Uncover Trauma’s Frequencies In Tissues

There are three states of the nervous system. And knowing those three states will help you identify if you have stored trauma in your body. And what does that mean? It means that your body goes into this trauma response sometimes even on a daily basis and we just have not known what to call it, how to recognize it and we have called it stress. But we haven’t recognized it as actually, my body is going into a trauma response. This freeze response, we talk about the freeze response being something that stops us from moving. That is one of the key differences between the stress response and the trauma response. Let me show you a graphic of the three states of the nervous system so that you can go into this interview having the information you need to get the most out of it. 

Here are the three states of your autonomic nervous system. That part of your nervous system that runs your body functions without you having to think about it. There are three states, three states that tell it how to live. In the middle, we see the parasympathetic. This is where our body is naturally in the healing state, it will heal itself, it will bounce back, and as long as it has what it needs it will do the work. Now the stress response is up here on top. We also call that the sympathetic state because there are sympathetic nerves that run down your spine, it is what communicates to your body. We are in stress mode and this is how you should be right now, this is what you should do right now, this is how we should live right now and it is a very high energy state. I want you to think of that hamster on the wheel where you are running, that is the stress response, it is high energy, it is where you are actually responding and taking action. But then down here below, and I put it down here because this is the low energy state, these are actually all in order of the energy level that you will feel when you are at the low energy state. What does that mean? That means that you feel overwhelmed, that means that you may notice yourself saying things like, I just can not do this anymore or maybe you wake up in the morning then you are like, I do not want to get up, I do not want to face my day, my day, my life already is overwhelming to me, I just want to pull the covers over my head and if I could just hide, that would be what I would want to do. When you think and feel that your body is in this trauma physiology, isn’t that interesting? We have called that stress. And, no, stress is when we are taking action for the problems, this is when we are jumping out of bed because we can hardly wait to solve that problem in our life. And when we are in the overwhelming place, when we are in that trauma physiology, when we are in that freeze response, and this can become a chronic place where we live life, we live life from a place of, I do not want to do this anymore, what do I need to do to just get through this, that is all the trauma response and that has a very specific physiology. 

Now, if the sympathetic stress response was communicated by the sympathetic nerves running down your spine this freeze response, this trauma response is communicated by something different. Your parasympathetic state is really communicated that receives the signals to be in that state from what we would call your vagus nerve but specifically your ventral vagus. And that is where you actually have all of the social engagement, your eye muscles, your facial muscles, all of that is engaged, especially the innovation above your diaphragm, this is all the ventral vagus as you are socially engaging and feeling safe to do so. But the moment that you feel unsafe in a certain way like a potential danger your body goes into that sympathetic state and that is communicated now by the sympathetic nerves running down your spine that send out messages to your body. But then in the freeze response, this is when it feels like an inescapable stress, an inescapable life threat even and we have thoughts, we have feelings of what is the point, nothing that I do is going to make a difference anyway and it feels inescapable. And when that happens it actually changes our metabolism and that is communicated by the dorsal vagus. And this is why we can not just do vagus-stimulating activities or build your vagal tone because, well, which vagus are you building, which vagus are you stimulating, are you stimulating social engagement one or are you stimulating the trauma one? Because there are two different innovations of that vagus nerve. And the communications coming from this vagus nerve are going out into the environment around yourselves and to each cell. 

And we are going to talk all about the environment around each cell today in this trauma physiology. It is receiving this message of life is overwhelming, life is too much, things have happened to me too much, too fast, or I have just had too little of something that I need for just too long and I can not do it anymore, this is all the trauma and the freed response that we are going to mention in this interview. With that, we talk about somatic exercise being somatic referring to the tissues. Because we need to work with the tissues. And if at any point you are ready for that, then I invite you to take the 21-day journey with me. And when you come to my website traumahealingaccelerated.com you can find out about the 21-day journey which is a somatic exercise course. I lead that course live still. And there are some self-study portions. But you also meet with a group once a day to do the same exercise, these are very short exercises, so that is the 21-day journey. But if you come down here to the resources section this would be a great guide for you, steps for identifying and healing trauma. I go over how to know how to recognize the trauma response, I have gone over a few things with you here. And then you are going to want the essential sequence guide because this guide will help walk you through that process of, wait, how did my body get into a trauma response and if that is the way into the trauma response what is my way out, that is all explained in that essential sequence guide. 

