Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today we have Dr. Aimie Apigian on our Conscious Fertility podcast and she’s written an incredible book. I am so excited to be able to share this with all of you guys because if you’ve been listening to what I share and all the expert guests, she’s kind of put it all together in one book, so it’s pretty amazing to have her on. Now, Dr. Aimie is a double board certified physician, preventive and addictive addiction medicine. She has a master’s degree in biochemistry and public health, and she really is revolutionizing trauma healing by kind of revealing how our cells, not just our minds store our trauma. You’ve heard us say this many times that our issues get stuck in our tissues and it’s got a bottom up approach that we’re looking for as well as a top down. And this is what Dr. Aimie’s going to share. And in her book she does this really well, the biology of trauma, how the body holds fear, pain and overwhelm, and most importantly, how to heal it. Dr. Aimie, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Aimie Apigian 

Dr. Lorne, I am so excited to be here. This is going to be a great conversation and it really is helpful for me to hear what you got out of my book, so thank you for that.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, no, I’m more excited than you are. I am just loving what you’ve been writing, what you’ve been sharing on all the YouTube podcasts. I’m going to see right off the top to our listeners in the show notes. I’m going to put links to all Dr. Aimie’s stuff where you can buy her book as well as her podcast. YouTube. There is a wealth of information, so if you’re struggling with autoimmune conditions, infertility, you’re feeling fatigue, you’re just not feeling right in your body and your doctors are telling you it’s all in your head. We’re going to learn today that it’s probably in your cells nodding your head.

Aimie Apigian 

This is so true, and actually when you say that, it takes me back to the time when I had a doctor tell me that and I was like, I am also a doctor. Do you realize what you just did? You are talking to a fellow colleague here. I am not one of those patients, but yet that was my situation. I developed chronic fatigue and we went in and all of the labs were mostly normal, and that was our standard answer in allopathic medicine at that time. And so I am hearing those words said to me, I think it’s all in your head.

Lorne Brown:

I want to hear your story because again, you’re allopath trained and you have your own experience, so you have the medical training to understand what’s going on from a very physical level. You have also trained in functional medicine and other really cool modalities, so you really have a holistic view of it. But I also find it interesting for the listeners when they know the person who’s speaking not only has the knowledge, not only has experience helping other people, but it’s an added value. Sorry that you had a sufferer, but it’s an added value. When you actually were in that experience yourself, you were the patient, let’s call it, and you found a way to heal. Can you share your personal story,

Aimie Apigian 

Dr. Lorne, I have not just been the patient. I’ve also been the parent, and this started when I became a foster parent. I became a foster parent while I was in medical school. I was just finishing my master’s in biochemistry and I had a few months before jumping back into the third year of medical school and I decided that the best use of my time is to be able to give in such a way that will help hurting children. And I go through all of the logistics that are required, and by the time I actually got through all of those, I was on internal medicine rotation. When I get the phone call from Rosa, the social worker, she says, Aimie, there’s a little boy, he’s four years old, he’s been in the foster care system since age nine months. She told me a little bit about his background, the challenges that they were having with him being placed in other families.

Aimie, he’s the perfect match for you. I could not say no. Now, I was completely unaware of my own trauma patterns at that point in my life. I did not know that I was a people pleaser and needed to take on things and try to still be the accomplishing one from my family of origin, but that was who I still was. And so I take this on not knowing what this was going to become, and as I bring Miguel into my home and my heart and they’re telling me more of his situation, they tell me that unless things work out with me, he is going to go to a group home for the rest of his time in foster care. His behaviors were at the level that he could not be placed in any other home with children or pets. He was that much acting out his anger and his rage.

Well, as a bleeding heart myself, I was like, I can’t let that happen. And so I made the very strong decision that as a single mom in medical school, I am going to adopt. Miguel and I went all in. I was all in to try to now find the answers that he needed to be able to rise above his childhood. And I took him to therapies, I took him to psychiatrists. I took him to all of the different things that I had available and the therapies weren’t working. Time was not healing, and my love was not enough. This is what really started me down the path of studying trauma. How could it be that I can take in a boy and I can give him all the love, I can give him the stability, I can give him the certainty, I can give him all of what he needs and he’s still living as if he’s in the past.

