Latest / The Shivan Show with Shivan Sarna / How to Heal Trauma 30 Seconds at a Time | Dr. Aimie Apigian

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How to Heal Trauma 30 Seconds at a Time | Dr. Aimie Apigian · The Shivan Show with Shivan Sarna

• 0:00
  All healing of trauma starts with making it safe, Siobhan.
• 0:05
  If there's a chance that you will hurt me again, I am going to stay braced.
• 0:09
  I'm going to stay guarded.
• 0:10
  You're still being held hostage by that person or that event from your past.
• 0:16
  When we can recognize that our biology is now part of the picture, it allows us to bring in another tool.
• 0:22
  What does forgiveness mean to you?
• 0:24
  Do you know what your trauma is?
• 0:27
  do you feel like, yeah, something definitely happened to me?
• 0:31
  Or like me, I was like, yep,
• 0:33
  I really know.
• 0:35
  How dare I say that I have had anything traumatic because on the spectrum of things, it is golden over here and always has been.
• 0:44
  The woman who I want you to meet is Dr. Amy Apigian, and she is an expert in this.
• 0:49
  And she's written a very favorite book.
• 0:52
  This is the one.
• 0:53
  It's The Biology of Trauma.
• 0:55
  And you want to read this one and not the other one that's keeping score.
• 0:59
  You know what I'm saying to you?
• 1:00
  But what I also love about Dr. Apegian is that she's a lovely person.
• 1:04
  She's someone I call a friend, and she's the one who helped me understand trauma in new ways, giving even more credence, respect, and compassion for real trauma and helping with understanding trauma.
• 1:21
  what we all need to know about it.
• 1:22
  So that's what today is all about on The Siobhan Show, Health, Wealth, Wisdom.
• 1:27
  Hi, Dr. Avigian.
• 1:28
  Thanks for being here.
• 1:29
  Well, thank you.
• 1:30
  And thank you for what you do in the world.
• 1:32
  You're one of those people that is showing up to actually help people and take what you've learned in order to make the world a better place.
• 1:40
  So thank you.
• 1:41
  Thanks.
• 1:41
  Right back at you.
• 1:42
  Okay, what is the biology of trauma?
• 1:44
  That term is so powerful.
• 1:47
  Well, most of us have thought of trauma as something emotional, maybe psychological.
• 1:52
  And yet we haven't realized how much of it is biological.
• 1:56
  Now, the normal understanding would be, well, that trauma becomes your biology.
• 2:01
  which is true, but that's only half of the picture.
• 2:04
  Really, the crust of the lens of biology of trauma is that your own biology will become what holds you back in your trauma patterns.
• 2:16
  the cells, everything, your psyche, your microbiome, everything.
• 2:21
  Yes.
• 2:22
  And so that SIBO or those imbalances or the thyroid issues, these now become reasons that your own body senses danger within yourself.
• 2:34
  and it is responding to danger, whether that's outside of ourselves or inside of ourselves, it's responding to danger, it's danger.
• 2:42
  All danger is the same to a cell.
• 2:44
  And when we can recognize that our biology is now part of the picture, it allows us to bring in another tool that we haven't known that we needed to bring in.
• 2:53
  We've been thinking, I have trauma, I need to go talk about it, I need to go see a therapist, I need to do EMDR, I need to do this, I need to do that.
• 3:01
  But we've completely neglected the fact that our own biology will hold us back in our trauma patterns.
• 3:07
  It does not matter how much other modalities you bring in.
• 3:11
  Wow.
• 3:12
  Okay.
• 3:12
  So how can we address the, I'm going to call it biology of trauma, cellular trauma?
• 3:18
  Are you saying don't have talk therapy?
• 3:19
  Or are you saying, sure, go for it and do X, Y, Z?
• 3:23
  I am saying that we have been so reductionistic in our approach.
• 3:28
  that we have said, I'm gonna go to a GI specialist for my GI issues.
• 3:33
  And I'm going to go to a therapist for my trauma issues, as opposed to seeing ourselves as a whole unit.