Now for this conversation on the extracellular matrix and the environment that informs our cells how to live whether to be in disease or healing based on the trauma response, I have my good friend, Dr. Christine Schaffner. Now she is a board-certified naturopathic doctor who has helped thousands of people recover from chronic or complex illness through her online summits for a spectrum of health podcasts and network of eminence health clinics and renowned online programs. Dr. Schaffner goes beyond biological medicine healing from all systems of medicine and healing modalities helping patients reclaim their wellness and reveal their brightest light. She completed her undergraduate studies in pre-medicine and psychology at The University of Virginia in Charlottesville and went on to earn her doctorate at Bastyr University. I am so excited to have her on for this interview. I know that you will enjoy this so let us jump in. 

Dr. Schaffner, why should we care about the extracellular matrix when it comes to stored emotions and trauma? When I was going through medical school like that literally, as you say, that was the piece that I just kind of cut away and put into the trash. And now we are finding like, wait a second, no, this may have the clues to so much of why we struggle to bounce back after something in our life. Why should we care about the extracellular matrix when it is related to emotions and trauma?

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah. Great question. And a lot of my work focuses on extracellular matrix. It is really, as we flush out this model of understanding what is happening in this, it is a very active space, everything is at when we think about toxicants, trauma, and pathogens, it is really the space that we need to focus on, and target our modalities. And in the way that I look at the body I look at what we call terrain medicine which is very different from germ theory, it is like the opposite. And germ therapy, theory rather not germ therapy, germ theory is this idea like, hey, you got a bug you encounter it you automatically get that illness. And terrain theory is this really empowering and beautiful way to look at the body that we can build resilience and adaptability and we can really optimize our epigenetic expression. Because right now Earth is this beautiful place, but we do not live in utopia, we are encountering so much stress and so many toxic hands. And I am so happy you are doing the summit and built this summit over these years because the trauma piece has been quite misunderstood. And I think it is just as important as the toxic and our pathogen to unwind in the body. And when we look at this building resilience and adaptability in this idea of terrain medicine and how we feel empowered, the terrain really is the extracellular matrix. And in bioregulatory medicine one of the fathers and kind of pioneering thoughts, Dr. Alfred Pischinger wrote a book all about this extracellular matrix and he says, “The cell does not exist in isolation but it exists in this beautiful environment around the cell and health begins and disease starts in the space.” It is actually like the place to look if you have a chronic illness or if you are dealing with trauma.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And I love that. Thank you for sharing that quote. Because it is true whether health or disease it really resides in the space around the cell. And when we look at our life and our modern lifestyle it can be overwhelming to see all the stressors that are coming at us whether it is a chemical stress, whether it is an environmental stress, whether it is something in our food, whether it is something in our water, the air, we are surrounded by things that could be a stress and a trauma and an assault on our system. And to be able to look at it through this lens of, but wait, I can have this terrain around my cells that actually promotes resilience and health. I am not just a victim of all of these modern lifestyle toxicants and pathogens around me.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yes, absolutely. And, this space too when we kind of flush out the model is this really beautiful space in this environment around the cells. And the more that we unwind it and understand it we realize how interconnected our bodies are. And that really we even learn that this space that is so important to keep training, whether that is out of lymphatic remedies and lymphatic therapies help to drain the space, some of our other drainage remedies and homotoxicology. Also, this is the place where, as I mentioned, toxicants and pathogens, and trauma like to reside. But when we kind of even go more granular, we have realized this interconnection in the body and Dr. James Oschman and also Dr. Jean Claude Guimberteau really studied the space and the spaces within what we call this beautiful fascial network which is also what we call the tissue continuum or the living matrix. 

And we realized that there are these true lines of interconnections of the extracellular environment and the intracellular environment. And the extracellular matrix is full of collagen. And collagen is the most abundant protein in the body as well as proteoglycans and hyaluronic acid. It is also bathed in prelin and on structured water. And I really feel like the water in this space holds the trauma and this idea of facial memory kind of began because we see this unwinding when we do somatic work or neural therapies or whatever that the body will release this trauma, so we see these also mass cells and immune cells. And we know mass cells are reacting to everything these days. And the more we clean up the space is really important. But we see this outer extracellular environment tucked in. You have Dr. Bruce Lipton on this summit which is awesome. And he has educated us so much about this cell membrane. But over the cell membrane, there is a connection through the extracellular environment through these proteins called integrins, that kind of lock in the extracellular environment to the cytoskeleton of the intracellular environment that hooks into the nucleus of the cell and the nuclear cytoskeleton. We have this all of a sudden connection when you break out the extracellular matrix it goes to our skin. We can really be effecting epigenetic changes by doing hands-on work or doing remedies that are working on the skin which I think is such a trippy thought. But we see it in practice and my patients teach me any of my thoughts that I have developed probably have come from a curiosity of seeing what works with my patients. I just think the more we know that about our body, like, wow, and we learn that health and resilience is creating more flow and getting this space coherent and helping to unblock stagnation and congestion and a build-up of these things we have been talking about.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And as I get that picture of the integrins, those proteins and it even being hooked into the nucleus of a cell. And again, I see this clinically. And people ask me, why do you start with a somatic work journey? And I am like, it because this is actually what changes, starts to change our biology and in my experience, Dr. Schaffner, it makes the body and tissues receptive through them the supplements. And the biology things that we need to change, we can not neglect that, we can not do somatic work and expect that everything will unwind and will be able to make ourselves have our best help, but it is making the body and the cells actually receptive to these interventions that we are doing. And I see that happening with somatic work. I lead people through a 21-day journey in order to introduce them to this somatic work and it literally is amazing to me as a medical physician who is trained in this germ theory, for one thing, the medication theory.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yes.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

