Kim Vopni (00:01.332)
Dr. Amy Apigian, thank you so much for joining me today. We haven't really covered this topic in a huge amount of detail on the podcast and it really needs to be talked about. You've written a book called The Biology of Trauma and I would love to learn more about you and your book. So before we jump into questions that I have, can you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what led you down the path of writing this book?
Dr. Aimie (00:31.934)
I am a physician and my background is in medicine. I did start in surgery, but then I switched to preventive medicine and addiction medicine. So those are my board certifications. But as you have hinted at already, I have moved into a deep study of trauma and looking at not just the impact of trauma on our bodies, but then what does that healing process look like? Because
Trauma creates disease and we know that there are many conditions and physical health issues that are a result of chronic trauma. We know this even from the adverse childhood experiences, but we haven't known the mechanism or what to do about it or if there's anything that we can do about it. So this has become my deep study and it really was inspired by my becoming a foster parent and then adopting when I was in medical school.
And that experience opened my eyes to so much of what I did not know about trauma. I thought I knew, I did not know. And then it just has led me layers and layers deep into what I now see as the biology of trauma. It's not just one's emotions or psychology, it becomes your biology. And that means that we need to do certain things along the healing journey that a person may not otherwise think of.
Kim Vopni (01:57.908)
When you, I'm curious about the decision to adopt when you were in medical school. One of arguably, I've never been to medical school, but I hear, and it's a very stressful, busy time. Tell me a little bit more about that story. What led you to wanting to adopt, especially a foster child? That's another, I guess, layer of the story. And then I have a couple more questions about that afterwards.
Dr. Aimie (02:25.582)
My decision, Kim, was not actually to adopt at first. My decision was to become a foster parent. And I did it at a time when I had a space in my life that was open, that was free, and I had just finished my master's in biochemistry. I was headed back into third year of medical school, but there was several months gap, and I thought, what better use of my time than to become a foster parent? And at that time, they didn't have a child for me, and they also
There were so many requirements to become a foster parent that it took a while to get through all of those logistics of all the changes that you have to even do in your home. So Rosa is the social worker and she calls me once I'm already back in third year of medical school in the internal medicine rotation. Yes, one of the busiest rotations. And she tells me about Miguel. Miguel is four years old.
He's been in the foster care system since age nine months and he needs a home. And my heart was like, how can I say no, yes? And the context around that, which I probably didn't understand at the time, the context was that my father was adopted and my father had been born to a teenage mom, just like Miguel's mom had been a teenage mom. And...
So it was almost like this, it felt like it was supposed to be. It felt like this was a way for me to repair some of the generational trauma in my family and be able to take in a boy who needed love, needed a home, and that was what I was going to provide for him. I did not know that it would lead to me adopting him by the time he was turning five and would be his mother for the next six years.
Kim Vopni (04:23.252)
So the follow along questions about that is, and maybe we should start by defining trauma, but my questions are the learnings you had, is it, and I'm making an assumption, but trauma, his trauma potentially, and was there trauma for yourself? You mentioned your own generational trauma. And I think when,
We hear the word trauma, it can mean physical trauma like a car accident, could be abuse, like there's many things that we kind of have associated with trauma, but there's a whole bunch of other things that we may not associate with trauma. And I also hear people say big T, little t, trauma. So maybe if you can define trauma.
And then also talk a little bit about the trauma learnings, like what was it yours? Was it his? Was it a whole bunch of everybody's traumas? Yeah.
Dr. Aimie (05:22.934)
Everybody's traumas. You know, a good place for me to start with answering that question is looking at what have we misunderstood about trauma? What have we done wrong when it comes to understanding trauma, not just for ourselves, but then in the medical system or even in the therapy? What have we been doing wrong? And so much of the focus has been on exactly what you just said. We're looking to qualify an event. Was that car accident a trauma for you?
Was your childhood a trauma for you? Was that sexual abuse a trauma? We're looking at an event and saying, does that qualify? Almost like, was it bad enough? And we've got this scorecard then and even we have these assessment forms that professionals, practitioners will use and they'll ask about all the different possible events that you may have had to try to determine how much trauma have you had?
