The Importance of Nutrition in Our Healing Journey with Amber Gentry (Part 1)

And so when we go into that shutdown place, what happens is that the vagus nerve now sends a different signal, a different message to every cell of our body, but mostly to our lungs, to our heart and our digestive system, since that's the main areas that the vagus nerve integrates primarily. And that message is shut down. We need to shut down everything.

We need to conserve our energy because that's the best way that we can survive this situation. And so our digestive system literally just shuts down everything from motility to stomach acid to pancreatic digestive enzymes, and so people can go into having abdominal pain, bloating, constipation, diabetes. IBS is a big one for the body having gone into a trauma response.

IBS is not stress. I welcome to another episode of the healing podcast. This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life.

I am Karen, milling your host, and I believe that what we resist, her cysts, and that we cannot change what we don't face. And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies, and money into myself, in professional support, that my life was completely transformed, and now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and thank you so much for listening.

Hi, today we are going to continue to talk about how we heal trauma from our bodies, and I'm super excited and honored to have with me, Dr. Amy Appigian, who is a physician, turned trauma expert, and who is going to help us understand at a deeper physiological level, what happens to our bodies when we experience trauma, and also share with us what I consider is a complete, comprehensive, mind and body approach to healing trauma. I loved it.

Dr. Amy is a double-bored certified medical physician, preventive medicine, and addiction medicine with a Master's in Biochemistry and a Master's in Public Health. She also has several certifications in various trauma healing modalities, like somatic experiencing them anymore, and she's an author, a speaker, a podcaster, and the founder of Trauma Healing Accelerated and Family Challenge Camps.

You can find more about her and her amazing work and her 21-day journey program, as well as her certification courses and upcoming Biology of Trauma Sumit, being held this coming August 2023, on her website at www. traumahealingacelerated. com or along podcast platforms and on Instagram at Dr.

Amy. We talked about her journey from medicine to trauma healing, we discuss what trauma is, we discuss the difference between a stress response and a trauma response, and how experiencing trauma affects our entire body, our metabolism, our digestive system, our lungs, our cardiovascular system, and more importantly, her approach to healing this from our bodies and our mind and our soul. I really enjoy this conversation, and if you do too, please share it with us many people as possible.

Please subscribe and please give me a five-star rating just so that you can help me and her and everyone on this podcast, inspire as many people as possible to do this step at work. Welcome to the Healing Podcast that's right in me, I am so glad and honored that you're here. Oh, thank you, Karen, it's good to be here, I'm glad to be here.

Thank you. So in February of 2018, I moved to New York, I left the company, I had founded in medical devices, and I was having sort of a transformation, a second healing journey, and I had pleaded reading the book, the body keeps the score by Dr. Vessel, that undergulk.

And I went to a week retreat in Tucson, Arizona, where I developed this complete business plan, PowerPoint presentation, an integrated approach of healing trauma with medicine. It was like, this is something that is missing in the world, how can we miss the impact of what happens to us, and I mean, this was like six years ago, so Vessel Vanderklauk was in a snow and I said, today, and I'm like, how can I do this, which is obviously a monumental task. When I met you and I read all the stuff you've done and everything you've found it informed them, like, oh my God, this is amazing, I can wait to have your own podcast, meet you and promote your work.

Well, thank you, I had that same, that same awakening and thought at one point of, how can we be missing the medical, the biology side of healing, it's just as important. And how can we incorporate it in obesity, in chronic disease, in everything that happens to us, how is that completely missed, never asked, and we just get surgeries and hey, good luck, right. So before we get into the details on the biology of trauma and what happens to us, would you mind sharing with my audience a bit of your journey into the work you're doing today, how do you go from being a physician to focusing on trauma, one of our objectives of this podcast is to inspire very competent people to do this work.

So your story, as you know, it's important. Yeah, I mean, my story is, I think, one that I never expected, I never, I never saw myself going into this field, I would, I never was necessarily drawn to this field. In fact, I would say quite the opposite care.

