Episode 151 | Oct 9, 2025

How to Heal Trauma in Your Body, Dr. Aimie Apigian

What if trauma isn’t just in your mind, but in your cells? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes double board-certified physician and trauma expert Dr. Amy to explore the biology of trauma and how it impacts both mental and physical health. Dr. Amy shares groundbreaking insights from her new book The Biology of Trauma, which reveals how the body stores fear, pain, and overwhelm, and how we can begin to heal.

“The trauma is just a physiological state… That’s all it is. It’s just one of the three physiological states. It’s not bad. It doesn’t mean that some bad event happened to you. It may have, but it doesn’t mean that it did. It just means that your physiology is now in a state of shutdown.”

Dr. Aimie Apigian

In this powerful episode, Dr. Amy explains how trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by the body’s physiological response to feeling overwhelmed, unsafe, and alone. She breaks down the difference between trauma and stress, highlights how unresolved trauma can contribute to chronic illness years later, and offers health coaches practical language and tools to recognize and support nervous system dysregulation in clients. Through real-life examples, she illustrates how trauma manifests not just in emotions but in the digestive, immune, and cardiovascular systems, and how coaching can create a foundation for healing. This conversation underscores the vital role health coaches can play in trauma-informed care without crossing the line into psychotherapy. Coaches can help clients recognize when they feel safe, notice dysregulated patterns, and guide them with somatic education to shift into more regulated states.

Dr. Amy’s journey into this work began in medical school, after adopting a child who had experienced trauma. As she searched for solutions beyond conventional medicine, she developed a deep understanding of how biology, not just psychology, influences trauma recovery. Her personal and clinical experience led her to create an integrative, science-based sequence for healing that goes beyond the cognitive and into the somatic. Today, she is dedicated to training practitioners, including health coaches, in how to recognize and help clients shift out of trauma states and into safety. Dr. Amy emphasizes that healing does not always require reliving painful memories. Instead, it begins with helping people feel safe in their bodies again, which is something health coaches are uniquely positioned to support.

Watch The Episode

Listen Now

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: We hear so much lately about trauma, trauma-informed therapy, trauma-informed coaching, people saying, “I’m the victim of trauma.” Well, what is trauma? And if you’re a health coach, can you help people who have experienced trauma? And these are some of the things that we talk about with a true expert, somebody who is leading the way in helping people who may have experienced trauma, and is helping practitioners and health coaches who have clients and patients who have experienced trauma.

So, my special guest today is Dr. Aimie Apigian. She is a double-board certified physician, preventive, and addiction medicine. She has master’s degrees in biochemistry and public health, and she revolutionizes trauma healing by revealing how our cells, not just our minds, store trauma. Her new book, “The Biology of Trauma”, How the Body Holds Fear, Pain, and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It with a forward by Gabor Maté, transforms our understanding of how the body experiences and holds trauma. After adopting a child during medical school, sparked her journey, she developed an integrative, science-based sequence for the healing journey. I know you are going to enjoy my conversation with Dr. Aimie.

Dr. Aimie, you are someone I have known for quite some time and admire your work. And you are releasing a groundbreaking, new book, which we will talk about. So, let’s start out just by talking about trauma. This is something that we hear a lot now, and there’s trauma-informed coaching, trauma-informed therapy. So, can you just start out by describing what you mean when you are looking into trauma?

Dr. Aimie: Well, I even was taught about trauma-informed medicine. And coming into my residency from medical school, I thought I knew what that meant, and I had no idea. I was clueless in terms of the actual experience of the body and how it experiences trauma, why it holds on, even though we want to let go. Why does the body still hold on? And what is the body waiting for? What does it need to actually be able to heal that? And for the work that you do, I think that health coaches are the central people who will be the biggest change makers for a person with even their trauma recovery. Why would I say that? Because for that healing to occur, we do need coaching. We do need accountability. We do need the support. That’s what health coaches provide. Medical providers don’t provide that. They don’t have time for that.

We also need the community. Well, that’s what your coaches are providing. They’re providing that community piece because we cannot heal in isolation. A trauma experience made us feel so alone. That was why it was a trauma, is because we felt alone in our experience. And so, for a health coach to come beside them now and say, “You’re not alone, and you’ve got me in your corner, and you’ve got these other people that we’re going to be doing this group coaching with.” Again, I see the health coaching training that you’re doing as being so important to a person’s recovery, even from how trauma has impacted their body.

