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Bruce H. Lipton, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit. Stem cell biologist, bestselling author of The Biology of Belief and recipient of the 2009 Goi Peace Award, he has been a guest speaker on hundreds of TV and radio shows, as well as keynote presenter for national... Read More
- Learn how your belief systems shape your epigenetics, influencing your physical state
- Understand the power of environment creation at both micro and macro levels for better health
- Gain insights into the deep connections between cellular-level programming and your overall biology
Related Topics
Autonomic Nervous System, Biology Of Belief, Blood Composition, Brainstem, Chemistry, Chronic Freeze Response, Culture Medium, Dna, Dorsal Vagal Freeze, Environment, Epigenetics, Genetic Determinism, Growth, Limbic System, Memory, Operating System, Oxidative Stress, Parasympathetic State, Protection, Stem Cell Research, Stress Response, Sympathetic State, Trauma, Trauma Response, Victim MentalityAimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH
Welcome to this interview on the Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0. I’m your host, Dr. Aimie, and we are talking about the trauma disease connection and the path to freedom. The tool discussed in this interview is such a powerful tool that it can change your epigenetics. You would be surprised at how often the professionals in my biology of Trauma Certificate Training program ask me, Dr. Aimie, is there a gene for PTSD? Is there a gene for trauma as we go into this interview where we will answer that question and so much more? We will give you the key to controlling your genes around trauma. And let me provide you a little teaching that is important for you to understand around stress and trauma. As we go into this interview, you will hear that there are two mutually exclusive states of our biology in this interview. Growth and protection. You cannot be in growth and protection at the same time. They are mutually exclusive.
Now, what Dr. Lipton refers to as the subconscious, I have come to understand and call the autonomic nervous system. And yes, there are two states of that autonomic nervous system, growth and protection, and yet there’s actually a third that is part of that second. So we need to break that protection phase down and actually understand that there’s two in there. That part of our nervous system that is so close in communication with the limbic system that controls all of our instinctual patterns and reactions and holds all of our memories. And it actually originates from the brainstem, but runs our body, in fact, it runs our body automatically so that we don’t have to think about it, which is why it’s called the autonomic nervous system.
So we don’t have to think about our hearts beating, our lungs, breathing, our intestines, digesting. Oh, if your body was a computer, your autonomic nervous system would be the operating system so that you can have different apps, you can have different programs on your computer, but your operating system is what will control how they run and how well they run. That is our autonomic nervous system and in its most basic form. Yes, you can say that the autonomic nervous system are operating system has two states. Fear and safety. Protection and growth, guarded and open. Yet there are actually two different types of fear. There are two different types of protection. There are two different types of living life guarded so that there are actually three different states of our operating system, our subconscious autonomic nervous system. This is critical to understand as we go into this interview on the role of the environment that we create for our body, the three states of our autonomic nervous system. One state is the parasympathetic. I’m going to actually share this image with you so that you can see what I’m talking about. The autonomic nervous system. We can see that there’s parasympathetic, which is where we feel the best. We feel our healthiest. We feel connected. We feel in social engagement, and this is where we want to be. Now, if we were a car, this is where we would be driving down the road, moving forward at a good pace, calm and yet safe. We’re moving forward. We are responding to our environment in the right way. We are responding to the road conditions in the right way. Now, when we hit the stress response, this is what you’ll see here in the image as the sympathetic state and that sympathetic state is when your foot is on the accelerator and you are accelerating. Now, how much you are accelerating depends on the level of stress and all kinds of stress. So not just emotional stress or psychological stress, but chemical stress.
Why face stress, internal stress of inflammation, all forms of stress will depend on how hard your foot is on the accelerator. This is the sympathetic state of the autonomic nervous system, or what we call the stress response. You are in fear and anxiety and doing something about it because your foot is on the accelerator. But wait, where is the trauma response? There is that third state. This is the other type of fear. This is not the fear of the accelerator. This is the fear of paralysis. What happens in that trauma response and you’ll see this on the very bottom of this image where it says the dorsal vagal freeze, the overwhelm your operating system throws on the emergency brake and your car comes to a screeching halt. Internally, you will feel the immediate drain of your energy, the knife in your gut or the kick in the gut. This is your operating systems ultimate chance of survival. It can sense that you are running out of gas, that you don’t even have enough gas to get to your destination.
