The Biology of Trauma® With Dr. Aimie

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:

RESOURCES:

You know the thing that would help. You have known for a while. You still have not done it.

Dr. Aimie recognized herself in the research on learned helplessness. For a long stretch of her life she expected everything to be hard, expected to fail, and quietly stopped trying without ever deciding to. It is not laziness. It is a body that learned effort did not matter and powered the effort down.

In this Part 2 conversation, recorded in Josh Trent's Austin studio, they talk about what separates resting from escaping, why the drive built on...

You finally have an evening with nothing in it. Twenty minutes later you are on your phone.

Josh Trent spent most of his life in a body that did not know how to rest. A clench in his stomach. A breath that stayed high in his chest. His first memory is of being a boy watching the adults around him be angry, unable to change it and unable to leave. The bracing stayed for thirty years.

Dr. Aimie and Josh talk about why stillness can feel unsafe, what separates real rest from escape, and why...

Why do I crash every time I finally slow down? Maybe you feel fine all week, then crash on the weekend. Maybe an open Saturday fills you with a quiet dread. So you fill it. An early bike ride. A full list. Anything to keep moving. Many people call this high-functioning burnout. It has a name, and it has a cause.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/episode-184-why-you-crash-when-you-slow-down-the-pattern-of-depletion

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:

Most of us were told to grieve, to rest, to be present. Nobody taught us the skill. In Part 2, Dr. Aimie and neuroscientist Dr. David Rabin get into heart rate variability and resilience, why anxiety masks itself as focus, and why grieving is a skill your body has to learn. Feeling safe enough to feel is where the work begins.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/why-grieving-is-a-skill-what-hrv-reveals-about-resilience-david-rabin 

Stress was never the enemy. Your body was built to use it. What wears the body down is chronic stress with no recovery on the other side. Translational neuroscientist Dr. David Rabin splits stress into two forms. Eustress builds capacity. Distress, carried over time, moves the body toward disease.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/eustress-distress-difference-means-for-your-body-david-rabin

In This Episode You'll Learn:

Cravings point to a need underneath. This episode covers the three unmet needs behind food. It looks at the childhood roots of reaching for it. And it helps you tell stress from something deeper.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/what-your-food-cravings-mean-nervous-system

In This Episode You'll Learn:

An early read on your nervous system explains why reflux holds on. This episode covers reflux hypersensitivity, lost hunger and fullness cues, and the somatic tools that calm the gut, including diaphragmatic breathing after meals.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/nervoussystemandacidreflux-thegut-brainconnection

In This Episode You'll Learn:

This is where adoption, attachment, and addiction meet. An early attachment rupture leaves the nervous system braced and hypervigilant. A substance can feel like the first relief from that noise. Drawing on her own recovery, Lisa Coppola names the four hidden losses adoptees carry. She shares why recovery asks for more than abstinence. It asks for safe connection.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/adoption-attachment-and-addiction-why-adoptees-struggle-and-what-recovery-really-ask

In This Episode You'll Learn:

Vision is one of the primary signals your nervous system reads for safety or danger. Under stress, peripheral vision collapses and the body locks into central focus. Dr. Bryce Appelbaum walks through three eye exercises that begin retraining the eye-brain connection and the felt sense of safety.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/vagus-nerve-and-vision-how-your-eyes-signal-safety-to-your-nervous-system

In This Episode You'll Learn:

Attachment is a survival imprint that lives in the body, encoded before you had language. In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian walks through the 6 hidden attachment pains, the adult symptoms each one creates, and why inner work alone cannot reach where the pattern lives.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/episode-177-6-attachment-wounds-chronic-symptoms

In This Episode You'll Learn: 

Information alone does not resolve nervous system dysregulation. The body comes out of stored trauma in a precise three-step sequence: Safety, Support, Expansion. Skipping the order keeps the system stuck. Three Biology of Trauma® professionals describe the same shifts emerging in the same order, across three different conditions.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/nervous-system-regulation-stories-why-the-sequence-matters

In This Episode You'll Learn:

Metabolic syndrome, long-haul syndromes, hypersensitivity, and autoimmunity are four ways the immune system adapts to a nervous system living in fear.

