Explore The Biology Of Trauma: Its Impact On You

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Thank you. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

This is going to be so much fun. I mean, this in regards to cancer, I mean, your what you do is like the core aspect of what we need to address. First of all, I’d like the audience to get to know you a little bit. Dr. Aimie, she’s a leading medical expert on how life experience gets stored in the body and restoring the body to its best state of health through her signature model and mythology. The Biology of trauma. She is double board certified medical physician, preventative medicine and addiction medicine. She has a masters in biochemistry and a masters in public health in addition to her medical training. 

She’s also a certified functional medicine physician and has training and certifications specifically in neuro autoimmunity nutrition and genetics for addictions, mental health and mood and behavioral disorders. She has several certifications in various trauma therapies, including the Instinctual Trauma Response Model, somatic experience and neuro effective touch. Dr. Aimie brings you the biology of trauma, new lens and mythology that courageously both adds to and bridges. Trauma work in medicine by reverse engineering. The chronic effects of trauma on the nervous system and body on a cellular level. Well, this is going to be so cool.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

It is. I’m really excited for this conversation and to have this conversation with you.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, see, we get double bonuses right here. So here we’re focusing on cancer. I mean, we have, you know, people who come with all types of cancer, breast, colon and whatever it may be. You know, is this only a physical response or is there more to it?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yeah, that’s a big question. And what I’ve discovered is that especially with cancer, but really with any chronic illness, there’s always other component. So there’s always multiple factors that went into the development of that condition and why that condition specifically. But there have been many people who have come through my program who are either currently going through their cancer journey or have just come out of their cancer journey and are looking for a a way to address the what they think is the emotional component. And then what they end up finding out is it’s a lot deeper than that, really just looking at how our operating system is for our body and looking at the role that all of that plays in in terms of are we living our life in a fear mode or are we living our our life from a safety mode? Because when we those are two very different operating systems for the body. And that’s not just emotional like that is actually what drives our physiology, drives our biology. And so that’s what I started to see is wait a second, there is this whole biology downstream effect that is a result of whether people want to call it chronic stress, or I will tell them that it’s trauma patterns. But that is what drives our physiology, our biology. And so when we look at something like cancer, is it physical? Well, yes. And there’s so many things that drive that physical condition, including all of the other things that actually do change our biology.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So I’m curious. So trauma, it seems like a psychological event and you think that that would only kind of exist within the mind, so to say? So here you can can the trauma that that emotional event or can that how can that reside in the body in a physical form?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yeah, that’s a great question. And some people may have heard, you know, like, oh, the trauma gets stored in the body. But like, how like what is the actual mechanism of that? And we really need to redefine trauma to understand how it gets stored in the body. And trauma is anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed us. And when we see it through that lens, which is, again, anything that for any reason at that time in our life overwhelmed us. We’re not just looking for big events. We’re not even looking for things that we can remember. It’s those experiences in life when we felt all alone, when we felt misunderstood, when we felt overwhelmed, that life was happening too much, too fast, or that we were having to live off of something that we needed. And there was just too little of that for too long. And whether that was support, whether that was love, whether that was touch, whatever it was, our body reached a point at which it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. And that is when the body goes into a trauma response. And so when we understand trauma through that lens, we can see that, oh, like it actually isn’t even just the past that I’m looking for trauma. I’m actually looking to see. Well, I think that I feel overwhelmed every day of my life. Right. Many of the people coming into my programs, when we sit down and we map out their autonomic nervous system, those three states, they see that I’m waking up in a trauma response, which to them means I don’t want to get up in the morning when I wake up. I’m already overwhelmed by my day. That hasn’t even started. And I want to stay in bed. I want to just pull the covers over my head. I want to just curl up into a ball. That is what we will feel when our body is in a trauma response. Now, of course, even though we feel that way, that’s not exactly what we do. And so even though that’s what they’re waking up in that state in a trauma response, they’re are waking up in a trauma physiology. Then we do things in order to pull ourselves out of that, to get things done, because we can’t live our life curled up into a ball, even though we may want to secretly we may want to. And so we do things that actually will stress us out. And this is where we can start to talk about the difference between stress and trauma, because stress is where there is energy and we are getting things done. In fact, we are stressed about something. 