You are burning your engine or your transmission and it has to do something about it. And so it throws on the emergency brake. Now, your foot still may be on the accelerator and so you are still experiencing adrenaline and cortisol. And yet overriding that is the emergency brake that’s causing the paralysis. So you may still feel a stress, you may still feel the adrenaline, and you just haven’t learned how to recognize that, oh, no, this is the trauma response, because I feel the energy drain and I don’t seem to be moving forward anymore. I have become stuck. I’m in a spiral and this can actually become a chronic state.
And so this is where our trauma operating system can become a chronic state, one that we call a chronic freeze response, where the body is at its sickest, has the most inflammation, and we feel the most disconnected, lost and overwhelmed. Sound familiar? So the chronic freeze state is actually where when we have the most effects on our biology, we have the most effects on our DNA. This is where we will have the most effects on the oxidative stress. So the sympathetic or the stress response, yes, it releases all this oxidative stress. However, that freeze response, that chronic freeze response releases even more. And since our body, our operating system is in the paralysis, it’s not doing anything to clean it up. This has the greatest effect on our epigenetics and thus our physical health as we age. What we talk about here in this interview has the potential to absolutely change all of that and change your life. If you take it to heart and apply what is said here. This can change your physical health, your emotional and mental health, and accelerate your trauma healing journey. Here to talk to us about the genetics and epigenetics of trauma is none other than Dr. Bruce Lipton, someone who’s had a big influence on my life and my work. He is a cell biologist. We share that in common. I have my college degree in cell biology and he is an internationally recognized leader after his fundamental, fundamental work with the stem cell research at Stanford University.
He is now the bestselling author of The Biology of Belief, The Honeymoon Effect and coauthor of Spontaneous Evolution, and in 2009 received the prestigious GOI Peace Award from Japan in honor of his scientific contribution to world harmony. Let’s jump in with Dr. Bruce Lipton. Bruce, one of the most common questions that I get is, is trauma genetic? And each time I get that, I want to shake my head and said, you have obviously not read any of Dr. Bruce Lipton’s books because it is not about the genes. It’s about what controls the genes. It’s about how the genes are read. And this is all of your work. And so talk to us about what you have learned about the epigenetics and how that is so much more important than genetics in especially something around the physiology of having a physiology of fear.
Bruce H. Lipton, PhD
Yeah. Well, let’s go back to the earlier time when I was teaching at a medical school. And at that time, back about 1980s or so, the conventional understanding at the time was called genetics. And I go, So what does that mean? I said, Well, genes control the character of our life. We refer to it as genetic determinism, that genes determine the character. This brings the problem up. And that problem is simply this, as far as we know. Did you pick the genes you came with? I don’t know. We don’t know. If you don’t like a characteristic X, can you change the genes you came with? A No, can’t do that. And then add on top of that the belief that genes turn on and off by themselves. And I said, Well, put those together. I said, What do you have? I said, You have a victim that we didn’t pick them can change them. They control us. We don’t control them. And that kind of consciousness is spread through our civilization that were victims of our heredity, that things are running in our family.