And that’s exactly what I would want people to know, is that so much of our emphasis on trauma over the years has been on the mind. How are you thinking about life differently because of what you’ve been through? How do you talk about yourself or talk to yourself differently? What are the things that you’re doing differently? It’s all been about thoughts and our mind and our actions, whereas I’m looking at the effect on the body. I’m looking at the effect on our biology. And this is where I think we’ve missed a lot of the mark because we have the research. We have the studies that show that even as early in childhood, those things that people call stress have made them sick 20 years later. If it made you sick 20 years later, that was not stress, that was trauma.

So, let’s call it what it is because then it gives us tools that are different than if it’s just stress. With stress, we can just do stress management, but with trauma, that’s not going to work. That’s like trying to treat a fever with Tylenol without actually looking at, no, what’s causing the fever? Oh, you have an appendicitis. Oh, you have a bladder infection. It’s not the right answer to just go take Tylenol. It’s the right answer to find the root cause. And that’s what we need to do with trauma and the body.

Dr. Sandi: What would be some root causes of trauma? Could you provide some examples? Because, again, it is just a word that is bandied about. And what would be an example? We know the big examples, if you’re in a war-torn country, if you’ve had witnessed the loss of loved ones, but what would be some things that people might not be aware of? Like, yeah, it’s trauma.

Dr. Aimie: Oh, this is so good because I even start chapter 1 of my book with the story of my patient, Elena. And in chapter one, we start with her in a car accident. She’s in a car accident, and I walk people through those five steps of the body’s trauma response. And then one year later, she develops autoimmunity. She thought it had come out of the blue. She had no realization that actually, this was a sign that her body had experienced trauma as a child. It had grown underneath the surface, and then the car accident was just the final straw that turned everything into a full-blown diagnosis. But she would never have really looked at her life and said, “Oh, yes, I had trauma.”

So, your question is so good at being able to really understand, what does qualify as a trauma. And what we’re taught when we are taught how to be trauma-informed is to go through the checklist. Did you have this happen to you? Did you have this happen to you? And it’s all about the event. And whether we call it the big T-trauma or little T-trauma, we can add on that checklist, were you neglected? Did things not happen for you that should have happened?

But Sandi, the emphasis is still on the outside event, the external circumstance. And actually, how the body experiences trauma is the internal response. Gabor Maté wrote this in his book, “Myth of Normal”. It was one of the key messages of that book. Trauma is not what happened to us, it was our response to what happened. And so, what I do in my book is I lay out, these are the exact physiological changes. It’s an escalation of our physiology into the strongest survival response that we have. And that is our qualifier for a trauma. It doesn’t matter whether that happened in a car accident, like my patient Elena, or whether that happened because we grew up in a scary neighborhood with gang members or bullies at school, or maybe none of that. We just didn’t feel like we belonged in our family at our school.

So, what is the internal experience that qualifies a trauma? This is it. There are three aspects. Whatever we’re experiencing, number one, it has to be unbelievable. We can’t believe what’s happening. This is not what was supposed to happen. This was not how life was supposed to go. This is unbelievable. Then it’s unbearable. The sensations that it creates in my body are so awful, so uncomfortable that I don’t want to be in my body. I don’t want to feel those things. And those things can be a certain level of panic and fear of, “I don’t know if I’m going to be okay. How am I going to do life with this now or without this person?” And it can also be grief. It can be other forms of that unbearable sensations that happens. So, this idea that it has to be unbearable. Grief is often an unbearable sensation. We experience a loss in our life. Even if it’s a loss that we anticipated, like a pet died. Our pets die, but if it creates unbearable sensations, then that might have caused a trauma response inside of us.

And that last piece is feeling all alone in that experience. We don’t have anybody to share it with. We don’t have anybody who understands what we’re feeling. We don’t have anybody who sees what we’re experiencing. So, three elements, it’s unbelievable, it’s unbearable, and I feel all so very alone.