I realized that trauma has a larger impact on us than what we have thought, and he started to become a window into my own storage trauma. And while he was adamant about protecting his heart and not even letting my love in because it felt dangerous for him to connect, to let me in out of fear of being abandoned again, I realized that I was also doing the same thing, that I kept people at a safe emotional distance. I would only let them see the safe part of me, not those things that I was embarrassed about, not those things that I was sure that if they saw that, if they knew the real me, they wouldn’t like me. And so he became the window into my own trauma patterns and I realized that it was I who was also still living as if the past were happening, that I was still living as if I might still get hurt, I might still be abandoned, I might still feel those things that I never had wanted to feel again.

So it really became a portal to my own healing journey. And then that’s when I started to see it in all of my patients and I realized I think this is humans. I think that if you have a human body, this is what the human body tends to do. It tends to hold onto our past to protect us from the future and the impact of that will be seen in our thoughts, our behaviors, but also our emotions and our reactions to people, but also down to the cellular level. And I started seeing the connection with all of these chronic health conditions that people were presenting with, and then it became mine and I became the patient in the chair with these chronic health issues and not knowing if I could reverse them or if now the damage from my trauma had been so great that this was just the life that I needed to accept and to settle for.

Lorne Brown 

And on your journey, because you shared with your son the abandonment issue, he didn’t want to let you in. Then he became your mirror and it was triggering yourself. You saw that you had the same patterns. I think I heard you did the traditional talk therapy, but that didn’t seem to fix it. I often in conscious work, I often share that this is one of those things you can’t think your way through. You have to feel it to heal it because medically trained you’re going down the orthodox pathway. How did you end up changing it to your journey to where we get to today where you’ve written a book on it?

Aimie Apigian 

It was quite the process because as you are mentioning, I was trained to think that it’s all a willpower issue. It’s a choice, it’s a mindset. If you don’t want to be impacted by your past, well then you make the choice to not be impacted by your past. This was how I was raised even before I went into allopathic medicine. And in fact, I remember in my medical training what we thought was trauma informed was to be able to recognize that a person was experiencing overwhelm or shame, maybe sadness or even over their diagnosis. And what we would say is, you should really go talk to someone about that. And we would pat ourselves on the shoulder thinking that we’re really good health providers because we are noticing this emotional component, not realizing that part of my journey would be to realize that no talking about it is not resolving it.

And so as I now jump into my own trauma work, once I had my own health issues and I realized it’s time to do my own work, no longer just focusing on other people, and I started with the traditional therapy and I was jumping in such a way that’s like I wanted to get it all done. Now if we got to do this stuff, if I’ve got to look at my childhood, can we just get it over with? And I would sign up for all of these deep therapy sessions and I would come out of those sessions thinking that I had done such a great job, Aimie, I’m so proud of you. You really went deep. You let things get stirred up. You even cried and had this release. I was thinking I was doing a really good job only to find myself three hours later on my couch in a fetal position eating a tub of ice cream and binge watching movies and I was like, this isn’t working. It’s how triggering things that my body has then having a response to. But Dr. Lorne, I was so disconnected from my own body, I didn’t even know that I was disconnected from my body. And it wasn’t until I started seeing that my body’s having a physical reaction to my trauma therapy sessions that I started realizing I’ve got to bring in this biology piece. I don’t even know what this is. If I didn’t know that as a physician, that was when I was like, who else might know this? I thought I knew the body.

Lorne Brown 

Chinese medicine doctors

Aimie Apigian 

Chinese medicine doctors, actually a lot of them, right? Naturopaths.

Lorne Brown 

It’s the medical system. In Chinese medicine, it’s not mind and body. It’s mind body. You can’t separate. The mind is bidirectional. The mind impacts the physical. The physical impacts the body or the emotional, mental, emotional. So every time they look at something at a pattern, they’re always asking questions about the physical and also the emotional because if you have worry, pensiveness overthinking, that means something, lack of will, sadness, irritability, they’re telling us imbalances. So just because you said how would I look to know, I just wanted to clarify that there is a medical system that actually that’s the system, but let’s carry on

Aimie Apigian 

It is the system and to be so intrigued in an allopathic system where that was not the model I didn’t even know to look at these other modalities. I didn’t even know that that was their model. And yet that is the actual amazing description of my book, which is that yes, trauma impacts our biology and we know that we know the studies. We don’t need to be told that that’s not new news. But what I found out in my own personal experience was that my own biology was then creating more and more trauma responses. My own biology became what kept me stuck in my trauma responses, kept me stuck in the inability to actually recover and get back to health and move from a mode of protection to a mode of connection and health.