And inevitably they’re going to show up because we got the genes. Well, unfortunately, that’s 100% false, because I was teaching that, too, in medical school until I was doing research on stem cells, which are embryonic cells in your body. And what my research revealed is genetically identical cells in different environments, meaning different culture, media are had different fates. So I had genetically identical cells, three dishes. All cells were gene identical. They came from a clone and I changed the culture medium slightly in each dish. And the culture medium is the environment in which cells grow. It’s going to come back to us in a second big time. Okay. So the culture medium is the chemistry fluid in which the cells are living. I created in the lab, I made three slightly different versions of the chemistry. I have three dishes of identically the same genetically cells, genetic cells, okay. And dish one with culture medium version one. Okay, less and environment one. The cells form muscle in the second dish genetically identical cells, but environment two slightly different chemistry. The cells form bone and and dish three again slightly different chemistry. And the cells form five cells. Well, while I’ve been teaching in the school that genes control life, this experiment completely flattened that idea because all the cells were genetically the same. But their fate wasn’t determined by the genes. Their fate was determined by the culture, medium environment, the chemistry of that. So I go, Oh, okay, that’s really cool. I go, No, here’s the picture. We are skin covered petri dishes get under my skin. I got 50 trillion cells and I have the original culture medium because culture medium is a laboratory version of blood. So we have the original culture medium. The original blood. And I go, just to make a difference if the cell is in a plastic dish or a skin cover dish and regard to responding to this environment, we are absolutely not. So all of a sudden I said, well, wait a minute, then that means that the composition of my blood is determining my genetics and behavior.
I go, Yeah. And then I go, Well, wait a minute, then, who’s the chemist? Because that chemistry is going to control my fate. I go the brains, the chemist that puts all that chemistry into the blood. And I go, Yeah, but what chemical should the brain put in? And all of a sudden the world changed for me because I realize whatever consciousness, whatever picture I was holding in my head, in my conscious mind that was being translated into complementary chemistry of that picture and that chemistry then goes through my skin color, petri dish and adjusted genetics. So the genes were not controlled by themselves. They were controlled by the culture, environment. The blood in my body and the chemistry of my blood controls my genetics. And then I find out. But it’s my consciousness that determine what the chemistry of that blood was going to be. And all of a sudden it’s like, Oh my God, consciousness is creating my biology and my behavior. And very interesting. So just a little sidebar here.
Quantum physics is the most valid of the sciences on this planet. And the significance of it is that the primary principle in quantum physics is consciousness is creating our life experience. Well, that’s a physics composition and understanding how consciousness interacts with the environment and blah, blah, blah. But now the new science, which I just described, where the blood controls the fate of the cells, that’s called epigenetics. And I go, Well, sounds like genetics. I got genetics was the story. Victim genes control me. I don’t control them. Epigenetics says the environment is controlling those genes. The environment controlled by my consciousness. All of a sudden the weight of I change my consciousness, I change my blood chemistry, which then adjusts my biology, and all of a sudden then I’m not a victim.
I am a creator of my genetic activity. And this creation is coming from my consciousness and going down happy means above. So all of our medically oriented people recognized and most people on the street recognize what we call skin epidermis. So what does that mean? Well, that the means above. So epidermis means above the dermis, down underneath a layer of skin is a layer called dermis. I go, yeah, above. So I said, What is epigenetics? I say, control above the genes. This is the science I saw in Petri dish. This is a science that says, as I change my consciousness, I change my genetic activity. And all of a sudden I said, Well, then what’s the point? I said, Well, what are you focusing on? Where’s your consciousness focus at this point? Because if you change the focus of that consciousness, then you change the chemistry of your biology, which then in turn changes, controls your genetics. Well, I want to start off at something that’s profoundly important that people just don’t talk about before is a good time to talk about it right now. And that is this is something called the biological imperative. The biologic imperative is a biological recognition that organisms have a drive to survive. Every organism on this planet has the biological imperative, which then makes it very difficult. And then where the hell is is a logical imperative. Because bacteria have a biological imperative. You try to kill a bacterium, it’s hard to go. Oh, okay. Tell me it’s going to do everything it can to stay alive. So I said, there’s a drive even from bacteria to stay alive. Like, Oh, this is really important. I go this, but this is underlying our whole psychology. And I said, What do you mean? I said, You don’t realize it, but when you go out on out on the street and you start looking around, you don’t realize the brain has a biological imperative working, and that biological imperative is to make you safe.