Kim Vopni (06:04.638)
Yes, yeah.
Dr. Aimie (06:22.23)
And then we get to say, well, no, that wasn't a major trauma. That was a little trauma. So then we've designated, well, then let's use little T trauma for those events. But we're still looking at what happened to you. Or if we want to look at neglect, what did not happen for you. But that's not what we really want to be looking at. What we want to be looking at instead is
Did your body go into a trauma response? Not, is the event something that qualifies or not? Because we don't know that. Until we know, did my body have a trauma response, we don't know if that was a stress or a trauma. So I actually start chapter one of my book with the story of Elena, and she's in the middle of a car accident. It's a Sunday morning.
and she's away from her two teenage daughters. She's a single mom, so this is a lovely time of the week for her to get away from her kids for a moment. And she's reaching down for her phone to put on her audio book when she hears tires screeching. And so we're in this car accident with her. And what is important to know is that one year after this car accident, she develops autoimmunity.
She thinks that the autoimmunity came out of the blue and she's looking at, my family have a genetic history of autoimmunity? Why am I getting this autoimmunity? But she's not realizing, no, it's the car accident that triggered a trauma response in her that then created this new surfacing of a biology of trauma that became disease. So rather than asking for
the event in the past, what I'm looking for is the internal response. And we can be having that internal response today just as much as we did back then. So what is the real definition then of a trauma that will cause a trauma response? In my book, I lay out the exact five steps that our body will experience on a physiological level that will make something be different from a stress that will be a trauma response.
Kim Vopni (08:24.008)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (08:43.352)
But the idea is this, a trauma response is triggered when for anything and for any reason at that time in our life, it overwhelmed our capacity to understand, to process, and to resolve it. And that's it. And when we look at it in terms of anything, for any reason,
But at that time in our life, it overwhelmed us and our ability to respond and take action and overcome it, it would have created a trauma response in our body. And so then unless we know how to resolve it, then it becomes stored in our body and we carry remnants of that and then it becomes these patterns that eventually, like my patient Elena, makes us sick or like many of the people in your group.
It makes us sick, it gives us physical health problems that we can see that are a result of a nervous system being in survival mode, a nervous system staying in fear rather than having been able to return to a complete sense of safety and know I am well, all is well, I can relax.
Kim Vopni (10:01.022)
That was beautiful. Now I'm thinking about the people in my community in two different lights now, where for some people, the diagnosis of a pelvic floor dysfunction, and I would say often it's either the pain or the prolapse or the ones that are the most challenging I find for people to deal with, that diagnosis could be the...
Now I don't want to call it the event now, but basically that is what creates the trauma response. For other people, there could be an Elena car accident. There could be some other event or some other trauma response that then could potentially lead to the pelvic pain or the prolapse or the incontinence.
Dr. Aimie (10:50.464)
Exactly. And so we see this almost like chicken and egg scenario start to develop of, well, what actually caused this trauma response? Was it a prior event that then created these changes in the tissues that led to the pain in the prolapse? Or was it the pain in the prolapse and that caused overwhelm and that created a trauma response? It's all the same thing. At the end of the day, your body is still going into a trauma response.
Kim Vopni (10:54.259)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (11:06.195)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (11:11.08)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Dr. Aimie (11:17.836)
And that's what we need to work with in order for person to now be able to get into their best state of health.
Kim Vopni (11:24.468)
When you were talking about the difference between a trauma response and a stress response and you talked about five different things, can you kind of highlight a little of how you would distinguish between the stress response and trauma? Because I often talk a lot about symptoms being associated with the amount of stress you may be experiencing in a moment or in a phase of life or what have you. And oftentimes there's a heightened sense of
the symptoms. So just curious on the difference there.