• 3:41
  And that, of course, I need to be approaching this in an integrative, holistic way so that I'm working on each of the pieces.
• 3:51
  I call it three levels, mind, body, and biology.
• 3:55
  You want to be doing something for each level so that you can be shifting to a biology of safety and out of a biology of trauma.
• 4:04
  You want to do all of it.
• 4:06
  You need to do all of it and all at the same time, right?
• 4:09
  I think of making a stool and we're all now putting together furniture that we buy off of Amazon.
• 4:15
  So we know this concept that if I'm trying to put together something, if I am not putting all the legs on the stool at the same time, then it's going to be completely lopsided.
• 4:26
  And so the idea of each layer can hold us back.
• 4:31
  I wouldn't want someone to say, oh, I have trauma.
• 4:33
  I'm going to go see a functional medicine doctor.
• 4:35
  And that'd be the only thing that they do.
• 4:37
  But it does need to be one piece to the picture.
• 4:41
  So we have our own thoughts and beliefs about ourself primarily that will hold us back.
• 4:47
  So we have to do some form of mind work that will address that aspect.
• 4:55
  But we then look at somatic memory.
• 4:58
  Somatic memory is based on the meaning that our nervous system has attached to a sensation.
• 5:06
  And so I smell lavender.
• 5:10
  Well, that smell has a meaning.
• 5:13
  Maybe I grew up on a lavender farm or maybe a lavender place was where I got abused.
• 5:19
  Very different meanings to the smell lavender, but the meaning is attached or coupled to that sensation.
• 5:29
  And so as long as I have that meaning coupled with that, I'm going to have a meaning that
• 5:33
  that will hold me back.
• 5:35
  And I can be doing all of the mind stuff in the world and I can be doing all the biology stuff in the world, but I walk into a room where there's a lavender smell and I am right back in my trauma.
• 5:45
  So we have to also address the somatic memory level.
• 5:50
  And then we have to address the biology level because as our biology has adapted to living with a background sense of fear and danger for the majority of our life now, that has come at a cost.
• 6:04
  Even as simple as I have a magnesium deficiency, which is one of the most common deficiencies in the Western world.
• 6:11
  And it's very expected because every stress response that we have, we are burning through magnesium.
• 6:20
  And so now you go to have a stress response because there's a new problem in your life and your own body says, hey, I'd love to help you out with that problem, but I don't have enough magnesium.
• 6:35
  And so that becomes a reason why our body says, rather than overcome this, I'm just going to shut down in the face of this.
• 6:43
  I'm just going to get overwhelmed and I'm going to collapse and want to hibernate and hide from the world.
• 6:49
  And so all three layers, mind, mind,
• 6:52
  body, that somatic memory, and our biology are all connected and will each either help us on our healing journey or hold us back on our healing journey.
• 7:03
  Wow, that is very, very interesting.
• 7:06
  So I don't think, I mean, I just don't think people think that way.
• 7:09
  So I'm so glad you wrote about it.
• 7:10
  And this is from your many, many years of experience.
• 7:14
  And being in the operating room, being in the hospitals, being in practice and just seeing these things get unresolved over and over again.
• 7:23
  OK, we're going to continue to get personal.
• 7:26
  Have you ever been bloated, like really bloated?
• 7:28
  Have you ever had diarrhea or constipation or maybe have a combination of all of it?
• 7:32
  Maybe you have SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
• 7:36
  I have answers for you, the ones that I couldn't find for so many years.
• 7:41
  The website, my website, SIBOSOS.com, has a ton of free information, some premium courses you can take, small group coaching, and discounts on supplements and other health products.
• 7:53
  What changed everything for me was working with Dr. Allison Seebecker, and she is involved in so many of these projects.
• 8:00
  She is a true and legitimate SIBO expert.
• 8:04
  So if you'd like to work with us, you'd like to find out more, even just want to just take a little look and see if maybe that might be you, then check it out.
• 8:11
  You'll see the links in the description, and I hope you don't have SIBO, but if you do, I'm glad we found each other.
• 8:19
  The average person who has not experienced massive titled trauma, right?