If anyone had mentioned to me around, you know, therapy or just emotions, you know, feelings, I was just like, oh, no, that is not for me. Like the last, the last thing that I would ever become would be a psychiatrist or, you know, someone dealing with mental health, because it just was not, was not what I was interested in at all. And I was in medical school, I was at Lomalini University, and I was doing my masters in biochemistry, just finished that up and then had this pause between jumping back into third year of medical school.

And during that pause, I was like, you know, I've always kind of been drawn to helping kids. And so let me just become a foster parent and just see, just see, right, like just see if that's something that that isn't open door or not. And I jumped through all those hoops to become a foster parent.

And see, we're not busy enough. But apparently I was not busy enough. Yeah, no, I had my own, I had my own trauma issues that I was not aware of it yet at the time.

Yes, yeah, that was all to be revealed. And the busyness, definitely was a coping mechanism that I had in order to not feel. And the first placement that they gave me was Miguel.

And so Miguel is one that I adopted about eight, seven, eight months later. And he came to me when he was four. And as I was reading through his paperwork and all of his history, I was just blown away.

But then I mean, I think that this is also very common for a lot of the kids in the foster care system. And the neglect, it was a lot of neglect, a lot of abuse. But the neglect was so pervasive and neglect had started so early in life.

And he had already by age four become so aggressive and angry and violent. That they were having a really hard time placing him in families that had other children that had pets. And so when they found me and I didn't have either one of those, they were like, this is the perfect match.

And as the story unfolded, because he had had so many placements, then if it didn't work out with me, then there only other option would be to put him in a group home. And I just could not bat them a four year old going into a group home already. And so that really motivated me, inspired me to step up and take that decision to adopt him, that I had not been thinking of doing it first.

For me, it was just foster parenting that I was committing to. And so when I committed to being Miguel's mom, I committed to figuring out the pieces that he needed in order to heal. I could tell that his past was still driving him.

And he had a lot of very challenging and difficult behaviors. And he also did not want to be that way, but he was powerless over his own neural pathways and his own survival instincts that would kick in. And despite everything that I was trying, which was all of the, you know, standard of care therapies at the time, it wasn't working.

And in fact, some of those were making it worse in the short term where we would go to therapy or even they would come to the house. And it would seem to just stir things up, but not resolve things. And as you stir things up with Miguel, my goodness, like there's just so much more anger on the surface.

There's so much more aggression on the surface. It wasn't something that you could hide. It was very obvious what was always going on for Miguel.

And so everything that I knew to do was not working. And so that's when I decided that I needed to figure this out and started studying on my own, started studying trauma. But then I knew that I needed to study attachment because I knew that that was part of his story.

So that's where it started and I learned so much and I had to unlearn so much in order to learn what really is trauma and what really happens in the body. And what we really need in order to heal, I had it all wrong and I started all wrong because I didn't know this stuff. And because of that, yeah, I really set myself back with my relationship with Miguel and it took me years to regain what I had lost by starting off wrong because I had misunderstandings about trauma and what is needed to heal trauma.

So six years later, finally all the pieces come together for him and he has just the most beautiful healing experience and transformation that I could have ever imagined. And then due to the circumstances, due to life circumstances that are probably beyond beyond the scope of this conversation. But I had to reach the extremely difficult decision to adopt him out to another family and that was and still has been the hardest thing that I have ever.

And what happened was that a few months later, my body crashed and I got so sick I could not even get out of bed. And so I had to go on a medical leave and I want to say of course because I know that this is quite common now, but we run all the tests and I, you know, I go to see the doctors. I'm actually a surgery resident at the time.

I'm a third year general surgery resident at the time and to not have any answers in the test that we're doing. And yet this is the medical system that I've come to use and rely on for everything. It was a big shock and I didn't know where to go.

So I felt like I was back in that same place as I had been with Miguel where it's like everything that I know how to do is not working. And so I did the same thing that I had done with Miguel. It's like, all right, I've got to figure this out myself and I went to the board and that's where I started I actually found functional medicine.

And so I started my training and functional medicine. It was not for the intention of making that my work and my practice. I was a surgery resident.