Lorne Brown 

I’d love you to unpack the falling the difference between a stress response and a trauma response and then this idea of, because you said protection expansion because when we’re in fear, we contract and when we feel safe and therefore not feeling safe or alarmed, we contract and when we feel safe, we expand, we want to connect. And you were sharing that the body, the trauma does something to the biology and then now the biology is behaving a certain way to make you think you’re always in danger. Can you unpack that a bit more please?

Aimie Apigian 

You just want me to summarize my whole entire book because what you just asked for it

We want people to read it, but give us a little idea so they’re going to want to read it.

Aimie Apigian 

Absolutely. So you started with the difference between a stress response and a trauma response. Yeah, I did not know this. So as I am now working with my chronic health issues and trying to find a way out, I realized that I was having different physiological states, different inner states that also express itself as different emotional states. So I started mapping this out and it’s then what helped me piece together what I was learning in the somatic experiencing and trauma therapies as well as this art narrative process. That was a key piece for Miguel’s healing. And the stress response is this physiology of high energy and is driven by adrenaline and adrenaline is what makes all of these interchanges from our blood flow to our lungs, breathe faster to our cells, making more energy for us so that we have the ability to overcome a danger and survive. I think of the stress response as a sprint. I am in a full on sprint when I’m in this stress physiology. Now it’s not just a sprint for fun, I’m sprinting for my life, but it’s the idea that it’s a lot of high energy because I am actively trying to overcome a danger

Lorne Brown

If I can summarize that part. So your energy has been mobilized so you can fight or flight and therefore those resources get diverted from say reproduction because we’re talking about fertility, digestion and it goes to your heart and your major muscles so you can fight or run.

Aimie Apigian 

Exactly. It’s a very active process of surviving. And I make that distinction because the trauma response is a very passive survival response and we go into the trauma response, it starts with the freeze. When we realize that we can’t overcome by taking action, our abilities are just not equal to the danger. We’re not going to be able to outrun that tiger. He is going to pounds on us. He’s going to eat us alive. So in that moment, we need to change survival strategies. That survival strategy didn’t work. Now let me try the strongest survival strategy, and that is what the trauma response is. It’s an escalation from stress into the strongest survival response. And this survival response is a passive one. It’s one of surrender. It’s one of giving up and giving in and it feels awful because it feels heavy, especially just coming from the sprint. This feels awful. Now you’re curled up on the ground and you’re not wanting to move. You don’t have the energy to move. You’ve got brain fog, so it’s hard to even think and you find yourself word searching. You don’t really know what’s going on. You’re a bit disoriented. Some people even seem to watch themselves from a third person perspective. This is the ultimate survival response and it’s only something that we go into when the stress response doesn’t work, it isn’t enough.

Lorne Brown 

And so we go into this conservation mode, we freeze, and this is again the symptoms I’m hearing chronic fatigue. You talked about brain fog. You can have tired muscles, can’t forget things, your immune system.

Aimie Apigian 

Let’s talk about the immune system. So what I was taught was that cortisol is terrible. Cortisol is like the enemy. You don’t want high cortisol. Cortisol causes inflammation. I’m going to challenge that a little bit.

Lorne Brown 

I would challenge that too. Let’s hear it.

Aimie Apigian

Good, good. Well, what would you say?

Lorne Brown 

Well, if you don’t have cortisol, you’re not getting out of bed in the morning. First of all, you need that energy to move the cells. I’m going to pull from Chinese medicine again, everything is about balance. Even that stress response, if there’s a car coming at you or a wild animal, that stress response is awesome because it saves your life. Those that did not have a good stress response aren’t actually here right now. They get eaten by the lion. They’re like, he’s not going to eat me. They didn’t have the fear of the lion. If you have a deadline at work or your spouse isn’t behaving the way you want or your child or you’re trying to get pregnant, your body still thinks it’s under a major threat and it’s going to release all those hormones. Cortisol once in a while is great, but all day long, adrenaline all day long is going to damage your tissues. It’s going to mess up with your immune system. In Chinese medicine again, a little bit is okay, but if it’s all the time, it’s not so good. It’s like driving in first gear pedal to the metal for hours and hours, RPMs in the red. If you just do that to pass a car, people that drive cars say that’s really good for your car once in a while, but if you drove hours, you’d burn out the engine,

Aimie Apigian 

Which is what I did. I live like that

Lorne Brown 

Right? That’s what, because most people are walking around, I’m tired, I’m irritable, I have autoimmune like diseases. The doctor can’t find anything in the blood, but they got all the signs and symptoms of an autoimmune disease. If somebody’s listening to this going, wait a minute, I may have stored trauma in my cells. So what are some of the signs? If you were looking at yourself or you’re looking at a patient or a coach is looking at a client, what are some of the signs that we would notice that we have some stored trauma in our body based on our discussion thus far?