So there’s action, there’s movement. And sometimes people stress themselves out by procrastinating or by waiting to get out of bed. So long until now, you really have to go because the kids are going to be late, your boss is going to yell at you, and now there’s stress associated with it, which is adrenaline. And so that will actually be enough to pull your body out of that trauma response that just wants to lay in bed all day, just doesn’t even want to be woken up this morning and it will pull it out to be able to get stuff done. But then by the afternoon you’re probably crashing a little bit. So you’re reaching for that extra cup of coffee or whatever other means of caffeine that you’re getting in or you’re looking for food, sugar, to help keep yourself in that high activation state. And eventually you crash. And for some people, that’s 3 p.m., 5 p.m., 7 p.m., and they just notice that what they experience as a slump, those slumps like those collapses, those times when we just want to do something mindless, we just want to check out that is actually the body going into a trauma physiology in that moment. 

So this is how trauma gets stored in the body is literally it becomes just one of the main mechanisms by which we get through life. And more and more a person will start to go into that trauma physiology and that trauma response until eventually they’re there all the time in it. And this is really where we see the cancers and the chronic conditions really take off because the body is now constantly receiving this message of, I don’t want to do this. Life is too much. And that that message is telling the body to shut down, not to do anything that is healing, that is restorative, because it doesn’t actually have the energy for that. When it’s in a trauma physiology, it is just getting by on the bare minimum and all processes for healing have been shut down. So that is how trauma technically gets stored in the body, is that it may start with just one or two times where you’re going into that, oh, that collapse, that slump, that feeling of being overwhelmed. Maybe for some people they’ve had that their whole life, but then it starts to accumulate and you’re spending more time now. You’re waking up in a trauma response now. It’s happening earlier in the afternoon and now eventually all day long. And it’s this pattern of going into the trauma response. That is how trauma gets stored in the body.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So it almost seems like a freeze response where and so you have that kind of frozen energy and we know when in cancer, you know, it’s like when mitochondria shuts down and it’s not producing energy. And, and so now we’re doing kind of shifting it towards a way that is a very kind of a wasteful way of producing energy, but really promotes a cancer process. And then you can also look at cancer, you know, like a tumor. You know, that it’s kind of like a frozen energy in a location. So it’s almost like that trauma encapsulated in a physical capsule.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And trauma is frozen energy that is a perfect way to describe this trauma response in the body so that what I teach in my courses and do my professionals is that trauma is an energy problem. It’s that moment that your body and by your body I do mean your autonomic nervous system that’s receiving signals from your mitochondria and from your gut that it receives. These signals of whatever we’re doing right now is unsustainable. And so we need to shut things down. And you will literally feel that freeze moment where it feels like someone has just pulled the drain out from under you and all of your energy just goes. And so that if we were to have more energy, if we were to have more cellular resources, we would be able to sustain a higher metabolic state for longer. And that high metabolic state is the stress response. And we would be able to sustain that and we’d be able to stay in that problem solving mode of I’ve got this and I’m going to get this done. This is, you know, I’m bigger than this problem. But what happens is that in the process of being overwhelmed, it the problem now seems bigger than us. And so you literally have that frozen energy of, well, if the problem is bigger than me, I better not use my energy for that. I better just shut down and just try to get through. And in the process it shuts things down. It tells cells. So to malfunction, it actually causes further disruptions in the mitochondrial process. And now you’re in this vicious cycle of kind of low cellular resources feeding that trauma response and now the trauma response, feeding back that same message of shut down. This is not the time to repair and restore ourselves to health.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So it’s almost like, you know, for survival, you know, it’s like a car instead of having all four cylinders fire, you’re kind of you’re shutting it down. So maybe one cylinder is firing. You’re still moving forward and you’re still able to accomplish something, but not really. You know, and so a question that I always have, I mean, that I’ve always been curious about and I’m wondering if you can can I answer this? So is there certain traumas that tend to be stored in, let’s say, the liver, you know, so if somebody’s dealing with like liver cancer, would it be a certain type of subset of traumas that that tend to gravitate more towards that organ versus the colon versus, you know, breasts, you know, so forth?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yes. And so from my understanding perspective, there are multiple factors that go into deciding what form of cancer. Well, this person get versus another person who gets this other form of cancer. And that is a combination of epigenetics and life exposures, environmental exposures and the emotional environment, which really becomes our internal environment. All of those together go into this big soup, and that soup is what determines ultimately this is how it will present itself in your body. But there’s also then this element that when a disease process starts in a certain tissue or organ, it creates a certain emotional internal environment as well. So sometimes we can look at, well, chicken versus egg, right? Like which came first. Sometimes we don’t necessarily know, but we do see these patterns of certain emotions being associated with disease processes and cancers and specific organs. And I mean that that is just a whole fascinating field to dove into. We know. And Chinese medicine gives us some of those elements of, you know, the liver associated with anger. And we can even just look at the liver and the movement when the body goes into a trauma response. And we’re not able to get that movement of bile, we’re not able to get the movement of that flow through the liver. And what are the downstream effects on the digestive system? Well, then we’re not even able to clear out toxins as well. And so then we start to build up a emotional toxicity as well. So there’s all these connections with the different tissues and organs. One of the things that has come out of the study of breast cancer specifically is this idea that there’s a personality around having a different internal emotional experience than what you present. 