Dr. Sandi: That is just so powerful. And it really brings up this idea that it is personalized. Because what might be experienced as trauma to one person, someone else might not have that same reaction. And it might be because of environmental circumstances, it might be resiliency for personality, but many reasons why this would be experienced differently. And so, I think the health coach can have… There’s something in functional medicine, is a timeline where you see, “Okay, this is when I started to feel sick or was diagnosed.” Okay, well, when was the last time you felt well? And then go back, let’s say six months, it’s arbitrary, it could be eight months, a year before that, and what happened? Then you’re also saying that these things could have happened years ago, and still be driving that, not only emotional state, but physical condition.

Dr. Aimie: Yes. And as we look at that functional medicine timeline, what if the health coach could start asking, “Looking at this timeline, a few things jump out at me. When was the last time you remember truly feeling safe?” And my guess is that most of their answers would be, “I don’t remember ever truly feeling safe.” And that then starts to explain the health issues. And we can have a different conversation about, “Tell me about that. When was the first time that you actually realized that you didn’t feel safe? When was the first time that you started to feel all alone going through life?” And that’s how we can elicit these early beginnings of trauma responses without going through the checklist of, “Well, what bad thing happened to you?” Or, “What didn’t happen to you?” It takes the conversation out of that and into the internal experience, which is much more powerful for the health coach to understand how much of a biology of trauma are we really working with? How long has this been happening underneath the surface?

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. It’s such important work. And I look back in my own life. And lost my father when I was 9. And at the time when I was putting the pieces together in retrospect, I thought, “Okay, well, that happened in May. And that summer, I was an only child. And I started developing chronic UTIs.” That didn’t go away. This was 1959. So, I didn’t exactly know in terms of not only forget about microbiome, also therapy for kids, or support. But my mom did get therapy. But not being cleared up these UTIs. And they did all these medical procedures. And finally, something happened where it just got better.

But looking back, of course, there was that connection, but nobody, nobody made that connection. And I remember, and then she had to go back to work. We just had no money. And dad died without life insurance because he had a heart condition that was from childhood, and so, he never got insurance. So, she went back to work, And I was 10, or 9, 10. And I remember sitting by the window, we’ve lived in an apartment building with a courtyard, watching for her to come home. It was a lefty kid, and thinking, “Oh, no, she’s not going to come home. Something’s going to happen. I’m going to be all alone.”

There was an orphanage that was on the major street where we live. And it was a Catholic orphanage. So, I was, “There was no way a Jewish girl would have been in that orphanage.” But in my mind, I was going to be going to that orphanage and be all alone. And that feeling of even saying, I don’t like being… We’ll have those experiences of like, lovey-bee, being around family. And I’m really focused on the importance of loneliness, especially for kids, but putting those pieces together, we don’t.

But I do want to bring up something that sometimes, if somebody is diagnosed, let’s say, with a digestive condition or autoimmune, is there a danger that you’re going to immediately go to while it must be stored trauma, as opposed to, maybe it’s lifestyle. Maybe he foods they’re eating or not eating, or some other lack of sleep or so. So, how can we help people to see that the complexity that’s not always putting pigeonholing somebody into trauma. I saw this personally when I was a psychologist and everything, or psychologists who were automatically, everybody had a childhood of sexual abuse, no matter what they said, that was the category they were pigeonholed into.

Dr. Aimie: Not helpful. So, not helpful. And let’s not use the word trauma for a moment. Let’s talk about the nervous system. The nervous system is technically where our trauma gets stored if we’ve had trauma. And what it causes is these chronic patterns that then develop into disease over time. So, let’s talk about the nervous system and not even use the word trauma. When we look at the nervous system, is what decides which state we are going to be in every moment. It determines our response to stress, to challenges, to growth, to food, to exercise, to walking outside and experiencing a temperature change. Our nervous system is a system that adapts and is responsible for our responses to anything that happens.

And so, when we have nervous system dysregulation or nervous system imbalance, what a person will notice is that they start overreacting or underreacting. And this can be emotionally, they can start to isolate, they can start to have bigger emotional reactions to people’s looks, “You gave me a look,” and perceiving danger where there is no danger. That would be the overreacting. We can look at underreacting where people are doing things that are disrespectful, that are hurtful. And they’re like, “I’m not going to do anything about it. I’m going to stay in this relationship and allow this to happen.” That’s underreacting. So, the nervous system is where we start to see these patterns.