Aimie Apigian 

This is how I started looking at my patients because what I was taught to do and what most people do is they get out the scorecard, right? Dr. Lorne, they get out the scorecard, okay, what have you experienced in your lifetime? Have you had a car accident? Have you had a bad thing happen to you that has been sexually abused? They get out the scorecard, the inventory, and it’s all focused on the past without any reference to did you have someone to support you at that time? Because we don’t actually know if those things were a trauma for you. Oh, well we’ve brought labels. We said big T traumas and little t traumas, but we don’t know because we weren’t there at that time. And so how do we know if a person’s actually stored trauma? We look at their life today, we don’t look at an inventory of the past.

Lorne Brown 

Is that because it’s not the event, but it’s how you perceive the event that’s also going to determine how it’s going to affect your body. And then we look at what’s going on currently. I just wanted you to highlight, I think that’s what you’re sharing like big T, little T, you don’t know if an event happened and they had somebody to help them process and find resolution through that trauma experience and event. So it’s not in their tissues. So I think I’m hearing you can’t just look at the history of the event because the individual may have experienced it, perceived it differently where it didn’t get stored. Am I understanding that correctly?

Aimie Apigian 

Yes, because we’ve seen people, I’m sure you know people and they experience the same event. They’re in the same car accident, they’re in the same military excursion, one comes back with PTSD and the other person is fine. They were in the same place at the same time. So it’s not the event, it’s our internal physiological response. Did our body have a trauma response or to your point about the balance, did it have a stress response but be able to move through that and complete that and return to a sense of safety at that time?

Lorne Brown 

So from your perspective, from your, well, just because of who you are, all the things and have done people’s life experiences determine how their nervous system’s going to work. So I always say you end up with a lens. We all have a lens through. My training in clinical hypnosis. It’s our subconscious program and we see the world and perceive it through our lens. Everybody has different lenses. There’s a school of thought that your social economic status, whether your gender, your religion, all that will impact you up to around age 11 or 12 as your nervous system is being developed. What about intergenerational? I subscribe to that, to the research, but do you think it can even be passed? So somebody could, that’s why two siblings, same family, and they could be in the same situation and have a very different response to it. And I’m always wondering if that’s because I don’t think we come in with a clean slate. I think we come in with other stuff. So I’m curious about your thoughts on that, Dr. Aimie, about intergenerational.

Aimie Apigian 

There are so many layers of generational trauma and in fact we have the science that shows that it actually does get passed on in your DNA. If you want to look at the research by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, she’s at Holocaust survivors and their generations and saw that in their DNA, their DNA is still different from what their ancestors went through. Now, part of what I share in my book is how oxidative stress is at the core of this chronicity of trauma. And that is then what damages our DNA changes it on an epigenetic layer and then that’s what gets passed on in generations as well. But as you say, there’s also these other energetic elements of generational trauma. There’s also somatic elements that get passed on. I know people who experience sensations of drowning. They don’t know why they have this sensation of drowning that happens every once in a while and then they find out that one of their ancestors had a drowning. And so there’s this somatic element, there’s this energetic element. I don’t know if we have the science to really understand the mechanism of that, but it’s clear that it happens and that it is passed on as well as the actual biology of generational trauma.

Lorne Brown 

Alright, so we’re at the place now where we are all adults and we have a lens and we’re experienced in the world based on our nervous system. There’s no blame, no victim, you didn’t choose it. It’s just what you have. However, why be a victim when you have Dr. Aimie in her book where she’ll share how you can let this trauma find its full resolution so you can release it right and heal from it. I had interrupted you when you were talking about how they were looking at the past allopath like what happened to you but not looking at what’s happening now to you. And the subconscious only knows it now. That’s why. What’s the author? The body holds the score.

Aimie Apigian 

Yeah. Dr. Bessel.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. So what would we be noticing to let us know that our body may want some attention.

Aimie Apigian 

Trauma impacts us on three levels. So we’ll notice this in our thoughts. The body will notice this in our physical responses to things and in our biology. So how would a person know by their thoughts? I ask people, what is the very first thought that you have when you wake up in the morning? The more trauma that your body is holding, the more that your thoughts will be. Ones of trauma in the morning, meaning a thought of I don’t want to get up. Is it really morning? I don’t like my life. I know that I have to get up but I don’t want to get up. But that is waking up in this trauma state. And what I found myself doing is I was waking up in that state and then I was immediately finding ways to get myself up into the stress state where I wouldn’t have the energy to get up and go through my day.