• 8:26
  But they have maybe their, like, for me, I was like, no, I don't have any trauma.
• 8:31
  And then you were like, well, not saying that you do, but this is like, you know, don't discount trauma.
• 8:38
  whatever you've experienced as well, while not having it be like a rhino with the horn being like, everything's trauma, everything's trauma.
• 8:47
  That's all I can see is trauma.
• 8:48
  It wasn't like that.
• 8:49
  It was just like, you know, be aware and know that it is a spectrum.
• 8:53
  And if it bothered you, it's worthy of looking at.
• 8:59
  Let's awaken some awareness today.
• 9:02
  And I would add to that, if it's still impacting you somehow today, then that's a problem.
• 9:11
  We can't change our past, however bad or however good our past was.
• 9:16
  We can't change our past.
• 9:19
  But if it's still affecting me today in my life, then that's a problem.
• 9:24
  And I'm not actually free because I'm still tied to the past.
• 9:30
  And so I look at three areas to see if there is unresolved trauma that's impacting a person's life today.
• 9:38
  What in your life is going on?
• 9:40
  So we can look at your work, your career, your overall life.
• 9:44
  Are there things that you have wanted to do and hold yourself back?
• 9:50
  What are areas in which you're stuck or you're finding patterns, maybe patterns of coping, maybe patterns of pushing through, even patterns of perfectionism.
• 10:00
  This is what we've all learned.
• 10:02
  How do I live life?
• 10:04
  How do I survive life?
• 10:06
  How do I be okay?
• 10:07
  Oh, I need to be perfect to be okay.
• 10:09
  Okay, I'll be perfect.
• 10:11
  It's then looking also at our relationships.
• 10:15
  relationships are a big place in which unresolved trauma shows up.
• 10:20
  And we can look at my patterns in relationships.
• 10:23
  How do I communicate?
• 10:25
  How do I be intimate and vulnerable?
• 10:30
  What do I do in conflict?
• 10:32
  What do I do when I think that that person has misunderstood me or hurt me in some way?
• 10:37
  That's where our unresolved trauma is going to show up.
• 10:40
  And it will continue to show up in the same way.
• 10:43
  So I look for patterns and that shows this unresolved trauma.
• 10:48
  The last place that I look is your physical health.
• 10:52
  And the physical health happens as a result of this chronic unresolved trauma having become our biology.
• 11:01
  And so all chronic illness...
• 11:05
  is a degree of the nervous system being stuck in survival mode.
• 11:10
  And then it just gets into this loop because the survival danger sense is feeding the chronic illness and the chronic illness is feeding the need to be in survival mode.
• 11:23
  And that's what becomes challenging.
• 11:25
  And that's where I say, look, yes, trauma may have become your biology.
• 11:29
  And this may be because of your past.
• 11:32
  But right now...
• 11:34
  It's both.
• 11:35
  They are feeding each other and that those imbalances in your systems is also feeding this survival loop that now keeps you running.
• 11:46
  So I am less concerned about trauma that someone has resolved.
• 11:51
  As a physician, I want to know how much unresolved trauma do you have?
• 11:58
  Because that will still be holding you hostage.
• 12:03
  in your life, in your relationships, and in your health.
• 12:07
  One thing that I am curious about your opinion is about forgiveness.
• 12:14
  Dr. Ramani, who is someone who I follow and really respect in terms of narcissistic abuse and narcissistic recovery.
• 12:22
  And she talks about and this is like a huge, like puritanical, you know, religious connotations here.
• 12:29
  She's like, no, I have no problem not forgiving my abusers.
• 12:34
  And I was fascinated by that.
• 12:37
  Number one, permission granted to not fall into that crevasse of expectation and of not putting responsibility on you.
• 12:47
  And the person that was interviewing her was fairly uncomfortable with this idea.
• 12:52
  It went against the grain.
• 12:55
  You could tell he was bristling a little bit.
• 12:57
  He could see her point, but he was still uncomfortable.
• 12:59
  Yeah.