Dr. Aimie (11:54.796)
Yes, and this is how I was trained as well Kim. So I was trained as a physician to talk about stress and stress makes you sick and stress causes inflammation and you should do more stress management and stress techniques and to realize actually let's clean up our language for what's happening inside of us because sometimes it's stress and sometimes it's more than just stress. So the five steps are such the startle,
the stress, the wall, the freeze, and the shutdown. So walking through what each of those means, the startle is this moment where we first sense that something might be wrong. And that's important because it actually turns on our sympathetic nervous system. We have two main divisions of our nervous system that run our physiology, sympathetic and parasympathetic.
sympathetic is going to make our heart beat faster, our lungs breathe faster. It's what we associate with anxiety. And so when we have a startle, whether that's because we see someone walking towards us on the sidewalk that just something seems a little off or because like me, you've forgotten that you put something on the stove and you got into your your writing and it startles you. Then that is going to be that sympathetic nervous system that rises up.
Then we have the stress. So the stress is the next level of sympathetic. And so if that is a real stress, guess what? Your body is going to say, we need to get into high action. We need to do something. Like for me, I need to run to the kitchen. I need to take that off my stove. There's an action that I need to take. And if because of that action, our body gives us adrenaline. Adrenaline is the hormone.
that is secreted within 15 seconds of being startled that allows us to take action for what we need to overcome. And it's interesting, Kim, because, and I don't want to get too tied up in the biochemistry right now, but I think this will be so interesting for your community to have this idea of this stress response and how much stress. Because as you were talking about, how much stress is there?
Dr. Aimie (14:17.954)
we can talk about how much adrenaline is there. And the amount of adrenaline that our sympathetic nervous system releases is in direct proportion to the size of the danger that we see.
Kim Vopni (14:31.944)
Hmm. Or is, like, I just want to interject there. Is it our interpretation of the danger? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Aimie (14:38.154)
Exactly. Our perception. And so being able to recognize that our body is so fine tuned, it knows that we need to discharge all of that adrenaline that we secrete in order to be able to be in our best health and to be able to sleep at night. And so knowing that it can only produce as much adrenaline as we need in order to successfully overcome that problem.
And so when we sometimes, or like me, I used to do this all the time, I create a mountain out of a molehill. You've never done that. Let me tell you all about it. And all of a sudden I am perceiving a huge danger and the adrenaline in my body is going to the highest levels when actually it's not that
Kim Vopni (15:16.488)
never done that.
Dr. Aimie (15:36.781)
size of a danger and there's nothing for me to do about it. And so then this is what happens and we hit the wall. So the wall is that third step and it it's a change in the sense that based on the amount of adrenaline, based on the size of the problem that we perceive, our body says, I can't overcome that. That's too big for me.
And in that process, that's hitting the wall. And it's the effect of our body throwing on the emergency brake, even though our foot is on the gas pedal and secreting adrenaline. And so we have this moment, and that's why the wall precipitates the next step, which is the freeze. The freeze is the very unique moment. I used to not recognize it. It can happen so fast.
It's this moment where the anxiety peaks at such a high panic level that it shocks me. And it shocks me in such a way that it stuns me and I get paralyzed internally for a moment. And this is an important aspect of what then is a trauma response. Because the freeze is the first part of the trauma response. And it is this sensation of, I can't believe what's happening.
And whether this is Elena and her car accident, I can't believe that this car is coming right at me and I can't swerve and get out of its way. It's going to hit me. can't believe this is not how my Sunday morning was supposed to go. Or if it's the betrayal of a friend, I can't believe that they would say that about me. I can't believe that my spouse would do that. I can't, I can't believe, I can't believe, I can't believe that my pet would die.
This is not how life is supposed to go. So there's some element that makes it so unbelievable that it shocks us and it paralyzes us for a moment of, can't believe this. And we have that inhale that gets stuck. But because inside of us, our foot is on the gas pedal and we have the emergency brake on, our nervous system says, well, that's not a good idea for longterm.