And what I would do is I would lay in bed until the last moment possible and then I had to rush because oh my goodness, now I’m going to be late and what happens when I’m late? But just by procrastinating, then it had given me that adrenaline rush of Whoa, now I really need to hurry. There’s also caffeine. So that’s why I think caffeine is such a go-to for people. First thing in the morning when actually Dr. Lorne, what they should be drinking first thing in the morning is mineral water to replenish themselves from the night of dehydration. But they’re not reaching for that. They’re reaching for I need to feel better now. I need that energy now because I’m waking up and I’m already exhausted. I’m already overwhelmed by my day that hasn’t even started and I’ve got to do this thing called life one more day and I don’t really like my life.

I’ve created something that I don’t like, but I’ve got to push through. So those would be the thoughts. Again, what is challenging about our thoughts is that we can think about our thoughts. And so I’m trying to find that thought that you have before you can think about your thoughts and make a choice about, well, I want to have a different thought. I want to know your default thought as truly the window into your inner state at that time. What about somatically? Somatically refers to different things, what’s called, it can be associated with things. So our body, for example, I was in a bike accident one time and I went down, I broke my collarbone again, I had a concussion. So this was a big deal for me. And my body went into a trauma response by having a concussion. A concussion is a form of trauma response, just shutting things down because this is too much for us at the moment.

And I noticed that when I went to bike or drive past that section of the road, I would start to feel anxious. I would start to feel restless, I’d start to sweat a little bit and I realized, whoa, my body is still holding on from that experience. I need to do some work around it. But that’s somatic if it gets attached to something and our body responds in a physiological way whenever that thing then gets triggered. So we need to do this somatic work and this is the movement piece really in creating that difference in felt experience and sensations. And then there’s biology. So these are the ways in which I recognize if you have a chronic health condition because all of those are associated with a biology of trauma and whether it’s the chicken or the egg, at this point it doesn’t matter because you have a biology of trauma and that’s what we need to focus on then.

But to your point around the lens, we have what’s called the lens of the nervous system and neuroception or the perception of our nervous system. And I really want to highlight the importance of what you shared around our lens because the amount of adrenaline that we are going to create in a stress response is actually what determines whether that will become a trauma response or not. If we are making an amount of adrenaline that we ourselves can say, yeah, I can do this, I can keep up with this. I can create this amount of energy for you. I got it, then we are going to stay in a stress response and be able to complete it. If the amount of adrenaline that our body is secreting at that moment is more than what our cells at mitochondria can respond to in their energy production, that’s when they say, this is too much for me.

You’re asking too much for me. I can’t do that level. And so my survival strategy is going to shut down. That’s when we have both the cell danger response at the cellular level and emotionally we feel that shut down as well. Now we’re going into that place to do whatever you want. I don’t care anymore because I don’t have the energy to care anymore. But that adrenaline then, if adrenaline is really at the center for what determines whether we’ll be able to hang with stress or go into a trauma response, what determines the amount of adrenaline that’s made? It’s our perception of the size of the danger. And this is where in chapter 11 of my book I go into how our early life and attachment forms our lens and when I still have attachment wounds that I have not yet healed. Small things look like big things, a look from someone that I love or silence from someone that I really respect. What should be small things, if I have attachment wounds, those things become big things. They don’t like me. I am unlovable. That means no one will ever love me and that means I’ll die homeless alone on the streets because no one will ever love me. So all of a sudden I’ve taken one moment where Dr. Lorne, you gave me a look and I created a story from that look

Lorne Brown 

We got to let people know, it’s unconscious. People are like, what? It’s totally unconscious. It’s happening on that neural freeway. It’s fast. It is exactly. It is speedy. And it’s your unconscious habitual reaction to that response because of the lens you have and in your book you can change the lens so you don’t have that response.

Aimie Apigian 

And that is the work right there, how to change the lens. And that’s the path that I provide. It will require the integration of mind work, body work and biology work to change the lens that we have.

Lorne Brown (

Don’t let me forget, please, because I’m going to want to ask you about some of the things you do like supplements, some of the techniques you have. But I wanted to still go in because a lot of our audience are wanting to grow their families. So fertility in their thirties or forties and a lot, I’ve been in practice at this time of our recording over 25 years. A lot of the women I’ve seen are perimenopause, menopause. So I have a thought I want to ask you. I don’t know if you ever thought of this, but this is what came up while you were chatting. So I’m going to talk about perimenopause. The fluctuating hormones are a form of change, stress to the body and the decline in progesterone. And I’ve often said, I’ve written about the difference between people having perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms and not, not every woman has symptoms.