I had no intention of becoming a functional medicine practitioner. It was, it was just to help me. And then I had been in the process.

You know, I started doing all these different trainings because now I'm starting to realize that this is how trauma shows up in our body as adults oftentimes is in our physical health. And yet I had not seen myself as one who had had trauma. So I guess maybe I need to relook at what actually is trauma and then seeing how broken and beaten down my body was what do I do with this because the effects from now what I understood was trauma patterns that had programmed my body to just run off and survival all the time.

It had had those that had lasting effects on my biology and my body is not the same. And so how do I engage my body in the process of trauma healing so that I'm not struggling with these chronic health conditions, namely chronic fatigue and auto immunity for the rest of my life. And I mean, it was it's been it's been quite the process, but obviously through that process I've discovered and I've learned so much and I'm just I'm just so excited about it because what I've learned brings so much hope or what is possible in healing, but so many chronic conditions have trauma at their root cause.

And when we bring that piece in and then also when we bring the medical and biology piece into trauma therapy and we just combine those two were actually working with the system in an integrated way in and what is honoring the actual biology and how trauma gets into the body that we have the most potential for healing. And I don't think I know that I still have not reached my own potential like I I continue to discovered new layers and new levels that I didn't even know were possible and I do think that that's the way it is with trauma and how it has affected our bodies is that we still do not really understand exactly how much healing potential each one of us has. Thank you for sharing your story and yeah, I'm with you.

I as I mentioned with you are having worked with so many physicians and actually in a company training so many residents. I was always like for 10 years fiberglass that like what is this this is in human. I mean, I'm Canadian and Montreal.

They had a lawsuit like a human rights violations with how hard people work and how they are running in survival motor like 10 years working 36 hours in a row and I mean when I know you are in medical school and my step daughter just finished medical school and he's finishing a fellowship. And I look at their lives and they can't have a Christmas for three years in a row and can make it to their first day and can't and like what is this like what is wrong with society and when you said that about how can your own system feel deal and like always in shock to with yeah especially in the in the realm of psychology and psychiatry. My minor before business school was psychology and it's funny because now I'm coaching but I always attracted to psychology and when I was studying like just your job is to diagnose disease and guess if it's bipolar or schizophrenia and give them that's it's like yeah that's not sound and nowhere in four years of education then what's I where does this come from.

People are not born with depression they're not born anxious like where is this come from personal question house Miguel doing ensure you're in touch with him. As far as I know I spoke with him at two months ago now and he's doing good I told me he's going into the Marine Corps where he wants to hang out the person who goes in and saves hostages. Oh wow wow well thank you for your story you know it made me cry this.

So Dr Amy share with us how you define trauma your definition. So what I've come to understand is trauma is anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed us. Overwhelmed us in our ability to understand what was going on.

Overwhelmed us in our ability to process what was going on. Overwhelmed us in our ability to respond to what was going on in a way that we were present and embodied and connected. Stay connected with ourselves and our cord who we are.

So to explain it to our audience this means anything this could be a kid who was for bar eyes and left to cry or a kid who sing their stroller and they just want to hug it we say well tough it out those boiled on. That could be a bullying school a teacher not letting us participate and anything that makes us feel like what it's going on. Why is this happening.

It allows us to step away from this conversation around events and us looking for events whether in our life for someone else's life. Are we looking for big T events are we looking for small T events it's not the events it's not the events it actually is more the state of us our state what is our nervous system going into an event going into a situation. This can happen very early on and this is where a lot of trauma a lot of overwhelm happens even before we can speak because of even some common parenting practices that just in the process.

Overwhelms that infants ability to understand what's going on in process what's going on and respond in a way that they stay embodied because their survival systems are so elementary because they they're nervous system their brain hasn't fully developed yet so their survival systems are so elementary that they're only way to survive something that they don't understand and that they can process is to disconnect. And so these trauma patterns can start very early on and so when I'm working now with people whether it's a kid whether it doesn't matter I'm not looking for trauma I'm not looking for an event I'm not going to ask you to talk about your trauma stories or the events in your life and let's try to figure out if those were trauma for you I'm looking for are there trauma patterns that I see. In your life in your health in your actions in your behaviors in your coping mechanisms do we see trauma patterns because that's how we then know well at some point there was trauma whether or not we can identify exactly what that was or when that happened that doesn't matter as much as just being able to identify.