Each one is the immune system adapting to a fear-driven nervous system. These are adaptations. The body is doing what bodies do.

In this solo episode, Dr. Aimie walks through all four immune adaptive patterns. The fear pattern behind each one. What your diagnosis is actually telling you. And why hope lives in a simple fact: most immune cells turn over every three days.

She also shares her own experience with all...

Grieving without getting stuck is possible. But most people don't know what that actually looks like from the inside. In this personal episode, Dr. Aimie shares seven principles she is living right now — attachment grief, heart shock, body holding, and toxic positivity. Not the theory of grief. The actual practice from inside it.

If you have ever wondered how to grieve without shutting down — or why grief and the nervous system are inseparable — this episode is the most personal answer Dr. Aimie has given.

➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/episode-174-7-principles-for-feeling-grief-in-your-body-after-loss

In T...

Food cravings are not a willpower problem. They are messages from a nervous system trying to survive. In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian maps the cortisol, blood sugar, and inflammation patterns behind cravings, why menopause makes them louder, and how stored trauma in the body keeps the loop running.

➡️ Full show notes: EP 173: What Sugar, Bread, and Salt Reveal About Your Nervous System in Menopause

In This Episode You'll Learn:

Mother hunger is what the body carries when it missed one of three essential elements of maternal care: nurture, protection, or guidance.

On this Mother's Day Bonus Episode, Dr. Aimie sits down with Kelly McDaniel — author of Mother Hunger — to map the biology underneath. They walk through how unmet nurture shapes adult eating patterns, how unmet protection leaves a nervous system that never learned to settle, and how unmet guidance can leave a daughter inheriting the wound her mother could not heal.

This is not about blaming any mother. It is about giving language to what...

 ➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - The 3 Hidden Costs of Being the Strong One - Burnout's Real Biology

You've been the strong one. The one who keeps everything running. The one others lean on when things fall apart.

Your body has been keeping score. And the bill has three items.

There is a specific biology behind the pattern of holding everything together. It is not a personality trait. It is a nervous system response — and it carries three hidden costs most people never connect to the same...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Is Your Chocolate Holding Your Marriage Together?  |  With Luis Mojica 

Three women walked into Luis Mojica's nutrition practice with the same chocolate habit. When he asked each one what would happen if they stopped, the answer was identical — "I'd leave my husband." That moment became the birthplace of food therapy.

In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian and somatic nutritionist Luis Mojica break down the three unmet needs driving food choices — emotional, relational, and nutritional — and how stimulants, depressants, and balancing foods each shape the...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - EP 170: What If Safety Is What Your Body Was Taught to Fear?

You learned to assess the mood of a room before you walked into it. To listen to the sounds in the house before you got out of bed. To become whoever was needed — quickly, automatically, without being asked. Your nervous system built that skill before you had language for it. And it has been running ever since.

In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian explains what growing up in an emotion...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Is Your Body Still Running a Trauma Response?

What if the anxiety that will not settle, the fatigue that sleep does not fix, and the chronic health conditions that appeared out of nowhere are not separate problems? What if they are the same pattern — the nervous system running a stored trauma response it was never able to complete?

In this solo episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian walks through the biology of how trauma gets stored in the nervous system, why the event matters...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Why Menopause Is When Your Stored Trauma Finally Surfaces 

What if the anxiety, the depression, the rage, and the emotional floods did not begin with perimenopause and have been there all along? And menopause is simply when the body can no longer hold them? What if your childhood ACE score is one of the strongest predictors of how severe your menopause experience will be?

In this episode, Dr. Aimie talks with Dr. Betty Murray, hormone metabolism expert and functional medicine PhD, to con...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - What Did Your First Year of Life Teach Your Body About Safety?

What if the patterns you've called personality — the distrust, the hyper-independence, the certainty that your needs are too much — were never personality at all? What if they are the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do before you had a single memory to show for it?

Attachment trauma persists in the body as implicit survival programming — not as memory, but as an operating assumption the nervous system keeps runni...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast— What Does Overwhelm Have To Do With Chronic Pain?