It’s not the fluctuating hormones because everybody wants to just throw estrogen at it or estrogen progesterone. I said if it was actually the hormone as the problem, then every single woman who lives to 60 would experience these symptoms, but they don’t. The ones that experience it is because they don’t have the resilience or the ability to adapt to change. And this change is unconscious. It’s happening in the body. They’re not aware of it. But now they have brain fog, now they have anxiety, now they’re getting allergy reactions to things they’ve never had before. And they’re told it’s because of the estrogen fluctuating, which is a partial truth to it. It’s the trigger. But they’ve come into their forties or their fertility patients come into this time or already, I believe with stuff happening on a cellular level. You talked about oxidative stress. In your book, you talk about mitochondria, we haven’t mentioned that today, but in fertility from the female line, the mitochondria is going to determine the embryo quality.

It comes from the female, whether there’s fertilization. Then the embryo dividing that energy comes from the mitochondria in the tube or in the IVF center. And then implantation takes energy. So I’m seeing how your biology of trauma and these practices and the diet and supplements you talk about because it’s anti-inflammatory diet and working with neuroinflammation, if you’re doing all this stuff, the cells, because you’re made up pet trillions of cells, an egg is a cell that this in theory would optimize your fertility or in theory give you a smoother transition in the perimenopause menopause stage. So I consider you look at the body, the signs when I see women going through very severe menopausal symptoms, by the way in our clinic, we will still use hormonal treatment. I don’t believe people should suffer if it can help, but that’s the bandaid I want to get to the cause. I’m often wondering because of how I look at the body now is what’s depleted in Chinese medicine. We have systems that show this, but I always think from my hypnosis background and my conscious work background is I wonder what they came in with or what has happened that they don’t have the resilience or the ability to adapt to what’s happening with changing hormones. How does that resonate with you and your book and your work? From what I just shared

Aimie Apigian 

You have perfectly summarized my work and my book

Lorne Brown 

Okay

Aimie Apigian 

This idea that resilience is adaptability, resilience is not staying small to stay safe. And that’s what I see a lot of people do is that they have been spending so much time living in fear that once they learn how to create a sense of safety, they’re like, I never want to leave this. And now they’re staying small in order to stay feeling safe. But that’s not resilience. Resilience is the adaptability that you’re referring to. And this idea that how do we navigate change and change whether it’s good, bad, why do we need to label it? Change is change. Change is part of life, which is why then we can look at one’s ability to change as a measure of how much stored trauma they have. When I look back at my childhood, there was one thing that particularly embarrassed me and that was I got so emotional when it came time to say goodbye, and whether this was at the end of a school year or someone moving away or at a funeral, it didn’t matter, any type of change, closure of some sort.

And I was falling apart and I was so sensitive and people around me were wondering, why are you crying? And I didn’t know why I was crying. I’m a child. I don’t know these things. And it became something where it was so embarrassing for me because of what people would say and how they would react to my emotions. So it became something that I hid and I escaped from. And I would do anything to not be actually present for that last final moment because I didn’t know if I could hold it together. And if I did, then I would hold it together until I was alone and then I would let myself fall apart. And it usually involved emotional eating and all kinds of stuff at that point. And that never changed over the years until I started doing this kind of work, the same work that I lay out in my book.

And what happened is that there was a moment during COVID when I had a dear friend and he became sick after going to a nursing home and he was going to pass away and I did not want him to have to pass away alone. And that’s exactly what was going to happen given that time and that fear around COVID at that time. So I went and picked him up, brought him to my home so that he would not pass away alone. He still lived for two weeks and we had a wonderful time for those two weeks. But then the time came when he was actively passing away and it was hours that it was going to happen. And I’m having the hard conversation with him of who do you want to call? What do you need to finish up and close up in your life to feel complete and feel ready to pass on with peace?

And we made that phone call and you could tell the peace that he had after that phone call. And it was shortly after that that he lost consciousness. And I’m watching myself be able to do something that I’ve never done before. I’m watching myself actually be able to be fully emotionally present for a very hard goodbye and closure and to see how much I had changed in an area of my life that I had never been able to change. That was then what inspired me to start teaching this to other people. If I could change that, anybody can change anything. That’s how deep that pattern went for me. So in your conversation then around adaptability and resilience, that was it. I was not able to adapt to change, to closure, to goodbyes, to loss. And it completely overwhelmed me at that time until I did this work.