For every illness, there is medication.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

To step out of that and be able to see like, wait a second, people who are doing somatic work. And we are not talking about advanced somatic work, we are talking about exercises, somatic exercises that they can learn by themselves, do by themselves and that is changing their sleep, their GI symptoms, their daily chronic pain issues, I mean, this is changing biology and this is the reason why. And I got excited about that because certainly when I was going to medical school so much of this was seen as woo-woo because I could not explain it yet. And I see the science developing so that we have a mechanism to understand why the somatic work helps to unwind and make the body, the cells, the tissues, and the extracellular matrix be receptive to the interventions that we bring in.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah. I think that is so beautiful. And I am so happy you do that, Dr. Aimie. And I think that this idea in bioregulatory medicine and terrain medicine is all about regulation, the regulation of our nervous system. And we connected at a recent conference and I really feel that when we, my whole point in my conversation at the conference was, hey, this partial network is actually more profound than around my nervous system. And there is kind of research and data to kind of point to that picture. Because we know that cells are. I think there was a quote that I read in Dr. Oschman’s book like a hundred thousand biochemical reactions per second is happening in the cell, I mean, like, what the heck?

And we know that there is a speed of communication in the body that is not explained by the synaptic transmission and the action potentials of neurons which is quite powerful, of course, and of course really a big part of how our body communicates. But this fabric that touches our DNA and touches every aspect and connects and communicates every aspect is like our internet, it is our inner communication system, it is actually this fiber optic system. And I love that you work with the fascia, really, which is really also the extracellular matrix. At the end of the day, it is all kinds of one fabric that you are allowing the body to unwind areas of stuck energy, areas that the body has been holding bound energy. Network chiropractic, I love how they talk about it is all about bound and unbound energy in the body and there is a ball of trauma like it is unwinding and free and then liberating energy within the body. 

And that liberation of energy is allowing the body to regulate and heal. And I think that is why that work is so powerful. My tool19:50 in my office is really neural therapy. I have people in my office who do more cranial sacral and lymphatic work. But the somatic work is amazing. And again, the neural therapy work is more you doing an injection technique that helps to liberate bound energy and scars. Also, help to deliberate facial restrictions in different organ patterns. You can do ganglion injections as well to reset the nervous system. But a lot of the injections are just superficial on the fascia. And it is amazing how much energy moves once we get that system ongoing. And I think it is because it is this high-speed network of communication. And when you have an interruption and that cable system there is a breakdown in communication. And, well, the more the body can work as a whole organism that is where health really resides.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Well, that is where I wanted to go next because I understand trauma physiology. And I teach that there are the three states of the autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic stress, and then trauma physiology. What is unique about the trauma physiology is it is static, there is no movement, and everything is just kind of like constricts. And there you have this bound energy but it is not moving. And there are consequences for that physiology in the lymphatic system through cellular matrix. And this is where we can come in with different tools just to help bring in some movement. And you talked about trauma being stored even in the water in the intercellular matrix. Talk to us about this movement in the extracellular matrix in this terrain. Because it is not just this rigid hold around the cells it is a very fluid process. Well, at least we want it to be a very fluid process.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Trauma physiology will constrict that. Talk to us about the movement and then even the frequency that we can bring in to build health and resilience.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah, absolutely. And I am so glad you talk about the rigidity and the freeze response. Because when people, we call it blocked regulation right in the body, and when people are not able to communicate and their self-healing capacity is diminished that is what we see from all the things we have talked about, and trauma being a big aspect of this. And what we think about again, there it can be, when the time people comes to see me, these systems are fluid and flowing and all the things that we want, that’s what we have to work on. But in the normal physiology as nature and the divine intended us to be is that. When we look at this extracellular matrix, again, this fabric of interconnection, but we have the cell and then we have the space around the cell. And I already kind of painted the picture that it is all collagen and hyaluronic acid and these beautiful proteoglycans and fiberglass that are breaking the space down and building it up and dendritic cells and mast cells, all of this stuff. Because what happens is our blood obviously leaves our heart and it goes to our arteries and then it gets down to these really fine capillaries that are in the tissue space. And a lot of our blood actually leaves the capillary space and some of it returns to the venous system to get reoxygenated, but a lot of it sits there and it is called interstitial fluid prelims and it is the beginning of the lymphatics. And the point of that fluid is all to nourish these cells, nourish the tissue space, bring oxygen to the space, and then a big part of it is also to remove waste and drain into the lymphatic capillaries that are just sitting right in that space to pick up the fluid and then go through the lymphatic network. And when we think about it too, what our blood encounters, the antigens too, when we think of viruses, or Lyme spirochetes, or other co-infections or parasites, or other toxicants that are kind of front line as going into these spaces. And that is why we have a lot of our immune system surveys in that space. 