Now, that overreaction and underreaction is a trauma biology. But trauma is not just an event, right? Trauma is not just the car accident or the sexual abuse. The trauma biology is just the response that our body makes when it becomes overwhelmed. It can become overwhelmed by toxins. It can be overwhelmed by the glyphosates and the plasticides in our food and our water. It doesn’t even have to be something emotional or psychological. It can be biochemical that is causing our body to still go into that overwhelmed response, which is the trauma biology.

So, when we look at, what are all the factors involved in a person’s capacity? Well, what are all the things that are draining their capacity? It is going to be their lifestyle. Are they getting good sleep? Are they not? Are they eating quality food? Are they not? It’s either nourishing them or draining them. And whenever we go into a situation where we are drained rather than nourished, our body will go into that trauma response. Again, we’re not calling it a sexual abuse or a car accident. We’re not labeling it as that. We’re labeling it as just your nervous system got too much stress. And that stress comes in the form of all kinds of stress and just as much biochemical environmental stress, and even being misaligned with our body’s rhythms. So, the movement piece, the meditation piece, the sleep piece, like all of this becomes really important for helping our nervous system stay out of that overwhelmed response, which is trauma.

So, that’s why I say, whether you think you’ve had trauma or not, whether you’ve had a big event or not, it’s looking at your inner physiological state. And we have three states. We have a parasympathetic state. This is where we will always be in our best health, no matter what conditions that we were born with or the genetics that we have. You will be in your best health when you are in the parasympathetic state. When you are in the stress state, you will feel superhuman. You will have the highest energy that you ever have. This is where we can see firefighters doing extreme measures to save people from burning houses that they would never be able to do in the gym when they’re working out. Why? Because they’ve got adrenaline behind them. So, the stress state is this high energy state.

And then you have this trauma state. Again, if we don’t like the word trauma, that’s fine, let’s call it overwhelm. You have this overwhelmed state. It’s the shutdown state. And that state can happen for any reason. And this is my definition of a trauma. Anything that for any reason overwhelmed us and our ability to respond, to understand, and to process it at that time. And so, we get overwhelmed. We sit at the window and wonder if our mother’s coming back. And imagine having to go live at the orphanage. Because it’s overwhelming my ability at that time of my life to understand what is going on and how I’m going to be okay.

And so, the trauma is just a physiological state, Sandi. That’s all it is. It’s just one of the three physiological states. It’s not bad. It doesn’t mean that some bad event happened to you. It may have, but it doesn’t mean that it did. It just means that your physiology is now in a state of shutdown. Your digestive system will be shut down. Your cardiovascular system will be diminished. Your lymphatic system will be diminished. Your detoxification system is not the priority when you are in that shutdown state in order to survive. And that is why no matter what health conditions you have, you will have the worst symptoms because everything is shut down.

And so, this is what the health coach gets to do. The health coach gets to look at, what is your inner state? Whether you want to call it your inner emotional state, because that’s how people usually experience it and notice it. They’re by their emotions. It’s easier to notice in their physiology. But it really is, their inner emotional state is their inner physiological state. And when the health coach can be able to see what state a person is in, and have tools for in the moment to say, “Let’s shift your state.” Because when you’re in this state, when you’re feeling safer, when you’re feeling safe enough, when you’re in that parasympathetic, everything else is going to work better.

So, rather than throwing one more supplement at this, one more thing, yes, those are important. We’re not saying that those aren’t important. They are important. And the most important thing is, what is the state of your body while you take that supplement? What is the inner physiological state when you eat that meal? It can be the best meal. It can be the worst meal, but your inner state has just as much effect of how it’s going to influence and impact your body as what you’re eating.

Dr. Sandi: This is such important information for health coaches because I think there’s a lot of fear of even talking about trauma. Because rightly so, coaching is not psychotherapy, and coaches want to observe their boundaries and not engage in therapy unless they have the license allowing them to do that. But they can provide this crucial education that you’re describing right now. And they can help people by the right questions to become aware of some of these connections, and then offer hope that this is something that they can address, that they can change and make great gains in overcoming whatever happened in the past that caused this physiological state.