Trauma pattern showing up in our current everyday life you also said it is an event that happens too quickly too soon or too little for too long can you. Yeah, so there are there's a very specific process by which the body goes into a trauma response and there's only one trauma response so it doesn't matter what the event is it doesn't it does not matter. There's only one trauma response and so we can look at the steps in that trauma response and what are the triggers why would the body go from step one to step two and then from step two to step three what what has to happen for that next step to be taken until we get all the way into a trauma response in the body and that final step which is going from a stress response to a trauma response and so now we're talking about the different.

Between stress and trauma in our biology in our physiology and that difference right there the difference between the two of those is that something is either too much too fast or too little for too long and so those are two reasons why the body will take that final step and say alright this is more than what I can handle because it's coming at me too much too fast or I've had to live. I've had to live. Of too little of something that I really need for just way too long and I just can't keep going anymore too much neglect too much not being prioritized so it can be emotional can be social but it can also be biology because what if you have too little zinc what if you have too little be six those are too key ingredients for protecting and stabilizing nervous system so that if you have too little those your nervous system is just so much more reactive it's so much more sensitive.

And so even just a little poke and your nervous system is already like oh my goodness that's way too much for me and so even too little of certain nutrients essential nutrients in the body are still reasons for the body going into a trauma response so it actually doesn't have to be something external to us it doesn't have to be something in our life in our environment with someone else it can actually be what's happening in our own biology inside of us. There's so much that happens in our gut that can trigger a trauma response and so we're literally walking around with both the trigger and the trauma response you know when when we have a trigger in our life we can at least walk away from that person place or thing but when the trigger is inside of us because it's our own biology doesn't matter where you go it's still with you. And that's another reason why the body can just be like too little for too long and sometimes it's also too much inflammation too fast too much of bad food too much of toxins too much of this stuff and I can't handle it anymore because it's just too much too fast or too little for too long.

I hear you and you're getting into my next question when you meant biology of trauma what do we mean by biology I was thinking about how the stroma affect our nervous system but now you're getting into what's happening are at our cellular level and in our nutrition so going without too you know too little for too long could be terrible nutrition eating fries every day. Okay can you explain to us what is the biology of trauma what do you mean by biology. Yeah so there's a couple of ways to look at this and one would be the chronic effects on our biology that trauma has and so when the body does go into a trauma response for whatever reason right for anything for whatever reason at that time overwhelm us and so our body has gone all the way through those steps and is now.

In that trauma response and there are lasting effects on our biology a body cannot just bounce back from a trauma response unless we help it through that process and that's something that we just haven't also been taught and know to do so many of us are going into a trauma response and not resolving it and so the body continues to go back in that trauma response sometimes every day and sometimes we're living from that place and the chronic effects on our biology affect our body. And so if you think of the stress response is revving up your metabolism the trauma response does the opposite it completely shuts down and slows down your metabolism. So if you're in a state of slight or fight in your activated that's what we're talking about a trauma response no or this stress that's the stress.

Okay activation we're going to call stress and sympathetic. Okay so the stress is the response flight fight on okay now that affects our fun fun and freeze are I consider those a trauma response I don't consider those a stress response. And so if you consider that if you're having a fun response you have been overwhelmed you are no longer connected with yourself.

And you have gone into that shut down place. And so when we go into that shut down place what happens is that the vagus nerve now sends a different signal a different message to every cell of our body but mostly to our lungs to our heart and our digestive system since that's the main areas that the vagus nerve integrates primarily and that message is shut down. We need to shut down everything we need to conserve our energy because that's the best way that we can survive this situation.