And then because of that charge on things like heavy metals, they are positively charged and it is kind of counterintuitive. But health is a negative charge. When we are in that health, a lot of the health spaces are negatively charged because they are electron rich and they are ready to go. And the aluminum or the lead, or the mercury combined to those parts are negatively charged rather than proteoglycans and start breaking the system down. We know Lyme loves to degrade collagen, so all of a sudden we are seeing this breakdown and this network. And if the immune system is not ready to go and not in a healthy response we tend to have this chronic inflammatory response where the muscles become hyper-vigilant and this buildup of toxicants and then all of a sudden there is rigidity and stagnation and congestion and the lymphatic capillary system can not keep up and then there is lymphatic buildup in this whole system and then the cells can excrete their waste or bring in their oxygen and then they start to deoxygenated and the cell danger response perpetuates and all sorts of things and all of the system all of a sudden starts to just get really backed up. All this metabolic waste too is just sitting in space. And that is what Pischinger’s point was that is when disease begins and it is kind of happening in one area the body can quickly start to happen and accumulate in other areas of the body because the body is an interconnected system. When I start I unbound the energy and scars, I get the lymphatics moving, and I get the fluids in the body moving, a lot of our patients have sticky blood too. 

Also, our arteries space that we talked about is sticky and thick and not moving then we get less movement into the prelin’s space. And my focus usually is how do we stabilize and support the body and get the body to move and to feel safe and to start creating, yeah, this movement and these fluids in the body which are the blood and the lymph and then the fascia. And again, I mentioned I have neuro therapy, I have other lymphatic remedies, we do the Flowpresso here, I give a lot of drainage, and all of that. And then a big part of my curiosity and my passion is this kind of realm of the quantum. I guess we can say that now, quantum and energy, medicine. And I am sure Dr. Lipton talked a lot about these realms as well. But when you think about this fabric there are these really beautiful properties of this fabric and it does not just communicate with all of our biochemical kind of pathways and stories around biochemistry. But there is this beautiful communication that happens kind of upstream of our biochemical pathways through light and sound, electromagnetic waves, and bio photons are emitted from our cells and started in the DNA. And health is really a balance, this kind of goldilocks amount of coherent light that is emitted from the cell. And light helps to regulate the communication networks in the body and intercellular communication. And the oscillations and vibrations through this beautiful interconnected matrix can generate light, and can generate sound. There is this whole idea of sonocytology that the cells actually emit sounds. And when we are in a state of health our cells are in these beautiful sound patterns of harmonic coherent sound. 

And then when we are in these disease states we are emitting dissonant kind of very incoherent sounds, you do not think of like the screeching on a chalkboard sounds then you start seeing this story of like, okay, the sounds in the body and the light emissions in the body. And then wherever we have charges moving through conductors we have electromagnetic magnetic fields. And then we also have magnetism through coils which are the DNA and the collagen matrix is a helical coil. We have magnetic fields that generate electrical fields. We have electromagnetism in the body as well. Part of the techniques when someone is sick we can add coherent lights to the system, we can add coherent sound to the system, we can add coherent electromagnetic frequencies like PEMF or other technologies. We are ultimately the strongest frequency generators. 