And if you’re not safe, then the biological imperative is going to engage behavior to help you become safe. And I got the issue about the biological imperative is only humans are the only organisms that know they’re going to die. No other organism knows. And since the drive to survive as a survive and not die, then the whole biology. Once we become aware that we can die, our whole biology is directed to survive. And therefore, our mind is always assessing the environment to see are we surviving and where are the threats are coming from? Why? Because I need to keep adjusting my biology to keep that thing running. This what about trauma? Well, trauma, by definition, is a threat to survival. And as a threat to survival. Trauma is going to activate this whole biological imperative mechanism to get your body ready to deal with trauma. I go, Oh, well, how does this all come about? And I said, What’s going on? Well, this is very important. And that is this.
The biology has to phases that are mutually exclusive, meaning they can’t go on. And at the same time I said, What are these? I say, growth and protection. I said, Why? Because they’re mutually exclusive behaviors. Growth is to go to a stimulus and take it in, whether it’s food or love or whatever it is that enhances your vitality. You are open. You go to the stimulus and you incorporate it growth. I say, What about protection? I got no protection as a threat wall yourself off and go away from the stimulus. I So what’s the point is that growth is open, protection is closed. You can’t be both at the same time. Growth is go to the stimulus. Protection is going away from the stimulus. You can’t go to an away at the same time point when the threats override our lives, we compromised that by compromising growth, we get into a protection mode. Anything that affected us in the past, any kind of trauma that affects us in the past, we are specially programed to be careful.
Now what’s interesting about is this when we have a trauma, let’s give a simple example. A man in a shop is working on a saw, and he pushes a saw through cuts off his thumb. You got some trauma here. The instant that trauma occurred, the system took a photograph in the sense of every sense input coming at the same time, the smell of the wood being cut, the temperature, what was going on, the sound of the saw, the feeling of the car, all these things. It’s like a photograph in memory. The point is now that is a memory. So that was threatening. That is like a little card with, you know, punched out like, okay, smell, taste, vision, sound, all that. If we ever get into an environment where any number of those get hit simultaneously, it will immediately call up that response to protect yourself. So the guy cuts his thumb off and then months later, he’s walking by in the shop and someone has the saw going on. And guess what? He hears the store, smells the world. Guess what? Immediately he’s in protection because the card that was punched out of the threat, a number of those just got hit. And if they get hit, then the entire behavior is now put in a protection. This is the cause of all problems in the world because everyone think, oh, health issues are all related to genetics.
I go less than 1%. Less than 1% of illness is even connected to genetics. 90% of stress and trauma is a major, major precipitate of stress. And if you start to get into any environment where any of those same signals start to light up, it’s going to immediately push you into a stress mode. So what is stress ourselves? The opposite of growth. Number one, I say, how does it work? I say, all goes back to ancient history because the first stress that to experience was a saber tooth tiger. Otherwise, what am I going to run away from the butterflies, the mouse? And I don’t really know saber toothed tiger. That’s a threat, I say. And what they’re doing goes against a response of the biological parent you to protect yourself. I said, Well, what does that mean? I say, Well, you see that tiger chasing you? You’re going to run like hell.
That’s part of the built in unconscious man run I got. Yeah, but give me the biology now. And I go, oh, biology is very important. Why the energy to run is in the blood. Okay. And whatever you need to energize any organ, any system, you need to get the blood to it. So I say, okay, so there’s no tiger back there and I’m just walking along the trail. I say, Where’s my blood? Well, in no threat situation, the predominance of the blood is in the viscera, the guts. I go, why? Maintenance of the body, cleaning, filtering, energizing does all the maintenance. And that’s why the blood is energizing all these functions. Why? To keep you healthy. The tiger shows up and you got to run. I said, Well, wait a minute. Where do I need the blood? Not in the growth now I need it in my arms and legs. So I show them what happens in the first moment of that stress. So the first moment that stress is stress hormones are released into the body.
Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH
Just a little stress.