And so our digestive system literally just shuts down everything from motility to stomach acid to pancreatic digestive enzymes and so people can go into having abdominal pain bloating constipation. IBS is a big is a big one for the body having gone into a trauma response IBS is not stress. IBS is a trauma response and particularly IBS is the pattern right we talked about patterns already that pattern of going back and forth between a trauma response and a stress response and cycling almost back and forth between the two of them.

And when we look at the effect on the lungs so the vagus nerve innervates the diaphragm and the diaphragm is what gives us our breath by moving up and down and so as the diaphragm moves down into the belly our lungs expand with air we take that inhalation and then the diaphragm releases and the exhalation happens. So when the vagus nerve now says all right we're shutting everything down that diaphragm can barely move it's not going to drop down into the belly which has a lot of downstream effects it normally massages the whole digestive system right making sure that lymph is flowing making sure that the bile is flowing making sure because it's causing these pressure changes in the abdomen. So it's actually a crucial part of maintaining the health of the digestive system so that all shuts down and as a result you can get a number of things including at the end of the day a lot of inflammation in the gut.

And so leaky gut is something that happens in that trauma response some of that can happen in the stress response but the majority of that leaky gut and a breakdown of the lining of the gut wall that barrier that integrity. Or what we might identify as boundaries that breaks down and that most happens in that trauma response and so now we have this inflammation cascade that's starting and that inflammation travels up the vagus nerve to our brain where now we're also getting information in our brain and we're having the brain fog. And this is where when we are in a trauma response it can feel just like our our brain is tired it's slow it's heavy we don't want to make any decisions any decision even the most simple one of like what am I going to eat for dinner.

It seems like just the hardest decision to make and that's because of the inflammation that happens in this trauma response. But then the diaphragm also because it's not moving it also doesn't massage the heart and so when the diaphragm comes up into the chest cavity for that exhalation it actually gives what is a hug to the heart. And so without that now you're affecting all of the circulation and now you can see cardiovascular issues starting to happen.

And more importantly what people may start to notice is that just their heart can feel heavy or some people describe it as my heart feels like it's sinking in my chest well that's because the diaphragm is not there holding it up well the diaphragm has become. Wow it's become you know it's like a muscle that you don't that you're not using it just kind of sits there so it's not it's not giving that pressure that containment that fun to the heart so the heart you can literally feel is just it's it's sinking or it's heavy. And so if that happened when you're having the traumatic response after the event or can we stay like that for years.

So we can actually live in a chronic trauma response and that's what I see a lot of people doing and what happens is that when we first start having experiences of this trauma response that we don't resolve then it starts to form this pattern of we start to get overwhelmed more quickly with stress. But we're still mostly in stress but then like we just get overwhelmed and we drop down into that trauma response as a person progresses in life accumulating more and more stress accumulating more and more trauma they spend more and more time in that trauma response now this is a very functional state. So it's not that they are in bed at home not getting up because they're in a trauma response these people are going to work these people are doing surgeries right like these are your everyday people who are functioning but they their bodies are functioning from a place of survival.

And from a place of overwhelm it's not just I'm stressed and I'm high energy survival this is I'm overwhelmed I'm so exhausted but I don't see any other way but then to just keep going that is someone who's living their body their biology their physiology is in this place of the chronic trauma response most of the time. She started tired medical it is higher medical is using that I my husband's a surgeon at all he's calling the residents he this is what I see. But to Amy you were explaining that I was working hard not to cry and I remember my listening to an episode one of your first episodes in your podcast when you had a guest or one of your mentors talk about asthma.

And my middle baby my middle child developed asthma very early in her childhood like choose maybe 12 months old and suffered it we were hospitalized a few times and all and it was at the worst when I was fighting with her dad screaming at each other I said baby I said you were born as a six months old like screaming. And she suffered from asthma or old childhood and obviously you only think of okay you know she was born with week longs and like you know but it's like when I heard that episode I cried and it was like the first time that I was like oh my god we cost that like all this fighting all society was so hard on her like this little baby hearing the people they love the most scream at each other. And now yeah now she's 16 and we still have asthma and we still part of her medical record clearance all the time.

So this is the biology wow this is amazing. So how do we start to heal this tell me about your 21 day program and how is it structure how do we address all this. And when you say you start with the body I guess this is where we start.