Dr. Aimie (17:54.607)
If I'm gonna have the emergency brake on, I should take my foot off the gas pedal because otherwise I'm gonna burn through all the fuel in the tank and when I do let down the emergency brake, I'm not gonna have any fuel left to go anywhere. So it's better for me to let my foot down off the gas and that's when we feel this collapse. We feel this heaviness. We can feel shame.
We can want to curl into a ball in the fetal position or the shame posture because it now feels hard to even hold myself up straight because my muscles feel heavy and I just want to collapse. That's the final step of the trauma response is this shutdown. And what's happening inside is that's exactly what's happened. Even though all of this adrenaline may still be there, we didn't use it up.
And now we're no longer in that sympathetic nervous system. We're back in a parasympathetic, but a shut down parasympathetic where it's not the we're calming things down. It's we're taking you all the way to the bottom and you're going to feel so tired. You're going to feel so exhausted. You may fall asleep. You may faint. You may do any of these things where your physiology is actually shutting down your metabolism. It shuts down your metabolism. It shuts down your breath.
You can notice that you breathe very slow and very shallow, not the fast breathing of the stress response. No, you're not in stress anymore. Now you're in this low place, this heavy place. So that is the essence of the difference between a stress. It will give you energy. And a trauma, takes your energy.
Kim Vopni (19:24.542)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (19:43.093)
So when, because it's like the way you're explaining it, stress is part of the trauma response. like, if we let it continue, if we have that perception, that's essentially what then furthers it to become the trauma response. Is that a fair thing to say?
Dr. Aimie (19:49.61)
Exactly.
Dr. Aimie (20:01.922)
That's exactly what it is. see it as an escalation of the same process. So whenever we go into a trauma response, we will go through the physiology of the stress first. And it's just an escalation of that stress response didn't work. That stress response didn't create the successful overcoming of the danger or the problem. And so now I have to, I have to switch survival strategies cause that didn't work. If the stress response works,
Kim Vopni (20:06.942)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (20:31.842)
Well then we never go into the trauma response. We can now return back to a sense of safety and now we rest and we recover, which is a lower energy state, but it's not that heavy depression, hopeless, powerless state. It's the rest of a successful accomplishment. It's very different states. And so there are three states to our nervous system. One is this middle energy.
Kim Vopni (20:52.852)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (21:00.332)
which is yes, where we rest and recover, but it's also where we create and connect and are calm and yet alive. And then we have the high energy and that's our sympathetic state. That is where stress response is. And then we have this low energy state. And again, this is where we will feel hopeless. We will feel depressed. We will feel like we're lazy. We'll feel like we just are so tired.
even though we may have slept well, but that's not it. I'm tired of life. I feel tired of life. I don't like the life that I'm living right now.
Kim Vopni (21:42.965)
Okay, so then you said, you know, your original allopathic training is like, do stress management, do some breath work, do this, but so if we were to provide tools, thinking about it from the lens of the biology about are there things we can do to recognize stress to help.
from going down the trauma response. guess that's my first point. And then if we happen to continue and we're down this trauma response, are there different things we can do at these five stages? Do we have to experience all five stages to then start to heal? I guess those are kind of the questions that are going through my mind.
Dr. Aimie (22:25.858)
Yeah, and what great questions. So there's a difference between going through something in the moment, Kim, and once we've already gone through something and we've stored that experience and we're coming back to heal it. So if we're experiencing something in the moment, then we want to be able to stop the escalation and the progression at any step that we can. Ideally, even starting with the startle. If we can startle and then realize, that's not a...
real danger. That's not a real problem. I can take care of it. We're good. Well then that allows us to reset back to safety and we never even progress to stress. Which would be amazing because there is a cost to the stress response. But if we progress to stress maybe because we need to, well then what can we do at that step so that it doesn't progress to the trauma response? And when we are in that stress response, this is about resourcing ourselves.
Kim Vopni (23:08.181)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (23:24.002)
This is about problem solving. This is about planning. This is about never letting ourselves cross the critical line of overwhelm because I don't feel like I am enough, I have enough, or I know enough. So in the stress response, we're going to be resourcing ourselves. This is where we need to look at how am I resourcing myself with people? Are there people that I can call and say, hey, this just happened?