Bruce H. Lipton, PhD
I got so excited by the stress, you know. So what happened is simply this is I need to get the blood to the arms and legs. And I said, well, the stress hormones squeeze the blood vessels in the guts close. I said, Well, what does that do? I said, Well, it keeps the blood from going in the gut, pushes it to the arms and legs so I could run. I say So, yeah. But then when there’s no blood in the gut, then there’s no maintenance of the body. I got out of the tiger’s chasing you. I don’t need the maintenance now. I need to escape first, maintenance later. So when people start to get stressed, the first thing they feel is butterflies in the stomach. A little queasy. You know, that’s the stress hormones causing the blood vessels are squeezed. Shut them. You can feel them fluttering butterflies, but you feel okay. So the first thing is the function of the go to shut down I go, okay. Yeah, but I don’t need that. The tiger’s chasing me. Second thing, and this is the critical one as well, the immune system uses a lot of energy. Yes. If you’ve ever been sick, you didn’t have enough energy to get out of bed. So where did your energy go? Because the immune system uses a lot. Okay. Scenario, you’re being chased by a sabertooth tiger and you have a very profound bacterial infection. Bad case of diarrhea looming right now. I say, well, how do you want to split the energy? How much should we used to run away from that tiger and how much should we use to work on the bacteria? And I go, The how are the bacteria? If the tiger catches you, you don’t have a problem with them anymore. Point Stress hormones conserve the energy to run away from the tiger by shutting down the immune system.
I go, this is why when doctors are going to do a transplant, take an organ from person and put it into person, be they give the recipient of that organ stress hormones before the operation so that the immune system won’t be actively rejecting the graft. Okay. So that’s how effective stress hormones are shutting off the immune system so you can put a foreign tissue in the system. Okay. Number three, that when you’re in a state of stress like that, thinking is a very slow process. You got to mind conscious and subconscious conscious as creative wishes, desires, things that we like. Subconscious programs. The significance is this thinking is a slow process. If you’re running, running away from a tiger, it’s not time to think. It’s time to do every action movement reflex you can to get out. So the blood vessels in the forebrain thinking are just like the blood vessels in the gut. When the stress hormones come in, it squeezes them shut.
So no blood coming to the thinking part, but it’s being pushed to the hind brain where reflexes reactions are programed. Okay, no thinking. We have three problems that just occurred. One, we shut down the growth and the maintenance of the body. Two, we shut off the immune system which protects us from internal threats. And three, we became less intelligent in the process because now we’re responding to reaction and not thinking, okay, hey, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago, it was just a damn tiger. After you escape from the tiger, 10 minutes of run your ass off. You’re away from the tiger. You don’t need to be in stress anymore. So you come back into growth. But today’s world stresses 24 seven 365. Biology was never designed for chronic stress, and it turns out up to 90% of the illness on this planet is all tied to chronic stress, which trauma is a major participant and creating.
And so the relevance assess it is a chronic problem of releasing these stress hormones which debilitate the body and the intelligence of the system and a lot of people think that this trauma is held inside here in my body, that I got trauma and I’m going to release it. Well, it’s experience that way. But the trauma was in the consciousness. The trauma was a vision that released the chemistry to get the body to be affected by the vision of the trauma is sort of like if I sprinkle iron filings, I take a iron and I file it down, make iron dust and put in a saltshaker sprinkler on a piece of paper. I get a random pile of iron filings every time I do random pile. But if I take a magnet and put it underneath that piece of paper, when I sprinkle the iron filings, it’s not random anymore. Now I see that beautiful magnetic pattern, the feel, the magnetic field. I say, what shaped the iron filings was the control in the iron filings answers. Now I can shake the iron filings on a piece of paper with no magnet, never does anything but random. So it’s just weird that the pattern comes from the field. The magnetic field shaped the iron filings in our biology, the cells of the iron filings, the mind is the field generator, the mines fields then organizes the iron filings to complement whatever the field is. And if it’s a field of trauma, then the body is going to physiologically accommodate the posture and and behavior of protection. Well, protection is shutting it down. I go, Yeah, now it’s not a saber do tiger, not what’s there all the time. I said, Oh, you can’t do this. This is why we have a health issue. So the current understanding becomes critical and says that the pattern isn’t held in the cells, it’s expressed by the cells, but the pattern is held in the consciousness. If we want to change the effect of trauma, then we have to go back and deal with the consciousness of it.