If you have chronic pain, you've probably been told that stress is making it worse. But here's what the biology actually shows: by the time your pain is flaring, you're past stress. You've crossed into overwhelm — and that changes everything about what your body can do.

In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian — double board-certified physician and author of The Biology of Trauma®  — explains why chronic pain and chronic trauma follow the same biological pattern, and ex...

➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Is the Need to Always Be “Good” a Trauma Response?

What does your body do with guilt it can never undo? 

Have you ever done everything right — and still felt something unresolved living in your body?

Maybe it's not a dramatic story. Maybe it's just a moment you can't stop replaying. A decision you can't forgive yourself for. A version of you that acted against your own values — and your nervous system never got the memo that it's over.

That's w...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast – Episode 164: Could Your Trauma Be Disrupting Your Metabolism? The Weight Health Conversation

What if the reason your body is holding onto weight has nothing to do with what you're eating — and everything to do with hormones you may not have heard about? 

In this episode, Dr. Aimie talks with registered dietitian and author Ashley Koff to unpack the hidden world of weight health hormones: GLP-1, leptin, ghrelin, and more — and why optimizing them matters for everybody, not just people trying to lose weight. What you'll hear will ch...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 163: Growing Up With Addiction Left a Trauma Your Body Still Carries

What happens when a child has to become the adult in the family? Dr. Tian Dayton, clinical psychologist and author of Growing Up with Addiction, joins Dr. Aimie for one of the most personal conversations on the podcast. Both share their own childhood stories of reading the room, managing a parent’s emotions, and the unspoken rules that shaped their nervous systems for decades.

This episode reveals how children in unpredictable families redirec...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast — Episode 162: Why Fixing Someone You Love Is Destroying Your Nervous System

When someone you love is struggling with addiction, your nervous system absorbs what theirs numbs out. Relational trauma repair therapist Karen Moser joins Dr. Aimie Apigian to explain why the families of substance users often carry deeper nervous system dysregulation than the users themselves. This episode reveals the biological cost of trying to control another person's healing and what it takes to reclaim the parts of yourself that got lost along the way.

In This Ep...

Grief, regret, loneliness, inflammation, pain. There are deeper layers than we are even aware of.

Dana was a family physician who had managed gut issues for years. Constipation. Bloating. Acid reflux. She had every tool available to her. She rotated medications, over-the-counter laxatives, and antacids. She pushed through. Then one brave question changed everything. I asked her: what happened that should not have happened? Her posture collapsed. The tears came. And she made the connection — that was when my gut issues started.

This is the biology behind what so many of us carry without knowing it...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast -  Episode 161: Dopamine and Depression: The Metabolic Link You Need to Know

Dopamine doesn't just create pleasure. It signals unexpected experiences and primes the brain to learn. New research reveals that depression, anxiety, and ADHD have different metabolic phenotypes. Understanding your unique metabolic footprint explains why standard treatments work for some and not others. Mental health and metabolic health are inseparable.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

[01:00] How does peripheral nerve stimulation affect dopamine in the brain?
[06:30] Does dopamine actually make you feel good?<...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 160: How Creativity Rewires Your Nervous System with Adam Roa

What if the key to healing isn't more therapy—but creativity? Adam Roa's poem "You Are Who You've Been Looking For" reached over 250 million people. But before that poem existed, Adam spent 25 years emotionally shut down. He didn't remember his childhood sexual abuse until age 30. His journey reveals why creativity creates neurological safety for emotions that were once too overwhelming to feel. Creativity isn't about talent—it's about pattern disruption. When you turn pain into a poem or p...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 159: Why Trauma Blocks Your Stem Cell Repair System

What if we knew how to repair cellular damage from stress and trauma? Stem cells are your body's repair system—replacing 50-70 billion cells every day. But chronic inflammation from trauma creates what Dr. Dan Pardi calls a "noisy neighborhood" where repair signals can't get through.

Dr. Pardi is the Chief Health Officer at Qualia Life Sciences, where he researches what actually allows cellular healing to happen. In this episode, we explore why trauma...

