so that new stress now sends us into overwhelm. And so this is then how the body just actually starts to accumulate more trauma over time because then that new stress and...
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the trauma response that it created, it’s not something that we’re completing because we don’t know how. And so it’s like we’re going on a hike through life and every trauma response is picking up a rock as we hike along. And the first few aren’t that bad. You know, we can kind of hold them in such a way that it doesn’t impact our ability to hike this walk of our life.
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the more the rocks we pick up, the more they start to be cumbersome, the more they start to slow us down, the more heavy they start to become. And now it becomes harder to just move through life. And we get afraid of triggers that make us more aware of the rocks or make us drop all the rocks and then have to pick them back up. And so now we’re trying to like avoid our triggers because we don’t want any of this stuff to be bumped. then eventually we just have to buy a backpack because we’re holding so much that
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We can’t carry it all, so we buy a backpack and we put all the rocks in the backpack, except we pick up more. And every trauma response that we have is picking up another rock until eventually we’re trying to do a hike, pushing a wheelbarrow full of rocks. And that is going to impact your ability to show up for yourself, your ability to express your authentic self, your ability to even know your authentic self.
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let alone be able to be present for others, be able to co-regulate with others, have healthy relationships, and even feel like you can expand in your personal development and your career and professional life because at this point, you’re just trying to get through. You’re just trying to push this wheelbarrow down the path. You don’t have the energy and it doesn’t feel safe to be seen. There’s so much of yourself that you don’t like that you’re trying to hide. Okay.
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All right, so in the story that I gave, I could see that as an example of I did complete the trauma response. So I didn’t store it. But for years, I’ve done that and hit the ground running Monday and pushed through it. And maybe I got enough sleep to keep going. But what it sounds like is that pushing through for anything more than a short window of necessary time.
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is how trauma then begins to accumulate in the body and then your resilience over time goes down physically, mentally, emotionally, all of those things because you haven’t completed the response by spending enough time in the parasympathetic state. Yeah, and this idea of completion, like I love that you’re using this language because the trauma response, needs to be completed. The stress response needs to be completed. If we don’t...
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Complete a stress response it becomes a trauma response. Those are the only two pathways You go into stress and you either complete it or you escalate it Same with the startle response. We always have a startle But you either complete the startle return to a sense of safety or if you don’t complete it it Escalates into the stress response where once again you have the opportunity to complete it And if you don’t well, then it escalates in the trauma response
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And there, then, now this is a longer process to complete a trauma response than just a stress response. But if we don’t complete it, it just lingers. It stays stored. It doesn’t magically go away. Just like with our breath, right? Like when we take a breath in, our body’s waiting for us to exhale. That’s the same thing with our stress, with our trauma responses. It’s like taking a deep breath in,
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and then not letting the exhale out. Our body is lying to experience something and then let it go. And we’re the ones not letting it go because we haven’t known how. And then these are the chronic effects of that. Okay. All right. So let’s talk about the mindset that matches each state of the nervous system and how you’re making sense of the reality. So what I’m assuming is that
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You know, in the past, I might’ve done my month long marathon, come home, and then when I was tired, beat myself up because I didn’t get enough done, or look back and see what other balls I dropped, or how I can’t keep going like this. This is just on, and then kind of traumatizing myself about the trauma because I’m seeing it as a sign of weakness or a sign of this is bullshit and I can’t keep doing it.
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Whereas when I returned back to a parasympathetic state, I had a much clearer, undisturbed, not bothered mindset. So can you talk about what it sounds like up in crazy town when you are in regular sympathetic or parasympathetic, when you’re stressed, fight, flight, freeze, fix. Like these are themes in your brain. It’s 2025, nobody’s running from a bear, but you’re arguing, you’re defending, are you fixing.
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Or you’re overwhelmed, I can’t do this. Talk about the mindset that accompanies so that people can learn how to orient and diagnose the state that they’re in by the story in their head. These are such good questions. The mindset is one way that we can recognize which state we’re in because our physiology creates our thoughts. Yes, our thoughts can influence our physiology, but at the end of the day, our physiology will create our thoughts.
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So for me in working with those who come through my courses, I’m asking them, what is the first thought of the day? I don’t want your thought after you’ve thought about your thought and what do you want your thought to be. I want that first thought before you have a chance to change it and say, oh no, I’ve agreed to that positive mindset. I need to change that thought. What’s the very first thought? So the thoughts that a person will have when they are in parasympathetic,
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as you’ve mentioned, are ones where I am excited about life. What else is there to learn? What else is there to explore? I am totally in the moment and I don’t even have to try to think about being in the moment. I’m just in the moment. And I am so able to connect with you because I’m connected with myself. When we are in the stress physiology state, our thoughts will be one of, what do I need to do?
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There’s a problem. This could go really wrong. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And I’m doing it and I’m problem solving. So there’s a lot of planning. There’s a lot of problem solving. There’s a lot of action. When we are in the trauma response state, the thoughts that we have are, I’m useless. It’s useless. I’m a failure. I’m not enough. No one is going to like me. I should just hide. I should just stop trying. You’re nodding your head as if you’ve had those thoughts before.