On the surface. One of those common ones is kind of harboring some internal resentments, whether they’re aware of it or not. Actually, they may not even be consciously aware of that because oftentimes, honestly, the cancer is their bodies way of trying to communicate things that the mind would find unbearable if it were to see that. And so we have an internal experience, but then on the surface, maybe we’ve become a people pleaser and we’ve just been able to put a smile on her face and say, No, everything’s everything’s great, everything is fine, how are you? And yet that’s not at all how we feel inside or again, maybe there’s just that big of a disconnect because we’re not actually aware of how we feel inside. And the more fragmentation there is, then the the more of an internal environment there is for a disease process like cancer to develop, because we’re so out of touch and out of tune with what’s happening to be able to feed our system and kind of have this highway back and forth that is giving ourselves cues of safety, that all is well, I’m okay, everything’s going to be okay and instead, when, when there’s these fragmentations of I present one thing on the surface, I’m a people pleaser on the surface, but that’s not exactly how I feel inside. I’m actually resentful that I am this way and resentful that that that you are putting me in this position, then that that creates this disconnect that is actually providing the cues of I’m very unsafe and very unsafe, and this is how that shows up on the surface. But this is how that shows up on the inside is disease and cancer.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I frequently look at cancer kind of like a disconnect from the authentic self. So that there’s, say, a tissue that is having to separate from you as your true identity. And so and the key obviously to that is to find your authentic self and to be safe within who you are. And that way you can then resonate and vibrate. I mean, all your cells can then resonate to that intention and yeah. And you know, but what you’re focusing on doing, yeah.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Melanie was one of the ones who came to my 21 day journey at the time. I did not know this. I only learned this afterwards that she told me that she was going through her breast cancer treatments while she was in my 21 day journey, and she was noticing how everyone around her was in this fear place. And I don’t know if I’m going to be okay. And really also putting so much of their personal power into their physicians, into their surgeons, into their radiation therapists. As far as you need to fix me, you need to cure me. And there is so much fear and she’s like this. This is not this is not good. I’m learning from Doctor Aimie that I actually need to create a felt sense of safety. And so she decided not to involve herself with all those communities at that time, but just to focus in on somatic exercises that could inform her body and make her body not just her mind, but actually make her body feel safe. And she told me that she’s laying on the radiation therapy table and she’s doing the exercises that I teach in the 21 day journey. She’s starting with orienting that she’s doing a gentle view and she’s doing some containment and she’s like the ability to be in that moment not only helped me to feel completely safe, but it also allowed my body to feel like it was open and receptive to the treatment. Whereas I could tell that when I was in that fear place, there was so much constriction that my body was so guarded up that it wasn’t it didn’t feel open to anything. Everything still felt dangerous. And thankfully, she had a very successful treatment then she’s all through and now she’s noticing kind of the same thing with the remission communities that so much of them are still in this fear place of, well, when is my cancer going to come back? You know, it’s still so much fear based. And she’s like that. What I have felt in being able to actually feel safe and know what that feels like in my body has not only allowed me, she felt, to be able to successfully get through her treatments faster and better with better results than a lot of the other people. But then, like you’re saying, be able to then move into, all right, and now who is my authentic self? What have I been neglecting over the years? What have I been missing? And she discovered a lot of things in the process, and it was fascinating to see the difference with her journey versus a lot of other people’s journeys when she was able to incorporate this type of stuff, of bringing in the authenticity, bringing in the felt sense of safety, that the trauma response needs, and having a very different experience as a result.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So how should I mean, you talk about the 21 day journey and it sounds like pretty much everyone needs to do that in order to be able to because we all got traumas. I mean, if you’re born, I mean, just birth is a trauma, you know? I mean, all of we all carry it. So how do we how does a person start that journey? I mean, what what needs to take place in order to be able to kind of shift that frozen energy that that from our response, a freeze response, you know, to shift that into, you know, instead of being in fear like you’re saying, or frozen, to kind of live more fully and and kind of turn on the mitochondria, turn on the energy, turn on who you are and live life to its fullest.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