You know it's not good for you. You do it anyway. Then you ask yourself why.

Late-night scrolling when you promised you'd sleep. Sugar after dinner when you said you'd stop. The fight you picked that you didn't need to pick. We call it lack of willpower. But willpower isn't the problem.

This is the biology behind the main episode this week with addiction policy expert Dr. Kevin Sabet. He shared what we've been getting wrong about marijuana and addiction. Now I'm taking you deeper into what's actually happening in your brain when you can't...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode Marijuana, Addiction, and the Body: What We've Been Getting Wrong

If you've watched a family member struggle with addiction, you know how helpless it can feel. Treatment programs that don't work. Policies that seem disconnected from reality. Debates about legalization versus criminalization that never address what actually helps someone recover.

Dr. Kevin Sabet has spent decades advising three presidential administrations on drug policy—watching decriminalization debates, marijuana legalization, and the opioid crisis unfold. He started asking a different question: What if we looked at what...

Can you do all the therapy and still have brain fog? Yes. Can you talk through your past and still have chronic fatigue? Absolutely.

Here's the tension. We've been told that processing trauma means talking about it. That resilience means surviving hard things. But what if your body is still holding what your mind thinks it released?

I go deeper into this with Marie Demasio in Episode 157. She shared how she'd done so much work after losing her son. She thought she was past it. Then she visited our mutual friend, Dr. Bryce Applebaum. He...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 157: Why Spiritual Insight Alone Can't Heal Trauma with Marie Damasio

She understood her grief completely. After her son Tristan died from brain cancer, Marie Damasio dove deep into spiritual work—soul contracts, Akashic records, the meaning behind her loss. She found peace. And her body stayed stuck.

You'll hear more on:

Why do so many people with depression struggle to stop their antidepressants? What if the answer isn't about willpower — but about missing nutrients your brain needs to function?

Dr. James Greenblatt has spent 30 years in inpatient psychiatry. He watched patients go from one medication to two, then three, then five. Suicide rates kept climbing. And he started asking: What if the brain is simply missing what it needs?

His new book Finally Hopeful explores the biological causes of depression most doctors never test for.

→ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podca...

What if the slogans we've trusted about healing are actually in conflict?

"The body keeps the score." "Time heals all wounds." We've heard both. They can't both be true.

Here's the tension. If time heals all wounds, staying busy should eventually work. Decades of pushing through should land us somewhere good. But that's not what happens. The body keeps the score whether we acknowledge it or not.

I go deeper into the research from my conversation with Dr. Karestan Koenen in Episode 155. She followed 100,000 women over twenty years. What she found confirms what...

We've been told time heals all wounds. Go back to work. Stay busy. But what if decades of stress are still rewriting the body right now? Dr. Karestan Koenen, a Harvard researcher who has followed 100,000 women over twenty years, shares what she's discovered about how unaddressed trauma doesn't fade—it becomes biology. In this conversation, we explore why major disease studies have ignored trauma, how stalking affects women's heart health, and what epigenetics reveals about catching these changes early.

→ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 155: Time Doesn't Heal: What 20 Years of Resea...

What if the habit you've been trying to break is actually how you learned to survive?

It's January. You've made the resolution. This year will be different. You start strong. First week goes well. By February, you're back where you started. Maybe feeling worse because now you've added shame to the pile.

I share about Rachel, a 42-year-old marketing director. She tried everything to stop late-night eating. Willpower. Mantras. Accountability apps. Nothing worked for more than a few weeks. When I asked what she felt right before reaching for food, she'd never thought about it...

In part one, we learned why so many of us stay stuck despite trying everything. This episode reveals what actually worked for the dogs in that study. Spoiler: it wasn't understanding. It was movement. I share Claire's breakthrough moment standing at her kitchen sink. What she felt in those 90 seconds changed everything.

→ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 154: The Biology of Burnout (Part 2): What Understanding Can't Do

In this episode you'll learn:

[01:08] How the Dogs Learned to Jump Again: Researchers had to physically move their legs—explaining jumpi...