And if we are well enough to get in a state of what we call heart-brain coherence where we slow our heart rate down and we get into a really harmonious coherent heart rhythm when we are thinking about our daughter, or our husband, or wife, or son, or our loved ones and we start to relax, we get into this coherent waveform. And that waveform actually instructs our whole field that actually creates coherent brainwaves. And when we get sent up between our heart, our brain, and kind of my models out in the fascia. We have heart-brain fascia coherence that we are in a coherent state where then we can receive. And I believe we are receiving energy from what people call the unified field, the ether, the divine source, whatever you want to call it but it is this field of unlimited potential and possibility. And we have the thought that we need or we all of a sudden start attracting the doctor that we need to see or the person we need to connect with.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Somebody that we needed to attend.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah, totally. We actually receive healing energy and that offers a biological upgrade to our system and we have a little bit more strength, a little bit more healing to keep going. And the more that we can almost tend to that part of our system as much as all the other parts of our health journey. It is almost like heart hygiene to this, we start to see shifts and we build momentum and we build capacity and we start regulating and then we start flowing and we start being in sync and we start healing. And I think we are all meant to. Life is all about this healing journey that we are all on in some capacity or another. Some of us really have that capacity in our physical body to learn about the beauty of healing, and some have obstacles with our relationships or obstacles with life events. And the more that we can tap in how we are wired to really truly be supported and to heal. And that we are really more powerful than will ever know that we build on this resilience and adaptability and we can live a life where I believe we are all here to live a purpose. We have this purposeful life and we have the energy and the capacity to do that. And that is how I kind of tie it all together.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

And I love that. I love the picture that this bio-regulatory medicine provides where it is almost like the continuum of the extracellular matrix, this space around the cells. And that no cell lives in isolation. And that becomes also for us as individuals that we do not live in isolation. We have this space outside of us too that we can tap into the healing potential, the frequencies. And make sure that the frequencies that we are surrounding ourselves in this space as well as the inner space ones of healing and ones of regulation. And I think of often the effect that people have when they are at the ocean and that is the space, it is the space and then it is the flow in that space, that it is the rhythm of the in and out, it is the I give and I take, it is the regulation of the flow and the system. 

And when we can have the tools to build that within ourselves, so the extracellular matrix, and surround each of our cells with that type of space and energy and frequency and rhythm and flow and music. Wow. And then and then we can also build that on a macro level around ourselves as a human being.

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah. It is where the micro and the macro on many levels. And the work of the heart is so beautiful. They are even showing how we are highly connected to mother Earth. And they have basically sensors all over the planet. And they are tracking how people can be impactful when they get in a group and then get a coherent state that they could actually change those sensors and change the magnetic fields on the planet. We as humans have the ability to live in relationships like that. Wow. And you know how many other applications of that experience are out there. And I think as you build you have a really great program and build community. Again, if you just take that idea of we are highly interconnected, health is connection, and disease is isolation. How do we find all those aspects within our life to create more connectivity to more community? And I think that is really such an impactful part of life as well.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

Yeah. Thank you for that. It is this connection and it is the message of life that we are able to send to ourselves rather than the message of disease. What would be one thing that people can do just today as they are perhaps finishing up this interview to help bring health to their extracellular matrix?

Christine Schaffner, ND

Yeah. And one thing it’s so hard for me, she said, but.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

The hardest question I have asked you.

Christine Schaffner, ND

I know. I am like, okay, what is the, one thing is going to be all about your fascia because the fascia is everything. When we learn about how the fascia works it is really about movement and hydration. And the more hydrated your fascia is the more that you can hydrate your tissues and the more connectivity we have within our inner network. And it really helps our health on so many levels. And building upon that, obviously, we want to filter our water. And ideally, I really believe in structural water. And we can structure the water we drink. And we can structure the water within us and that is getting outside connecting to mother earth, grounding, being in the sun, the sun as our friend, do not get burned. But the sun is our friend and it helps to regulate our circadian biology and structure the water within us. That is my attempt to do one thing. I am building upon those concepts. But I think that is within reach of everyone.

Aimie Apigian, MD, MS, MPH

What an amazing interview. I hope that you got a lot out of it. I know that I did. I always love this conversation around how the vagus nerve, how our cells, and our tissues are all part of a complex system. Remember that if you are ready for the somatic work come join me for the 21-day journey. And also remember that you can purchase all of these interviews so that you do not have to be vigorously taking notes but can take it all in. Have that breath, have that pause, have that space to not be stressed, not be in a rush, and certainly not to go into a trauma or freeze response and be overwhelmed with all of this. With that, I am your host, Dr. Aimie for this summit, The Biology of Trauma Summit 3.0, trauma disease connection. You can still invite your friends, invite family, invite colleagues. And I will see you in the next interview.