What I’ve noticed is that everyone who comes into my programs are people like me who have lived most of their life thinking about things. And they study. They read, My goodness, I was a book geek. I was never without a book. And I think that’s also why then, you know, like it’s not only the medical studies that I did, but I have two master’s degrees, like I love to learn. And I found out when I started this journey how much I was not aware of my body and not only not aware of, but when anything would come up, I would be like, Oh, no, no, no. I don’t want to feel that like, No, no, no, I don’t want to feel tired right now. So let me do this in order to not feel tired, then. No, I don’t want to feel lonely. No, no, no. I don’t want to feel grief. No, I don’t. I don’t want to feel the emotions right now. And I would and I had developed this amazing strategy to not feel until my body kind of broke and said no. Now, now is the time that you’re going to pay attention to us.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So let’s be intellectual, let’s just read. And that way I don’t have to feel my body.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

I don’t have to feel. And a lot of people seem to be like that because as they come in, they actually have to learn this process of what does it even mean to connect with my body? And it’s true that this isn’t meditation per se, because a lot, not all, but a lot of meditations are still just staying in the brain. And in fact, by using our brain to go into imagery or do things even outside of the body. So that’s not what we’re doing here. We’re needing to literally be able to become the experts and hearing the messages from our body. And to do that, we have to learn how to actually read the signals from our body and become the expert of our nervous system in the process. And when we understand this trauma response that it is an energy problem and it was a complete loss of safety because we got overwhelmed then that’s where we need to start. And so we start with being able to provide a false sense of safety in that process. Many of them discover that they’ve had this freeze response and it’s become a chronic freeze response for them, and they’ve never even known it. They’ve just pushed their bodies and pushed their bodies to continue to get through life. But being able to now come in and provide a felt sense of safety, they’re like, Oh yeah, no, I’m I don’t think I have felt this in a really, really long time. But maybe, possibly ever. But that’s where we have to start, because the trauma response happens when we have a loss of energy and a loss of safety. 