What would you do in this situation? Can I resource myself with people, with knowledge? What about resourcing myself with tools, with money? There's a million different ways for us to feel resourced that will allow us to feel like, no, I've got this. I can do this. I can overcome that. That is the most important thing for the stress response. It's also important to know that you really have 15 minutes before cortisol starts to come in. So the more that we can
address things, even put together a plan in the first five minutes is so helpful so that it doesn't become this chronic thing because this chronic thing is in what wears us out and we cross that line into overwhelm and we're going into the trauma response. The stress response is also so dependent on our pre-existing state and the analogy that I like to use for this is if we were out surfing the waves in the ocean.
If you are out there and you're waiting for a wave, because we all know that life is going to bring us waves. And we're out there and we're waiting, we're ready, we're sitting on our boards, we're watching the waves. We're not stressed about the waves because they're not there yet. Maybe we're watching the dolphins or maybe we're just enjoying being out in the ocean. So we're not stressed yet, but we're ready.
so that when that wave starts to form, we can stand up on our board because we're ready. And then we can go into a problem feeling much more resourced than if it caught us off guard. And so our pre-existing state is actually the most important thing that people can do. And this is where I look at the person's diet, a person's lifestyle, a person's schedule. Have you already created
Dr. Aimie (25:45.689)
the lifestyle for yourself that allows you to be at your best self, that allows you to be in your best health, because that is going to be the biggest determinant of how much stress or how big of a wave you can ride and not get drowned. Because that's what the trauma response is. The trauma response is being drowned by the wave rather than being able to ride the wave.
Kim Vopni (25:59.551)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (26:11.4)
Yeah, perfect analogy.
Dr. Aimie (26:13.908)
So if we get drowned, what do we need to do? Well, if it's in the moment, if it's in the moment, yes, there are three things that the trauma response needs to be able to come out. The most important thing at that time is a sense of safety and time. And so knowing that our body gets stunned, shocked when we experience that trauma response, it needs time to come out of that shock.
And that's what often people don't provide for themselves. They're rushing off to the next thing. They're not giving themselves and their body that time to really reset back to safety. So this is what I would love everybody to do. Just pause. When you feel that having happened, pause and let your body reorient to your environment. It needs to actually look around because...
nervous system collects information through our senses to know if we're safe or we're in danger. And when we don't have the time or take the time to actually look, we're neglecting that ability to use our sense of sight to provide our nervous system the information. Yes, everything is safe right here right now. I'm not being chased by a monster. There is no danger. My life is not in threat right now. It was a moment ago. But now, it's not.
Kim Vopni (27:24.372)
Hmm.
Dr. Aimie (27:34.688)
And that's then what allows our nervous system to come back to a full reset to safety. And we don't store that trauma response as something that then becomes chronic.
Kim Vopni (27:47.168)
There was a woman who I follow who does talk a lot about trauma and healing and there was one tool which sounds similar to this where you just, and it was more about eye movement but it was staying still and just using your eyes to look around your room at very, look down, look up, look, not so much turning your whole body but more the eye movement piece sounds sort of similar to what you're saying, just acknowledging you're in a safe place.
Dr. Aimie (28:13.676)
Yes, there are so many ways to engage our nervous system. And movement is a big piece of that. And so even just being able to realize, I can move my eyes and just bringing in that movement to my eyes and really focusing on like, what am I looking at? And bringing in, allowing in those positive signals of safety. That's why I like to put plants around my room because then I can look at my plants and I can pause and I can allow
Kim Vopni (28:17.481)
Yeah, interesting.