Dr. Aimie: Yes, this is so true. And thank you for emphasizing that. When I was working with my addiction medicine patients, this was when I realized I needed to give them something in the moment for them to be able to take home with themselves, that while they feel safe with me, which is great, they can’t take me home with them. And they need that education. They need the tools that the health coach can provide them for, “Here’s how you can create your own inner safety when we’re not together, so that when you go to eat that meal tonight… Why don’t we do a somatic exercise together right now? I’ll do mine and you can follow along.” So, it’s education. This is not therapy, right? This is education on somatic, self-practices that they can do in the moment when they sit down to eat a meal or they are going to bed. Do another somatic exercise. Let’s teach them. Let’s coach them into what they can do for themselves working with their body, not just their mind, not just, “Change that thought.” But it’s actually working with their body in that felt sense to shift their inner emotional and physiological state.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. And this is something that is not them talking. And I’ve seen too many therapists, people come out, there’s no resolution. They’re in a sympathetic state. They’re all stirred up because all they do is relive the memory of the trauma. And back when I was a psychologist or the health psychologist, I really was not doing therapy, but doing probably very similar to what you’re describing, where they would notice where their feet… It was first in awareness, “Okay, where are you feeling tight?” “Oh, I’m hunching up my shoulders. I am bracing. My jaw is tight. I’m squeezing here.” And so, we would use biofeedback or they would see that on the screen. They would see their breathing pattern. They would start to change that, and then they would easily be able to shift into different thoughts.

And so, now, they would go, “Well, okay, this thing that I was dreading, I guess, I can do it.” So, they’re shifting always from danger to safety. But these were just… And often, you had to come from that individual. It wasn’t me giving them an image. In fact, that’s really dangerous. One time, I was working with someone early on, and they were listening to a relaxation tape, “Put yourself on a cloud and imagine you’re floating above.” She got so stirred up because she had lost a child and she had… And that’s how she pictured, her child was up on cloud, or people who are…images of the beach. Well, what if you had a bad experience in the water? And so, those kinds of things, they don’t work with those. We just find something out there, “Oh, go to this meditation class. Take a listen to something from an app.” That has to be from within and personalized.

Dr. Aimie: Absolutely. And being able to have those tools that they can teach them, I think empowers their clients so much. And that agency, that sense of agency, that sense of, “I can do it,” is a big part of shifting out of a chronic trauma response, where I don’t feel like I can do anything. I don’t feel like I’m enough. I feel like I should give up because I’ve tried so hard and nothing has worked. And so, shifting them through these exercises into a sense of agency is just as much of the magic.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. And Aimie, where can people find you and find your book? You have great content available, great social media presence. So, where can people find you and your book?

Dr. Aimie: Yes. So, the book is called “The Biology of Trauma”. Here’s the book, “The Biology of Trauma.” And they can find it on the website, biologyoftrauma.com. And so, they can also order it on Amazon. And when they come to my website, they will find resources that I have put with the book, including my five-day nervous system reset, which are five of the somatic exercises that I teach in my practitioner training course. And I’ve put it together in this five-day reset for them to be able to start with something. And so, that is what they can get for free. It’s just a gift when they order the book is no matter where you order the book.

Amazon is the most likely place, but come to the website because I have that five-day nervous system reset for you that you can share both, again, helpful for yourself to help yourself be a regulated health coach, but then also, to be able to share these same exercises with your clients. You’re like, “Let me share something with you that I’ve learned that’s helping me. And whether you like it or not, whether you do it or not, let me just share what I’ve learned myself. And that way, we stay within our scope of practice, but yet are sharing practical tools for creating inner safety.

Dr. Sandi: That is going to be so, so helpful for all of our listeners. And I also wanted to point out and acknowledge your support of health coaching and the health coaching profession. So, we appreciate all that you are doing to spread the word about the power of health coaching and how health coaching can be really helpful for people who are dealing with trauma. So, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Aimie: And not just really helpful, I think some of the most helpful things that a person can do. Because I don’t think that they’re coming to their health coach with that expectation, but yet when the health coach can be aware of their nervous system, can be asking questions like, “When was the last time that you actually felt safe? It’s going to allow them to open up in ways that they might never even open up with their therapist, even if they have a therapist. These are not the questions that their medical providers even have time to ask. So, I see the health coach is actually one of the best people in the future who can help people even just start to open up and truly heal at that level as well.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. Thank you for that. Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and good luck on the book. I know that this will be a very important book. So, thank you.

Dr. Aimie: Thank you.