And then that’s what changed for me is my adaptability. So when we look at how that will change people’s life, how will that change people’s health? It changes everything because how you adapt to change is how you navigate. Life is changing. That’s the one thing that we can guarantee in life. And so the more that we have built the practice, built the skills, built that flexibility into our nervous system, that is true resilience. And many people don’t do that. Many people are not building those skills of flexibility before the hard time comes. And then when that stress comes, whatever it is for them, maybe it’s grief and loss, maybe it’s something different for them, but they’re going to find themselves resorting back to their default way of responding to change all that their nervous system knows how to do. Until we change the lens and change our perception and change its neural pathways to be able to change differently.

Lorne Brown 

And currently most people, myself included, we tend not to do things prophylactically, preventatively, prepare. We’re invincible. It’ll never be me. But pain moves people. So in your practice, in my practice, I see people with insomnia, infertility, perimenopause, chronic fatigue, the brain fog, people just label now. They go, I have anxiety. And they know the gut, they feel it and they just like, I can’t get out, I can’t get peaceful, not long enough. And they’re just out of their skin. I had an observation. Chinese medicine is the same, and I had an observation. Chinese medicine says before age 35, you cheat disease. And after age 35 disease cheats you. What I would experience in my practice, it was more around age 40 that people would wake up calls and they just, the acupuncture, the drugs, the herbs, whatever they were doing would give them temporary relief and then a new symptom would show up and then they would go after that symptom and then a new symptom. And after doing this kind of work, your kind of biology or trauma style of work, it became apparent to me that everybody has their childhood experiences that come into it. And the nervous system wants to keep you safe. So it packs it away. And then somewhere around 40 it says, you’re old enough to deal with your shit now. And you cannot escape it.

Aimie Apigian 

It should be old enough because we’re bringing it up

Lorne Brown 

Well, it’s coming up anyhow, right? So people go, why is it now? And that’s the story I tell them. I go, your inner child is basically saying it takes a lot of resources to deny, suppress, push this away or even project. It takes a lot of energy to have this stuck energy in there. And at some point the body wants to survive and all of its resources are trying to contain this vibration we call stuck trauma. And it’s eventually saying, I got to get this out. And so that’s what’s happening. The body’s deal with your shit

Aimie Apigian 

And then that happens around these changes in the hormones

Lorne Brown 

Yes, all the time where you’re like, now life’s great and then all of a sudden you have kids or you’re trying to have kids or you’re going into menopause and you don’t have the adaptability and resilience. So one day I just understood something of all the people I’ve been studying the work or training in, I’m a kinesthetic learner, so I tend to go and learn things rather than just read about it, read, then go and train in it. It became apparent to me that they were all doing similar things. And every time I’ve had a guess so far, I’ve not had a guess yet that I can overlay this process, which is why I think, yeah, that will work. I can see it. So I want to hear a little bit about your clinical integration where you talk about recognized reasons and repair. It sounds very similar to what I’m going to share with you. What made me really excited when I saw this in your book again, I’m like, okay, I got to dive into the book. I know you have training. I’m going to do some training because I just love to keep learning and adding and recognizing, reasons, and repair sounds very familiar to me already, but I only know the big titles. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Aimie Apigian 

Absolutely. And what I’ve loved about your work in this conversation is that this is so aligned and I think it’s so aligned because we’re really talking about the principles of the body and the principles of the body, whether they apply to health, whether they apply to trauma. These are the principles of the body, and that’s exciting to be able to see how they all come together. This framework that you’re referring to, the framework for me was my map out, and it allowed me to start to prioritize where do I even start with myself because there’s a long list of things that I need to do. Where do I even start? It felt overwhelming. And so looking at talking about a lens, this framework has the lens of the biology of trauma and what is causing the biggest source of dysregulation right now. What is causing the biggest source of dysregulation, ongoing dysregulation to my nervous system where I want to put my attention.

There are lots of things that need to be done and we will get to those. But what’s the biggest source of ongoing dysregulation right now? This is where I shared with you that I discovered that so often it becomes our own biology. Okay, well what does that mean? Well, let’s look at the underlying reasons. So once we’ve recognized that we have stored trauma, we have these patterns, now let’s look at what are the underlying reasons for why our body has not been able to heal itself since that is what it is designed to be able to do. What’s blocking that healing is that I’m still recognizing these patterns. And then we look at all of the different reasons that can be contributing to ongoing dysregulation. And so this is then the framework for walking through. How do I even prioritize what I start with? Do I start with hormones? Do I start with mitochondria? Do I start with brain inflammation? Where do I start? It’s being able to recognize what’s the biggest source of ongoing dysregulation of my nervous system right now.