Dr. Aimie (28:42.816)
a sense of safety to come in as I look at that plant. Otherwise, what I tend to look at is my computer screen or my bright lights. And those are signals of danger. It's what our nervous system perceives. And so we have to actually be intentional about this kind of stuff in our modern world of what am I looking at? What am I watching that is this bringing in a sense of danger or
Can I look at things that bring in a sense of safety that allows my body to be more in that ventral vagal and then when a stress does come, I'm coming from it from a place of, I was just safe. I wasn't already stressed and now this is just another stress and now it's compounded. Now I'm going to be overwhelmed. No, if I can come from it from, I'm resourcing myself with safety all day long. When that problem comes, I'm much more likely to be able to ride the wave than get drowned by the wave.
Kim Vopni (29:40.246)
I like the term you're saying, resourced. And my next question was, you know,
you've already sort of alluded to it, but how can we resource ourselves so that when these waves come and you've talked about diet and sleep and you've mentioned now light and what we're looking at and if you look at the number of people, myself included, who spend a lot of time on the computer and on phones and the images that we can't control what we're going to see, they just pop up and it could be my feed is a lot of art. Sometimes it's art, but sometimes it's nothing to do with art and something kind of scary and you can't control whether that happens, right? So it's about
you say resourcing yourself are there other things we could do to resource ourselves so that we are less likely to get there and then I have a question for the people that are in that chronic state who've been there for a while how we come out of that.
Dr. Aimie (30:27.918)
There's so many layers to this which I love and let me just speak to the first layer which is how do we resource ourselves? But then there'll be another layer of how do we resource ourselves by building our capacity in times when things are good so that we have a larger capacity when we need it? Basic resourcing there's different elements and I talk about them in terms of psychological resources
emotional resources and biological resources. And a person will want to do all three levels. Just like when they go to do trauma work, they will want to do all three levels since all three are the layers that trauma impacts. So what would be psychological resources? Yourself talk. How do you talk to yourself? No, I'm not recommending that you wear a rubber band and that you punish yourself by snapping yourself every time you have a negative thought.
That's not resourcing. Resourcing is when you have a thought that you're like, I noticed what that made me feel like, and that's an awful feeling. What if we could just shift our language a little bit? So a lot of people will come to me and they'll say, a common thought that I have had is I'm unlovable. If people really got to know the real me, they would leave me. They wouldn't like me, so I have to hide certain things that I do that...
Ah, are just embarrassing. So right there, we can already start to change our language in a way that will resource ourselves. And the change in the language is, isn't that interesting? I just had the thought that I'm unlovable. And now I'm not making it, oh my goodness, I am unlovable because we go based on perception and the amount of adrenaline that's secreted is in direct proportion.
to the size of the danger that I just created by my own self-talk. And if I'm unlovable, that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. And so I will be putting myself under constant stress if that's what I'm creating. being able to just say, was just a thought. It was just the thought that this. And then it creates that distance where I'm not that thought and I can decide what to do with that thought. But it's a...
Dr. Aimie (32:50.498)
way to resource ourselves psychologically to go through this practice of just reframing, rephrasing our self-talk that allows for a little more distance from those negative, toxic thoughts that we can have. What about emotionally? How do we resource ourselves emotionally? For some people, it will be connecting with people. I am an introvert, so it's not always connecting with people. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's a walk in nature.
Sometimes it's time by myself with my favorite book. Sometimes it's all of these aspects that give us these moments of feeling emotionally safe. And the more experience that we can have of those, then when we go into something hard, we can fall back on those and be like, but I know that I can come back to that. I know that I've felt that before. And so it becomes a way for us to resource ourself emotionally.
to experience harder emotions when we need them. Biologically, one of the most important things that we can do to resource ourselves is to align with our natural body's rhythms. Things like our natural cortisol rhythm. What about our sleep schedule, our light schedule? Are we getting outside into natural light as soon as we wake up in the morning? Are we aligning our meal times with what is best aligned with our body's rhythms? Our body...
has this innate ability to heal and to be in its best self. It has these healing strategies that it uses, the detoxification pathways, all of these pathways that it uses when it is in its best health. And so our best job is to get ourselves into those states where we are naturally aligned with what our body can do for engaging those healing strategies.