Not so much the body, but drugs and chemicals and physical things and try to adjust. I said this is downstream, started up here first. This is what quantum physics told us in the first place. Principle number one, consciousness is creating this experience. I go, Yeah, and you want to change this person, you change consciousness. And this is what epigenetics says. Consciousness is creating the shaping of this body. So they both agree now. And I say, So what about trauma? I go, It’s a very serious situation because it’s one of the primary activators of the biological imperative, which is the protection response, and that if we stay in that protection response, then we’re you can’t be open to grow. And your inhibitor, your immune system, which was keeping you healthy, what is the consequence? I see a breakdown of the system. It’s inevitable. You can’t stay in trauma because trauma is going to redirect the cells to be on guard. Let me. And it doesn’t mean that the trauma had to repeat itself.
It just had to believe that the trauma could repeat itself. Didn’t have to do it. Yeah. Give you a very simple story. Let’s say in a track race, the runners come up and they’re going to starting blocks built in where they put their feet on, push themselves off. And I go when they get up to the line or shaking themselves loose. Okay. And the guy that’s going to start and has the gun, he says on your mark and that’s how they all get down. And they got their feet into those blocks and getting ready. It’s like getting ready to go get set. And all of a sudden their muscles are tense and they’re now like ready to bolt and then go and then boom, they go, I go, here’s the problem. What if you on mark, you get ready because you’re preparing, then you get set because now you feel what’s going to happen now and then there’s no go.
The most trained athlete in the world cannot hold that set. They’ll collapse right at the starting line. They’ll put all that muscle ready to go and like not going anywhere I go, this is trauma. This is trauma. You’re set and you’re getting set. You’re on your mark. Get set and waiting. I said, that’s not possible to do physiologically. That’s why the runner will collapse while the runner collapses. Then what do you think you’re going to do? You’re going to collapse this well, and this is the consequence of a trauma. The first part of the trauma is to heal the trauma. The second part, unfortunately, is to heal the vision of the trauma as a continuous life experience. Because if you hold that, then you’re going to be get stuck waiting for the repeat of that trauma to come and you’re going to compromise the health and maintenance of body, because trauma is going to get the blood ready for you to get ready to run. When that trauma comes, the trauma is going to compromise you because the immune system is getting ready for you to run at that moment. And your intelligence is what should I do? And I go, Well, now it’s a bit fuzzy because if you’re not operating from that because you’re already to run, and this is where trauma crosses from the consciousness into the biology part, and the cells respond to this because the cells respond to the environment. They believe that this is what everyone says. Epigenetics responds to the environment. I go, Yes, but you left out something. And so what? The cells in my body do not see the environment. If my world I need to do something, it’s my consciousness that’s going to read the world and then send the signals into my body.
So it’s not the environment directly affecting the genes, it’s in between is my consciousness, environment, genes, consciousness. Okay, well, that’s left out of the story for most people because that in general, the environment controls physical. Yeah, the environment does make a big difference, but nobody really emphasizes it’s your interpretation of that environment that the cells see. They don’t see the real environment. And if you’re in a state of trauma, you are continuously showing pictures of a sabertooth tiger on your tail. I go, and what is the consequence? Well, we were talked about that 90% of illness is directly through that. And the trauma is a prolonged chronic experience that perpetuates a self-destruction behavior. Inevitably, it’s going to break down. It’s going to cause a cancer, it’s going to cause a heart attack. It’s going to cause diabetes type 200% stressor from the environment. That’s what it is. 100% heart attacks, 90% stress from the environment.