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Of course, yeah. This is why I wanted to write this book is to show people you are having trauma responses all the time and you haven’t even known it. Yeah. Because when we can recognize it, then that allows us to really recognize how much time we are spending under the influence of the past. Is that really how we want to live moving forward? And if not, here are the repair tools and most of the repair tools are going to be focused on
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the nervous system regulation, so the biology piece, because it’s not going to be, well, just change your thought and have a different thought. That doesn’t change your inner physiology. It doesn’t change the physiology that created that thought. So this is so helpful. The other thing that is really important about our thoughts though, and I want to really highlight this for people, you brought it up in terms of the stories that we can tell ourselves. And the amount of stress
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that we will experience is in direct proportion to the size of the danger that we see. And when we are in a stressful moment like a marathon putting a retreat on, for example, there is so much behind that. It’s not just the retreat. It’s everything about you. It’s are you good enough? Are you?
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are you know, imposter syndrome, are you really the right one to be able to put on this retreat? Who are you to host this retreat? What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong? Well, then no one will like you. Everyone will know that you are the failure. You already know that you’re a failure, but everybody else will know that you’re a failure. And all of a sudden we have taken hosting a retreat to this huge monumental life threat.
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of I might die alone on the streets and homeless and that’s the size of the danger that our body sees and our body is like, shoot, this is too big of a danger for me. I can’t do this and because we have created a problem so much bigger than what it actually is, we’ve caused our nervous system to cross that line into overwhelm. And so how important it is.
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to do, I want to say like schedule, schedule time with ourselves to just pause and evaluate. Am I creating a story here that doesn’t help? Am I creating a story that’s actually making a mountain out of a molehill? Am I creating the perception of a life threat when actually it doesn’t need to be? And when I can then
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kind of check myself and the perceptions that I’m creating, it allows me to bring my body back into the stress mode where it should be to put a retreat on and not go into the overwhelm because of all of my attachment insecurities that are also getting triggered and are feeling like a life threat if I don’t do it perfectly. Yeah, yeah. I really like using the...
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quality of my own thoughts, kind of like have a third party auditor go through the transcript and be like on a scale of one to 10, like how oversized or undersized is my reaction? And then if I can just get myself to see that, oh, this is trauma or this is stress, then like, okay, I’m going to put it aside. I’ll come worry about it. I’ll be right back. All you worries, you just sit there. I’m going to go get into a parasympathetic state.
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I’m gonna bring the big guy back to have this conversation with y’all. And it’s just amazing we don’t realize that we think how we feel. And if we focus first on addressing the physiology and getting ourselves back into a parasympathetic state, that our whole insight, our identity, imposter, you’re welcome. I just put on the best retreat ever.
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where five minutes before that, was like, oh my God, so-and-so got COVID at the airport and now my retreat is gonna be known as everybody got COVID. But then once I was able to look at it, it’s like, well, that either happens or it doesn’t, but just understanding that our brain, we can use our brain to manage our brain. And I don’t think anybody ever told us that. No one gave me that message. And for me, this is so much of the parts work that you’re bringing in.
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this idea that we have different parts of us and I can say, okay, worry part, I hear you, hold on, I’m going to go get my parasympathetic part. And I’m going to bring them into the picture, into the conversation. Exactly. Now we can have a different conversation that is more aligned with my true capacity and my resources and my knowledge base that I can’t even access when I’m just in that worry part.
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Right, right, right. All right, so let’s talk about your new book. My first question for you is who is this book for? Is it for practitioners or is it for just normal people with a normal human body live in normal lives? This is for your normal everyday person who has a human body and they’re trying to do their best in life and they want the manual for their survival system. This is showing you that inner map.
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to how your body survives anything and everything and helps you recover and what might be blocking its innate ability to recover if it hasn’t yet. And the subtitle of your book, which I absolutely love, is what it means, or no, let’s see, the subtitle of the book is? How the body experiences and holds fear, pain, and overwhelm. Yes. And how to heal it. Yes, how to heal it, thank you. How to heal.
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fear, pain, and overwhelm. So you’re saying there’s a chance. it’s possible to heal. Like the pain, the fear, the overwhelm, does it go away or is it something you’re managed? What does it look like to heal from trauma? Fear, pain, and overwhelm needs to be repaired. So when I think of a relationship and I’ve done something or they’ve done something that
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broke trust, broke connection. It just needs to be repaired. It doesn’t need to be forever damaged. And in fact, when we repair a relationship and both people are part of that repair process, it can become an even more beautiful and stronger relationship because of the repair. So that’s the same thing with trauma. Trauma has created ruptures and ruptures need to be repaired.
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And so I have so much hope from learning the science of what I have in my book. This is what’s given me hope. Before I knew the science, I didn’t have much hope. And I didn’t know if you could actually reverse, repair, heal any of this. And so it really wasn’t until I learned this science of how the body experiences trauma, why and how it holds on,
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that it gave me the tools to say, then here’s what I can do about it. And as I applied the tools in the right order, it was like magic started happening. And I realized, where was this all along? Where was this in my medical training? Where was this in my educational system? This is what has allowed me to navigate life differently than anything else that I’ve been taught because I know my body, I know my nervous system.