• 13:00
  And I've also heard of forgiveness as being like on a spectrum and flexible.
• 13:05
  You can forgive and feel that way more today than you did yesterday.
• 13:09
  At the holidays, you may be less forgiving or more forgiving.
• 13:11
  You know, so like it's not one and done.
• 13:13
  What is your take on that?
• 13:16
  Yeah, I'll ask you a question.
• 13:17
  Like, what does forgiveness mean to you?
• 13:20
  Forgiveness for me is just letting that person...
• 13:27
  be free of the karmic entanglement with me.
• 13:29
  And so it's like, I'm not involved in that.
• 13:35
  I've resolved it.
• 13:36
  Like, and I'm not, I don't need closure with you.
• 13:40
  I don't need to have a last conversation with you.
• 13:43
  It is done.
• 13:45
  And I don't wish you poorly.
• 13:47
  I don't wish anything negative towards you.
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  It is just like truth and truth.
• 13:54
  No energy.
• 13:55
  The energy of truth is very powerful, but no like dirty energy that is keeping me looped in with you.
• 14:02
  Yeah, so this is exactly what we've just talked about in terms of is the trauma resolved or is it not resolved?
• 14:08
  As long as there's this negative energy, there's still this charge, like I think about the person and I get an emotional response, you're still being held hostage by that person or that event from your past.
• 14:23
  So this is exactly what it means to resolve, or some people use the word heal, trauma from the past.
• 14:32
  It's the idea of how do I let go while still being safe to not have you hurt me again?
• 14:41
  Because if there's a chance that you will hurt me again, I am going to stay braced.
• 14:46
  I'm going to stay guarded.
• 14:48
  There's both aspects to forgiveness as you've defined it.
• 14:52
  It's a, I no longer need to hold this.
• 14:56
  I can let this be you, your problem, your thing.
• 15:01
  You have issues that you need to go work on and it's not my responsibility.
• 15:06
  So what you did to me is entirely yours.
• 15:12
  I'm not holding on to that.
• 15:13
  And I'm also making it safe for me to not be in fear that you will hurt me again.
• 15:22
  And so we still come back to really all healing of trauma starts with making it safe, Siobhan.
• 15:32
  How can I change a lifelong pattern of this is what I do to survive if I don't make it safe for that change first?
• 15:44
  if this is what I believe to be what makes me safe in the world, to change, I've got to make the change feel safe enough.
• 15:54
  And that's the step that most people miss.
• 15:57
  They go into therapy thinking, let's jump into it.
• 16:01
  Let's go into these stories of the past.
• 16:03
  Let's resolve them.
• 16:05
  Let's process them.
• 16:06
  Let's reframe them even.
• 16:08
  And yet they haven't made it safe anymore.
• 16:11
  to change the story that they've been telling themselves about themselves.
• 16:15
  That's so powerful.
• 16:16
  I just want to like sit with that for a second.
• 16:19
  And can we talk about the ACEs study?
• 16:22
  What do you think?
• 16:23
  So explain what it is and how the knowledge of that could help some people to, I'm going to say break patterns, but basically resolve some things.
• 16:34
  Yeah, this is a perfect example of what happens when we don't make it safe to make a change.
• 16:41
  So the Adverse Childhood Experiences study was started in San Diego by Dr. Vincent Folletti in a Kaiser clinic where the intent was to help people lose weight so that their physical health could be better.
• 16:57
  This was part of a preventive medicine initiative that the government funded because they had looked at all the data and said, we have found the single most common cause of mortality in the United States.
• 17:13
  And that was obesity because obesity led to diabetes, led to heart attacks, led to strokes.
• 17:19
  And so they said, we've found it.
• 17:21
  All we need to do is address the obesity.
• 17:25
  And we have got the most healthy nation in the world.
• 17:28
  So they put Dr. Vincent Folletti in charge of this obesity program to help people lose weight.
• 17:34
  He designed the best program there has ever been.
• 17:39
  The results that he was achieving have still never been achieved anywhere else.
• 17:44
  The guy is just phenomenally brilliant.