Okay. Cancer. There’s not one gene that causes cancer. Not one gene, but all of it that come from well, the cells are like iron filings. The cancer was first the picture in the mind or distortion of a picture in the mind that is now manifest. And the iron filings call the cells. There’s not a gene that does this. Cancer is perpetuated by belief systems and programing, and that’s what they find when they looked at adopted children being adopted into families where cancer is running in the lineage. And it turns out the adopted child will get the same family cancer as the rest of the family, even though the adopted child came from totally different genetics. The cancer is a symptom of not living in harmony. It’s not a gene.
You’re not a victim of that. Especially women have to know this quite a lot because they’re so programed to fear the breast cancer gene. Oh, my God, that’s a breast cancer gene. Angelina Jolie, healthy young woman, double mastectomy says, I got it because my mother died of it. My grandmother, I go, Yeah, that’s the lineage did the gene. Cause I got half the women that have those genes never get the cancer. Like, what does that mean? I said possession of the gene doesn’t cause cancer. Possession of the genes and living in stress causes cancer. It’s the stress that initiated it. You can kill all the damn cancer cells you want if you didn’t get rid of the costs. What’s the cause? Not a genetic mutation, a conscious deviation. And you can kill the cancer cells. But if you didn’t change the consciousness, cancer will come back in some form or other anyway. Why you? That was the cause. You’re killing the cells. That’s the symptom of a cancer. That’s a result of a cancer. And we have to get to this. And this is why your program is so important to deal with trauma, because there’s a physical aspect. Sure. That that hurts. Whatever it is, that’s a physical consequence. But there’s a long term learning experience from the biological imperative that recognizes when something’s threatening to you. You now have symptoms related to that, whether it’s the sound of a saw, the smell of the wood, the guy that had his finger cut off the moment he walked by that size. So he’ll pull his hand in just like that. Why? Memory trauma. And it comes back. And so the message that I like to give is I can change my belief system, I can change the vision of the trauma that’s more effective than trying to treat the consequence of the trauma, because the consequence is going to keep going until you get rid of the source and wasn’t the physical problem that was the result of the trauma. But the consciousness of.
Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH
Trauma is one of the primary activators of the biological which inhibits us to grow. Have you been living life protected, guarded, small? A break down is inevitable. I’ve had that breakdown. Have you had that breakdown? Are you in a breakdown? It’s fascinating to see that trauma will actually redirect blood flow away from our gut, which is why digestive issues are so common in those whose autonomic nervous system is operating in a trauma place. Sleep, pain, fatigue, gut and inflammation are the most common health issues that I see. And those whose operating system, autonomic nervous system, is in a trauma place. Which is why for me as a medical physician, that’s been fascinating and wonderful to see those going through my 21 day Journey program, to see the 26% decrease in daily physical pain in 21 days, 28% decrease in GI symptoms, 28% decrease in sleep problems, along with 30% improvement in depression, 30% improvement in anxiety, and the increase in energy sense of connection and joy. And yet, as we heard, as long as you believe, just believe that the trauma could repeat that will keep the physiology. Your physiology and that biological imperative and protection mode. The trauma, physiology, trauma is getting set for that race and the go that never happens.
There is so much here that we can apply to our life to change the vision that we have of trauma, to start to change the work. And that’s what we do in the 21 day journey. We start to change our mind to pay attention to those areas in our body, to promote a felt sense of safety. We’re not focusing on the trauma. We’re not going into the story. We’re actually redirecting our mind to give it something to do, to give it exercises and tools, to create a felt sense of safety and a felt sense of support. That’s why people experience those changes, because their physiology changing. Thank you for joining me for this interview on the Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0 the trauma disease connection. You don’t need to stress out on remembering all of this information. You can purchase the recordings. There are different packages available to you. Find the one that fits best for you so that you can come back to this information. You can resource yourself. Let’s not stress out, you can resource yourself, have all of this information at your fingertips whenever you would like to come back and revisit these interviews. I know that this one that I will be revisiting and rewatching, I’m your host, Dr. Aimie, and I will see you on the next interview on this Biology of Trauma Summit.
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