This is where we start. This is where the bleeding is happening so we got to stop the bleeding right there's a lot you even start to tackle that. There's a there's a lot to do and and so I don't want to oversimplify the process.

Absolutely we also need to start with the most important things and you know anyone who works in the medical field especially anywhere near the emergency room you know that when someone comes in you triage them you triage them you triage their issues and anyone who's actively bleeding that's going to be your top priority you have to stop the bleeding. Anything that is less urgent can wait and that's what we see with trauma we've got to stop the bleeding we've got to stop accumulating more trauma we've got to stop the bleeding and then over time we can address the rest of the stuff. So there are three essential pillars to addressing and healing trauma and there are a lot of different modalities and therapies out there and so I'm going to give you the general category of these pillars.

And then people can decide if what they're doing fits into one of these categories or if it doesn't fit in one of these categories and it would be an extra additional but not one of the three essential ones and I do mean essential I have never seen anyone reach healing to the point where they're they're able to live life in the present moment not still have their past driving them without incorporating all three of these. And so the three one would be the biology right we have to actually address these effects on our biology and now what has become our biology continuing to drive the trauma response and so even though inflammation may have been the result of the trauma response that inflammation is now continuing to keep us in a trauma response and it's not just inflammation but there's other things but that's just a really good example. So we have to address the biology the biology that's keeping us and actually causing trauma responses and then we look at internal family systems and parts work so hold on hold on.

Yep, when you say that. Say my daughter comes to you when she has asthma and she has experience trauma parents got the war she experienced yelling. When you say we look at that do we do you give her meds do you work with the nervous system with breathing with orienting with calming herself is that where you start tackling somatic techniques like what do you mean we deal with the biology.

When I talk about the biology I mean we're doing things that will directly support and change our biology so for me this is mostly supplements diet nutrition. Our lifestyle kind of goes in that for me with whether a person is in movement I don't like to use the word exercise right so I'm more talk about movement sleep those are things that I am kind of putting in that category of biology biology. Let us start is raising properly taking care of our bodies reducing inflammation yes I'm ready all that stuff yes all that stuff we have to we have to address the inflammation we have to address the nutrients we have to address the most common biochemical on balances that drive the trauma response like we have to address these biology issues.

And then we do need to look at what I call parts work which is understanding that there are different parts of us and that there are parts of us that go into the freeze response we have a young part of us we have we have a more mature part of us but being able to understand that even as we have gone through different life experiences there was a part of us that developed out of that experience that has a belief system that has a view of the world and it's holding on to that. So that is the reason you're not family system this is internal family systems yeah okay now that I have a whole episode on that for my audience to must understand I have a step okay and I do internal family systems in a way that I bring it and integrate it with the somatic work so that I don't do it as a separate thing I'm building it on top of where I start and where I start everyone I actually don't start them with the biology I definitely do not start them with the parts work because I need them out of their head and parts work can tend to just put them right back into their head into analyzing things and I need to get them out of their head. If analyzing things work we would all be healed years and years ago yes yes so I start with somatic work and by somatic work I mean doing exercises with that connect you with your body and you put your minds attention on your body and noticing sensations and noticing impulses that your body has to to move or to stay right there but the body has an experience and we get to just acknowledge that and put our minds attention on that rather than living in our heads and just telling our bodies what to do and to keep up.

And so I start with that but again that's not the only piece and so what I do is I say all right I've got to give you a foundation of somatic tools because for me that's what stops the bleeding. But I can't spend two years doing that just that because we've got this other work with your biology to do and what I find is that people who start with the somatic work we're able to stop the bleeding we're able to get some work done and then it's like they hit a ceiling effect and we have to now address the biology so that we can grow more and do more of the somatic work and as we do more of the somatic work we open up more capacity to do the biology work and now we have capacity to do the parts work so that now they start to feed off of each other and support each other rather than what is now happening which is they're all they're all triggering each other. And so the somatic work is where I start to give them some very basic tools a foundation of tools that they can use in the moment to keep themselves from going into a triggered and overwhelmed place.