So that’s where we have to start. Now, the cool thing is that we can actually provide that for our body now so that we don’t have to actually rely on anyone else. We don’t have to wait for anyone else. We can come in and we can say, All right, body, let me do this, let me try this. And I guide them through seven different exercises so they can decide which of those seven different exercises seems to land the most for their system and actually provide a true felt sense of in this moment right here, right now, my body feels safe. It’s not just my mind telling me that I’m safe, but it’s actually my body feeling safe. And what does that feel like? Because all I have ever really felt is anxiety or overwhelm. I know what those feel like. And then as the body starts to come out of a chronic trauma response, like this has just been a pattern of mind to go into this place of overwhelmed so many times as it starts to come out that the body starts to wake up. Right? And it’s been frozen. And so it starts to come in and people start to feel things. And so people will start to feel sometimes they feel uncomfortable and sometimes they feel amazing. And it’s these it’s just really the ability to start feeling, though. And as their body comes out of that freeze response, it goes back into the stress response from which it came and the stress response needs something else. So the stress response needs a felt sense of support because that was what we needed when we were stressed. If we had had someone who had our back, if we had someone at our side holding our hands, we’re going to get through this together. It actually doesn’t become a trauma response. It actually stays a stress response. And so that’s then what we need to come in and learn how to provide for ourselves in that stress response mode, and then the body drops back down into parasympathetic and we get to work on expansion and safely expanding our window of tolerance so that we can actually handle more things, hold more things, hold space for joy, hold space for stress, hold space for change, and it not disrupt us as much as it does right now. And so that’s literally the process that I walk people through in the 21 day journey. The first week is all seven exercises for creating a false sense of safety for the trauma response. The second week is seven exercises for a felt sense of support for the stress response. And then that third week is seven different exercises for safely. And I do mean safe because we can do too much too fast even of a good thing and put ourselves back into a trauma response. That’s what a lot of therapy does, is it goes too deep, too fast. And so we need to do safe expansion and safely teaching our mitochondria that you actually can do more. You actually can hang in there longer, you actually can hold more. And let me do this with you and let me work on now bringing in the biology piece, let me teach you how to actually hold more of these things in life that otherwise would stress us out or overwhelm us. But now we’re going to be able to have a greater window of tolerance.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So I’m curious, because you’ve had, you know, thousands of people going through your program and done amazing. What what how do you I mean, what do you see a person when they come in? And this is how they’re thinking. This is how they’re feeling and this is how they perceive the world. And then after the 21 day program, what are they experiencing? I mean, what does that look like?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Honestly, the majority of people who come into my 21 day journey aren’t sure that they’ve ever had trauma like they are not ones that are like, Oh yeah, that was me, that Rhonda. She’s a Chicago policewoman now, just with knowing that the rest of us would say, like, honey, you’ve had trauma, right? But she was like, trauma. No, like, I haven’t had trauma. And yet when she came into the 21 day journey and started doing these exercises and started actually connecting with her body, that’s when she realized how much trauma was there. And again, we’re not looking for past events. So she could certainly look at past events and see how she had actually been overwhelmed by them, that it had been too much at that time in her life to just process and understand, like life just happened so fast. These days it’s hard to process everything that happens to us. But in the process, she is learning that this trauma response is not just something that happened in the past, but is happening in her daily life and actually contributed to her getting very sick and ultimately leading up with chronic fatigue syndrome after having been very athletic and marathon runner all of her life. And this is what I find most people discover, is that they have more trauma stored in their body than what they even realized. Now, obviously, now they’re learning the tools. At the same time they’re learning the tools to work with it so that it’s not overwhelming to see all this, because without the tools, that would be overwhelming. But it’s this process of being able to understand yourself on such a deeper level and see your responses through this light of Am I stressed or am I overwhelmed because those two states are different and they need different things? And I can now feel the difference and know which tools to apply. And why is that important? Because especially if someone is going through a cancer journey or coming out of a cancer journey, you need to know, you need to be able to read those messages of your body on an ongoing minute by minute basis and be able to sense like, Oh, my body’s getting overwhelmed right now. Let me is back. Let me pull back. Let me take a pause. Let me take care of and provide a felt sense of safety, provide that felt sense of support so that we can actually navigate this. And I can keep my physiology out of the fear physiology that will only lead to more disease. It is the most important thing when we have an active condition or when we’re trying to prevent a relapse of something that we stay in that flexibility and balance and health of our system. And we’re staying out of the fear and what often feels like the inescapable fear of life that overwhelm, because that is what will always, always I mean, that’s just what it does. It generates disease, because that is the downstream effect. And so that is the most important thing that a person can do for their health now and to make sure that they are in the best health in years to come.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And the thing is, I mean, you have the field of psych and immunology where we know that all the the immune cells, you know, they have receptors for all the neurotransmitters and neurotransmitters, all of chemicals that are secreted in the brain or produce in the gut, their produce a little bit all over the place. But they are things that, you know, guides our emotions. And so our immune system then are in direct, directly command and by how we feel. If we are feeling overwhelmed, then the immune system is going to feel overwhelmed. If we feel stressed, the immune system is going to feel stressed. If we feel empowered, immune systems going to feel empowered. So there’s a direct physiological impact on our immune system by working on trauma, by working on stress.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Which is why we can even look at the downstream symptoms that a person has and backtrack that and say, this is an expression of the trauma response in your body. This would not have happened if there had not already been a trauma response that generates this. And when we have something, say, like a physical injury, a head injury, and that causes inflammation, that inflammation will still feed back into the physiology and cause a trauma response so that, like you say, like they’re so inter interconnected that that one happens always with the other. You can’t separate them. And it’s really cool because we do something and I’m sure you’ve seen it, you know, like blood cell analysis. When you take a drop of blood, it put under microscope and blow it up on a big TV screen. And you get to see then your red blood cells, white blood cells, how they look, how they behave and all of that. So then you get to see the difference in one person’s immune system and another person’s immune system. So you see some Yeah. That person’s immune system that’s not working that well. Yeah. That as in that kind of trauma response, they’re white blood, red white blood cells. They’re just kind of hanging out there. They’re having a margarita by the pool. They’re really not not that active, not really caring much about bacteria or viruses or cancer cells in any way. They’re there, but they really don’t do that much, you know, so so it is so important then to maximize, you know, how your whole physiology, how it’s supposed to work together in order to be able to achieve the health goal. But the health goal is always correlated with, you know, who you are as a person and your emotional and mental and desires and, you know, so that you can’t separate them.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And that’s why no matter where you’re starting, you still need to do it. All right. Whether if you’re starting on the mental health side of things, you still need to address the biology. Right. And if you have a physical health issue, you still need to address the mental and emotional because it’s all one system. It is all one system.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