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And now I know we’re in stress mode. Okay, so this is what I do because I’m in stress mode. Oh, we’re approaching that line of overwhelm. Do I want to pull back? Do I want to just let myself go over? It just allows me to be more of the driver in my life rather than feeling like I’m just letting life happen to me and there’s not much that I have in control. I have so much hope now. Good.
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Well, I love that that’s a possibility. Just to complete the full circle, I noticed this morning, two weeks later, that I still didn’t want to listen to a podcast, although I did listen to yours yesterday and it was so good. But, and I caught myself thinking, am I going to wake up, I think it was after your podcast, am I going to wake up with an autoimmune disorder? Am I pushing myself too hard? And I recognized that that thought was a sign that my body was in a stress response. Exactly.
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And so I said, you know what, we’re going on an extra long walk this morning. We’re gonna do what we gotta do, but I’m gonna give you as much time. And like that to me is the repair that you’re speaking of with the relationship with myself, instead of scaring the shit out of me for every little sign of aging or sign that, you know, I haven’t quite bounced back and oh, this means you’re gonna die alone in a van down by the river from some horrible disease that’s your own damn fault. I was like, that thought, that question.
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That’s not me in a parasympathetic state. So we’re going to go watch the clouds a little longer today. That’s right. And that’s what I love. Like it gives us something to do about it. And what I would have done before when I would have had one of those thoughts, it would have been like a runaway train. I would have chased that train all day long and I would have been in stress and then overwhelmed and binge eating and eating ice cream by the end of the day and watching movies. Right?
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That’s the runaway train for me. And so to be able to recognize now like, uh isn’t that interesting? I just had a thought that told me I’m in stress or overwhelm mode. So let me stop. I’m not going to chase that thought because it’s not about the thought. It’s about the state that created that thought. And I now know what to do about the state. And I’m going to go on a little long walk today. I’m going to spend some time watching the clouds today.
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Well, your tools are amazing and that’s where I’ve gotten a lot of them. So I went on my walk and I was like, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank like doing a gratitude thing, you know, and just like, I’m in control of how I feel right now and I’m going to slow it down until the gears kick in, you know, I get traction again. So is your book released yet? Can you give us the details on that and what everybody can do to get it? can give you the details. And while I have the hardcover copy of my book,
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Everyone else gets it September 23. Oh, September 23 is the official release date of the biology of trauma. This has been, wow, what a labor. What a labor. It is truly like birthing a baby. To figure out how do you take all of this experience and knowledge and present it to readers in a way that will pull them in.
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And so I have many stories in this book, but these are not the traumatizing stories that you might find in other trauma books. These are stories of everyday people. Most of them who didn’t even think that they’d ever had trauma. But I walk you through the inner experience that they’re having in different moments so that you and the reader can see this is the three different states. This is what I’m in each state. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. And this is what I can do about it. So.
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It’s, I mean, I rewrote this seven different times. So this is the eighth edition already, just because I wanted it to create a very specific experience and really truly be the manual for people’s nervous system and the healing journey. Yeah. Well, I cannot wait to read it. I thank you so much for the work that you do because you’re keeping the rest of us healing. clouds.
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watching clouds, watching more clouds and repairing our relationship with ourselves and bouncing back quicker and better because it is possible to heal. So thank you, Dr. Amy, for being here. Love that. And Colleen, thank you for the work that you do in the world and how you are showing up to do it. That speaks volumes. Thank you. All right. That’s it for the episode. Thank you so much for listening. And I did put the link to Dr. Amy’s new book, Biology of Trauma.
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in the show notes. If you’re listening in real time, it’s available for pre-order today. And when you pre-order, you get over $400 worth of bonuses. Just make sure you order it directly from her website if you want the bonuses. And then if this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared the show. Text a link to a friend or post it on your socials because this is how we’re growing this community of women organically.
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women who want to rewrite the rules about alcohol and emotional and mental health. And finally, if you’re ready for more than just listening, if you’re ready for real change, my one-year intensive group coaching program is open for applications. It’s designed specifically for high-achieving professional women who want to reduce their drinking without quitting by healing their relationship with themselves. This is not a bait-and-switch sobriety program either.
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you’re gonna learn how to drink mindfully and how to use your brain to work for you instead of against you so that you can stop letting your stress and trauma responses run the show. So if you are looking for a moderate and holistic approach to alcohol use disorder and you’re willing to stop avoiding your negative emotions in favor of running straight the hell into them so that you can get to the other side, this might be for you. So don’t overthink it. There’s only one way to find out.
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Take action in a moment of clarity because you might not have another one for a while. The link to schedule a discovery call is in the show notes. It’ll be with either me or someone on my team, an emotionally certified coach. And it’s not a high pressure sales call. We don’t even invite everybody to the program. It’s a two-way interview where we will discuss where you are, where you want to be, and what it’s going to take for you to achieve your goals. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening and being here and being part of this community.
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I love you, I really do, and I believe in you, and I hope you have a kick-ass week. I’ll see you on the next episode.