If we can go into an experience, whether it's a grief or a stress or a danger, already having our biology and at the cellular level resourced in terms of its best health, then we are going to be so much more able to handle the bigger waves and not get drowned. So that would be one level of resourcing, but really, what we also want to do is take that up at the next level and say, how can I be building my capacity now
Dr. Aimie (35:15.682)
so that when the larger wave comes, I've built my capacity to ride those larger waves. And this is where we wanna bring in flexibility. And so actually bringing in experiences, whether those are psychological ones, emotional ones, or physical ones, that stretch us without breaking us. And when we can stretch and then rest, or stress ourselves and then rest,
We're actually building in this ability to be flexible and to be able to go into stress and then return to rest. And go into stress and return to rest rather than what I see happen so many times that everybody tries to only feel safe and they're not doing that stretching so that when the stress comes, they haven't built that neural pathway to go into stress and then return to rest. They go into stress and progress into the trauma response.
And so this would be the next layer of resourcing yourself is actually building your capacity to be flexible with these states and be able to go into stress, stress yourself, not at the point where you cross into overwhelm, but you're stressing yourself and then returning to rest and then stressing and then resting. And that's how we actually grow our capacity.
Kim Vopni (36:35.273)
Yeah, I use that word a lot in the pelvic health space in terms of the capacity of the pelvic floor to manage. there's a book I have not yet read called the Comfort Crisis. I refer to the title, even though I haven't read the book yet, we, especially women who have become, they're afraid in their body, they're afraid of moving. They might've been told that this is not safe anymore. And those are words, know, prolapse safe or not safe. And so they've,
Now they're stuck in this comfort crisis because they think that is safer or more protective for their pelvic floor. And yet we're not building capacity. And then the whole concept of the stretch and rest, that's really, I'm a personal trainer. That's what we do. You go to the gym, you work, you stress the muscle, you give it time to rest and repair. And really it's the same thing with our nervous system as well.
Dr. Aimie (37:28.096)
Exactly. And this is for me what validates that we're all working with the same science and we're all working with the same body. Like these are the principles of the body. This is how the body works. And it's just applied in these different scenarios, but the principles are the same.
Kim Vopni (37:35.529)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kim Vopni (37:44.512)
Yeah, yeah. I have a question on, you know, when you were talking about our self-talk and there are also people who may choose to talk to somebody and there's been, I don't even know who, can't identify a person I've heard this, I've just kind of heard this that...
You know, there's beneficial aspects of therapy, but sometimes people stay too long in this talk therapy where they're just rehashing the problem over and over. And when I heard that, I thought, you know, that that makes sense. So as much as it can be beneficial to go and just kind of talk through, if somebody is perpetually going, is it maybe keeping them stuck in a place? Do you have thoughts on that?
Dr. Aimie (38:26.83)
got lots of thoughts on that. So for me, this was where I started when I realized that I needed to do my own trauma work. I did what I had told everybody else to do, which is you should buy and go talk to someone about that. So I went to talk to someone about it. And what I found was that by then I had these physical health issues. I had my auto-immunity, I had the fatigue, I had the depression, the anxiety, the weight gain.
The digestive issues, I had all of the stuff that I talk about in my book. And I saw them get worse. I saw these issues get worse. I saw the symptoms get worse. After what I had thought was a great therapy session because we talked about a lot of things. And I even thought that I was releasing a lot of things because there would be tears and there'd be all this stuff. So, I thought I had had this great session. I was congratulating myself for having done such great work.
And then three hours later, I'm on my couch and I'm binge eating on a tub of ice cream and watching movies. And I can't get up off the couch because the fatigue and the inflammation and the swelling and the digestive issues. So that was when I started to put the pieces together that, ah, this isn't working for me. But I didn't know what else to do because I didn't know this stuff yet. And so that's when I really started leaning into what is...