And it’s fascinating to me because sometimes when I do when you do like detoxification of like heavy or you kill off some pathogen like fungus or parasites or whatever it may be, it’s like they are, it’s like they’re holding emotions for us. And so when we are then detoxifying these things, the emotions come along with them. Or if you work on that, like you mentioned from a emotional, you know, I have a healing journey that is more on going to dealing with the traumas directly and that will then cost these heavy metals and these pathogens and you know, to start to release and come out. And you can actually see that the urine, you have people saying it smells like heavy metals. And all I did was working on my emotions and it’s really, really cool to see how yeah, we really are, you know, you can’t separate the two.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yeah. So I mean, I see the nervous system as a singular system and whichever angle you’re coming at it, it’s, it’s all good and it all needs to be done. You can’t just expect to approach it from one side and expect it all to come back into a place of health. And when we are able to bring multiple modalities that bring it from different angles all at the same time, they act synergistic together. So one of the things that I teach the biology of trauma professionals in my training program is that there are three elements to reaching the full potential for healing. And however you get these three elements is awesome. And those three elements are one is the body. And so this idea of working with the tissues and there’s many ways to work with tissues, there’s many ways to work with the body, but you have to connect with the body. You have to be able to start feeling, connecting, reading those sensations, knowing your different states as you go along and knowing how to shift those states. And then you have the narratives. And so those belief systems that you’ve told yourself and these belief systems that, my goodness, have been there since you were a kid, and as you went through different experiences, you learned things like you learned that, oh, trusting people is never safe, oh, loving people is never safe. And we’ve collected these life experience wisdoms along the way that now continue to guide life and our health because it can either keep us in a place of fear and we need to address those narratives. And so I do that through parts work, but there’s different ways to do that. And then we have the biology piece. And so looking at the information and how can I support the detoxification system? But even just looking at that, when we look at detox, if we can approach the detox through all of those systems, the somatic work, the narratives and our belief systems and the biology, and you do them all at the same time. Like that’s when from me, magic happens and people are shocked at how easy it is it seems to flow, whereas if they’re only using one modality, it can feel like they’re just sledging through mud to try to get progress. Because that’s not how our system was built. It really was built where we are multidimensional and as many dimensions as we can address. At the same time, they act synergistically to accelerate the healing journey.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So cool, so called. So how? How can people connect with you? How can they go through this, this 21 day journey where they can shift from being in a trauma response? And it’s and it sounds like, you know, like you’re mentioning it, it sounds like you don’t have to really know the events that may have caused the trauma. Yeah. All you need to do is go through the process to how to clear out the trauma response and our reverse engineer it, you know, from trauma response to something where you’re able to, to experience joy and purpose and so forth. So you know what? What should the next step be for people?

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

I would point them to a guide that I have on my website, which is traumahealingaccelerated.com. And there’s a guide there that’s called Steps to Identify and Heal Trauma. And that for me would be the place to start. If you are listening to this and you’re like, I’m not sure that I’ve had drama. You are one of the many people who have come to my program not really knowing that, and that would be the place to start, because in that guide, I actually have an assessment for you to look through it and do checkmarks of, Oh, I have this, I have this, I have this. So this must be indications that I’ve got some stored trauma and then they can find information on the 21 day journey there as well. But that guide steps to identify and heal trauma on my website. traumahealingaccelerated.com would be a great place for people to start.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Awesome. Well, Dr. Aimie, it’s always so cool to have to hang with you, to chat with you, and you’re just full of so much cool stuff that I know people can just be blessed with in so many different ways. Thank you.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Thank you.