• 17:48
  And so he's helping people lose over 100 pounds safely, medically safely, which is amazing.
• 17:56
  And then he notices that the people who are losing the most amount of weight, that his most successful patients are dropping out of the program.
• 18:07
  And they are regaining all of their weight back and more.
• 18:12
  Sabotage city.
• 18:14
  And he's like, right, like he probably had some choice words that I won't say on here, but it was the idea of why?
• 18:22
  I don't, from a medical standpoint, I don't understand why someone would do that to themselves.
• 18:27
  I just help them lose all this weight.
• 18:28
  Their life is better.
• 18:29
  Why?
• 18:30
  So he brought them in and he started asking them questions.
• 18:33
  And that is where things, everything changed for him.
• 18:37
  He was willing to become curious, not shaming, not judging, not criticizing.
• 18:43
  They would have shut down and never told him the truth.
• 18:46
  He became curious, which is a good lesson for us.
• 18:49
  If we really want to see our unresolved trauma, we become curious, not critical.
• 18:57
  And so he asked them, tell me, what is going on?
• 19:02
  And they said, Dr. Felletti, what you think has been the problem, my weight, has actually been the solution to my real problem.
• 19:13
  And that is how we can identify unresolved trauma in our life.
• 19:17
  The coping mechanisms, whether you want to call it scrolling on social media or binging on the TV or, you know, the chocolate almond clusters, whatever it is, the extra glass of wine, the extra glass of coffee.
• 19:28
  There's endless possibilities for how we should live our life.
• 19:33
  Shopping, porn, people pleasing.
• 19:34
  All of it.
• 19:35
  That's not the real problem.
• 19:38
  The real problem is what is underneath those that those are needed.
• 19:45
  And so the soothing, the escaping, and that is actually one of the most common patterns of stored trauma that I see across the board.
• 19:55
  Your way of escaping might be different than your neighbor, but you're both finding ways to escape your reality.
• 20:05
  And that's what these primarily women were doing.
• 20:09
  And they recognized that as they started to lose weight and they became attractive, that they actually found that they were afraid of being attractive because many of them had experienced sexual abuse in childhood.
• 20:24
  And so being attractive was only going to bring bad things.
• 20:28
  And their weight was a shield.
• 20:32
  and actually help them feel safe in the world.
• 20:36
  And so here's the perfect example of
• 20:40
  We can try to create a change in our life that we think is going to bring more joy, more growth, more expansion, more of whatever we want, not realizing that we've become this way for a very good reason.
• 20:54
  And until we understand why we've been doing this, why we've been living this way, we can't make the change feel safe.
• 21:07
  And so we will always default back to what is familiar because familiar is safe to a nervous system.
• 21:14
  Even if that familiar is unhealthy, familiar feels safe.
• 21:20
  That is really fascinating.
• 21:21
  So let's say there's someone who needs to do something for their health, work out, eat better, whatever.
• 21:30
  I mean, if everyone did what they knew they were supposed to do, like we wouldn't have any health crisis in the country necessarily.
• 21:36
  What can we have people start to do?
• 21:39
  Get the book, read Biology of Trauma.
• 21:41
  I'm serious.
• 21:43
  And by the way, if you, sorry, if you've read the other famous, more famous, like book about it, I have opinions about that book about trauma.
• 21:54
  This is the Gentle Wise book.
• 21:58
  approach that is very clean, very loving, nonjudgmental, supportive, the explanation of those three different aspects that we all need to heal.
• 22:10
  This is the book that I'm so glad you wrote.
• 22:12
  And I want everyone to literally read the pages of so that they can actually apply it to their lives.
• 22:18
  And if you're like, oh, you know, punishing yourself, like, oh, I got to read all these trauma books, just do this one.
• 22:24
  Because that other one is extremely punishing.
• 22:27
  So how can we get started?
• 22:29
  Read the book.
• 22:30
  And then what are some other, just some off-the-cuff ideas that we can do in our daily lives to, like, actually gently start?
• 22:39
  Where to start is finding a moment to create a feeling of safety.