What are the different modalities? Is there an order in which I'm supposed to do things? How do I actually make forward movement and not just stir things up but not release them and resolve them and so that's where I I did I piece together that there is these principles of the body for the order in which we need to do things and Then we can start to plug in different modalities and we can say well then this modality
What stage is that in? Is that where I start or is that where I end? But so many people, Kim, they're trying to work, they're trying to go into their story. And they are going into their story. And when they go into their story, they're re-experiencing all the emotions of that story. And they haven't yet learned how to work on the story. And there's a very big difference.
Dr. Aimie (40:45.526)
And so what I do now is, is I am working with people. We will need to go into that deeper layer eventually, but that is not where we start. Because as we come even back to this idea of how do we build our capacity, we have to work with things that are within our capacity to build our capacity. And going into our story is more than we have capacity for. Those were the emotions that we couldn't feel at that time. And believe me, you still can't feel them without going into overwhelm and shutting down.
So let's not do that to ourselves. That's just actually reinforcing this trauma response. Instead, let's pick something that we can manage, that we can look at, that we can feel, and we can let it go. But it's not the whole thing. It's not the whole story. And so I start with teaching people how to create the safety for themselves to even open up.
And I don't let them go into their story with me until we've learned how to create that inner safety so that they can even know, does it feel safe right now to go into my story or does it not feel safe? And if it doesn't feel safe, now is not the right time. And that's not what we've been told. We've been told that you should, you should do it. You should, you know, rip off the bandaid. You should feel the fear and do it anyway. And that is terrible advice for anyone doing trauma work.
Kim Vopni (42:04.593)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (42:12.174)
That is not how the body is wired. In fact, the more times that we do that, the more that our body will come to not trust us. And it will start to disconnect from us even more because of what we do to our own body in re-traumatizing it.
Kim Vopni (42:21.384)
Hmm.
Kim Vopni (42:29.3)
The other thing that's coming to mind is when people come into my community, some people have just received a diagnosis and they've panicked and they found me on the internet in one of their midnight Google searches or maybe they've been suffering for a while and now they're like, okay, now I'm going to do it. I'm just going to go do it. But they come in and they're just like, okay, they've made the decision and now they want give me the best hardest exercise that is going to fix
my prolapse or my pain or whatever it is. And I always say, I know you came for the exercise, but you have to start over here and we have to understand all of the other things that are playing a role in here. And we have to start connecting and rebuild the foundation and layering and doing all that. So it's really so much overlap with what you're talking is so similar to what.
my messaging is with my community as well. I absolutely love it.
Dr. Aimie (43:29.902)
Because this is the manual for the human body. There are these core principles of how we grow the body, how we strengthen the body, and they're the principles whether we're talking about emotional strength or the pelvic floor strength. It's the same principles because it's one body.
Kim Vopni (43:32.553)
Yeah.
Kim Vopni (43:46.131)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I love it. I love it. So your book is launching September 20 26 23. Okay, September 23. Yes. So this episode will have just this will be coming out just after so we will now then be able there'll be a link below where people can go and purchase your book.
Dr. Aimie (43:56.527)
23, yes, it's releasing September 23.
Dr. Aimie (44:09.698)
Yes, and I am, you know, as we've been talking, I've been thinking about more of the people in your audience and I would be very curious to see how many of them notice changes in their pain or prolapse around their emotional experiences. My guess is that they will really be able to relate to, when I'm in fear or when I have to be around my family that causes me uncomfortable feelings.
Kim Vopni (44:26.292)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah.
Kim Vopni (44:36.648)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aimie (44:38.99)
I notice that my pelvic floor is losing the grounds that it has gained with all of the exercises and the work that they're doing with you.
Kim Vopni (44:48.978)
Right, right. Yeah. And now I have another tool to direct people to. So thank you so much for writing this book, for sharing your knowledge and for joining us today. And I'm super excited to read it. I can't wait. I can't wait to hear it. It will become, it'll be added to the resource library. And now I will be asking people read this and tell me what changes from your symptoms.
Dr. Aimie (45:11.64)
Yes, that would be the value of being able to connect that emotional piece, the psychological piece, and connect it with their pelvic floor. Thank you for what you do, Kim.
Kim Vopni (45:20.274)
Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.