And so what I do is I lead them through a very specific sequence and I do this based on the trauma response and how the trauma response has a very specific sequence of steps that the body takes to get into that trauma response and the 21 day journey reverse engineers that and it does that because the trauma response needs one thing well I mean technically it needs three things but safety is one of those things. It has to have safety and as long as we don't have a felt sense of safety we're not going to be able to even touch the trauma places. The stress response needs something very different and the parasympathetic response needs something very different and so this is what's happening right like people are being diagnosed if you want with stress and they're and they're being told they have burnout and that they have chronic stress and then they need to go manage their stress.

And they're given a prescription even for stress management and that's actually not what's happening they actually have a trauma response and that trauma response needs very different tools and so the first thing that we have to bring in in order to heal trauma is that felt sense of safety and this is not our mind telling us that you're safe. This is our body actually feeling safe right you think of a couple that's been married a long time right and the guys like I tell her all the time that I love her as she's like but I don't feel loved. You finished into one my episodes.

The mind is like we're safe we know that we're safe and yet the body says you can think whatever you want but I don't feel safe so we actually have to create a felt sense of safety for ourselves we can't wait for someone else to do that for us. And then as the trauma response that trauma gets what it needs with safety it also needs energy so that's where we bring in some of the biology work and it needs time those are the three things that the trauma response needs then it actually goes up into the stress response from where it came. And many people think that you heal trauma and you just go to feeling happy and calm and relax and that's not true because that's not how we got into the trauma response we got into the trauma response by going through that stress and being overwhelmed by that stress and so when we come out of trauma we go right back into that stress because that's our way out.

And when we go into that stress response what it needs is a felt sense of support because when we feel that someone has our back I mean we can we can conquer the world we can we can do anything we can endure anything if we know without a shadow of doubt that someone has my back. And so that sense of support is what we learn to create for ourselves and so the second week of the 21 day journey are seven exercises to create that felt sense of support for ourselves so the first seven days felt sense of safety we stop the bleeding and then the second week seven exercises for a felt sense of support so that we have tools for the stress response. And then then we can come into parasympathetic after we've gone through that stress response to get back home to ourselves and now we can be in parasympathetic and this is what we call expansion right we can actually start to open up to the world we can start to open up to ourselves we can feel safe in opening up and we can learn how fast we can open up and it not be too much too fast.

And we learn all of these things that are part of building our capacity building our capacity to even experience joy building our capacity to hold stress and not get overwhelmed by that stress we learn to expand and build our sense of connection our ability to be present our ability to stay embodied as we continue to navigate life. And so that's the 21 day journey is literally walking people through this essential sequence that reverse engineers how the body goes into the trauma response so that we can effectively start to address that stored trauma in the body in a safe way because if we don't do it in a safe way we re traumatize ourselves in the process which most people end up doing when they go into the different therapies without doing this essential foundational work first of creating safety. I'm really shingh on you explain what happened to me in the last three years because I was doing all the EMDR and all that and while I was doing a lot of stronger and putting boundaries and I'm extremely happily married I was exhausted I was my friends call me low energy care and because unlike I got an app I'm exhausted and I think that's exactly I wasn't doing the somatic work I wasn't feeling getting that sick.

Getting that safety to then go and deal with the trauma and so this sounds amazing you answered all my questions I can speak with you another hour or two but we have to wrap up so thank you so much for being here I ask all my guess what does healing mean to you. Feeling means living without scars being able to live with open hearts open hands and why should people do this work what do I mean if they're happy with the way that their life is going they don't need to do this work. If there's something in their life that they feel needs to be changed and they've tried to change it and it hasn't worked well for them then there's likely a trauma component to that and whether this is relationships whether this is physical health whether this is their career it's all the same trauma is kind of that that route that grows into every area of our life and when we can't seem to change something easily then there's usually trauma at the root of that.

Beard a beard a free said thank you so much for being here and please cheer this episode with as many people as possible and help doctor a me and I. Inspire as many people as possible to do this work thank you for being here.