• 22:45
  And here's where most people get tripped up on that, Siobhan.
• 22:48
  They hear that and they're like, oh, that sounds so woo-woo.
• 22:51
  We somehow need to get into our body.
• 22:55
  But that's where most people stop because as they go to connect with their body, they're like, but my body hurts.
• 23:02
  But there's pain, there's grief, there's sadness that I start to feel.
• 23:06
  And so this is where I talk about pacing.
• 23:09
  We can drown in our own emotions and in our own emotional pain.
• 23:14
  We can.
• 23:15
  We can drown.
• 23:16
  And that is why most people are like, nope, not going to go there.
• 23:20
  Don't want to talk about that.
• 23:22
  Don't want to acknowledge what I've been through because I would drown.
• 23:27
  And the words that they often use is I would fall apart.
• 23:31
  Understood.
• 23:32
  And so this is where I come back to that word safely.
• 23:37
  How do we safely open up this stored trauma so that we can eventually resolve it, no longer live under the impact of it, but not fall apart in the process?
• 23:49
  If I'm falling apart, which is what I did when I started because I didn't know any different, okay.
• 23:53
  I was falling apart.
• 23:55
  My health actually got worse.
• 23:57
  My fatigue got worse.
• 23:59
  My autoimmunity got worse.
• 24:00
  My gut issues got worse because I was jumping in and then drowning in what I was finding.
• 24:07
  And the idea that that's not safety.
• 24:10
  So truly, like, how do I create a moment where I actually feel safe enough right here, right now?
• 24:19
  That's where we start.
• 24:20
  We don't start by going into the past.
• 24:22
  We start by learning how to be in the present moment.
• 24:25
  and creating a feeling of safety.
• 24:28
  This is where somatic work can be very helpful for people first starting out because they can do some movement with their body.
• 24:35
  Sometimes it's as simple as a self-hug.
• 24:37
  Sometimes it's as simple as putting something over my stomach or just hugging my stomach.
• 24:43
  These are things that we can do.
• 24:44
  We can push away a pretend rock that's in front of us and actually give us a sense, a feeling of, oh, I have space to breathe.
• 24:53
  For many people, space
• 24:55
  equals safety.
• 24:57
  For some people, based on their life experiences, space may not be a sense of safety.
• 25:03
  So this is where you've got to do what feels like safety for your body.
• 25:08
  But starting with where we're at, do 30 seconds at a time.
• 25:14
  So
• 25:15
  30 seconds at a time is usually safe enough that you won't fall apart.
• 25:20
  And then you build on that.
• 25:22
  30 seconds becomes one minute, then becomes two minutes.
• 25:27
  After a couple weeks, you're at five minutes of being able to create safety for your body.
• 25:35
  And when we are so used to living all day in danger mode, five minutes of safety is
• 25:42
  of healthy escape is a phenomenal shift for your nervous system that will already start to create shifts in your biology.
• 25:51
  Beautiful.
• 25:53
  Thank you so much, Dr. Opigion.
• 25:55
  Thank you, Siobhan.
• 25:56
  It's great to be with you.
• 25:57
  One more time, biology of trauma.
• 26:00
  Please, please, please.
• 26:01
  You're welcome.
• 26:02
  All right.
• 26:03
  Thanks.
• 26:04
  Big hugs.
• 26:05
  So that's a wrap on today's episode.
• 26:07
  Thank you so much for being here.
• 26:08
  It genuinely means everything to me.
• 26:11
  If something in this conversation sparks something for you, share it with a woman or a guy in your life who needs to hear it.
• 26:18
  That's how this show grows.
• 26:19
  That's how we heal the planet together.
• 26:21
  And that's how we really connect.
• 26:22
  For more resources, free tools, and everything we talked about today, head over to SiobhanSarna.com.
• 26:27
  That's S-H-I-V-A-N-S-A-R-N-A dot com.
• 26:32
  It's all there waiting for you.
• 26:33
  And until next time, keep asking the questions, keep finding the answers.
• 26:37
  You deserve the full picture and the very best.
• 26:40
  Namaste.