Lorne Brown 

I love it. And that’s how you start to repair. That’s the repair part.

Aimie Apigian 

That is the repair part. Because once I know the underlying reasons, then I know which repair tools to use for those reasons. And so if I’m focusing on, well, it looks like my brain inflammation is the biggest source of dysregulation at the moment, well then I’m going to go look for the repair tool for that brain inflammation. If my mitochondria is the biggest reason, I’m going to reach for the repair tool for the mitochondria. Now what you teach as well is it all needs to be supported. So it’s not like a person can go through life and say, I’m only going to support my mitochondria, but that brain I’ll let it do itself. No, it all needs to be supported. It’s just if it’s all out of balance, where do we start so that we can start with something and not get overwhelmed because it feels like so much.

Lorne Brown

Yeah, if I can unpack that with you, you’re doing everything. It’s just where are you going to prioritize or put a lot more of the energy? You’re not going to ignore anything. So let’s say again, you realize that there’s a lot of anxiety, stress, overwhelmed, and you see a lot of neuroinflammation stuff. The brain’s inflamed, but they’re overwhelmed. They’re not resourced. In my practice, as much as I know how much an anti-inflammatory diet will be beneficial from a Chinese medicine perspective, this organ system that’s out. I know by putting restrictions on them and giving them a really complicated diet, I’m going to aggravate their symptoms. They don’t even have the resources to buy groceries and to cook. So I may focus a lot on supplements on the gut and the brain to get that going. And with a little dietary, I’m going to say Coca-Cola, the chips, we got to change a little few things that are inflammatory. But is that how I’m understanding you are going to read the room, see what’s going on with the patient. You got MINDBODY stuff, somatic work you can use, you’ve got supplements. There’s things that you can use, dietary approaches, and you’re going to see which system’s out of balance. And then also based on what’s out of balance, what tool do you use based on what this person can receive right now and be supportive?

Aimie Apigian 

Yes. And the cool thing is what you’ve experienced is that when you apply those very deliberate repair tools, because you’ve done the evaluation of like, this is what they could be successful with right now, it opens up more energy for them. And then we have more energy to say, okay, now let’s do this repair tool, and that opens up more energy that we can then invest in another place. So it’s this unfolding that allows us to start and build momentum because each repair tool then opens up more energy that we can reapply to the process.

Lorne Brown 

So what are some of your tools that you use in your practice? I know you’ll do supplements like mitochondria support, you do dietary therapy. What are some of the other things, interventions that you use from your training and practice and what do you teach health professionals as well? What kind of tools are available?

Aimie Apigian 

So I do inner child work

Lorne Brown 

Love inner child work

Aimie Apigian 

Different parts of ourselves. And what surprised me most, again, coming from my background as an allopathic physician skeptical of all of this woowoo stuff, what I was most surprised at is the somatic practices that allowed them to create inner safety for themselves and it shifted their biology faster than any supplement or medication would. I was shocked because I’m a physician, that’s my job to focus on the actual medications and supplements. And so that when I saw that it prioritized the somatic work for me so that if I am working with someone and they are really deep into this, they really don’t have much capacity, then I’m starting them on one or two supplements. But I’m starting them on the somatic work because I know the somatic work will give the fastest results in terms of their change in fatigue and depression and anxiety and their sleep issues faster than any supplement. And I’d probably have to give them multiple supplements to create all of those changes, whereas the somatic work will change all of those things with the same somatic exercises. So that’s been a big piece that again, I just say that because as a physician, it shocked me, it surprised me, and it’s very different from what people will get from their health providers today.

Lorne Brown

Your work is amazing. I wish I could write like you write and organize it like you organize and have your training. It’s not too often that, you know, I’m a trained Doctor in Chinese Medicine, clinical hypnosis and other modalities. It’s not too often that somebody can talk about the subconscious the way you do and the biology from the mental, emotional, physical, and from trauma, who is a double certified medical doctor. That’s not common. And we need this because when I say it, it sounds a little woo woo and maybe maybe not, but when you say it, there’s a credibility factor because you’re immersed in the allopathic system, and if you’re saying this, it has credibility. So that’s why I wanted you on the Conscious Fertility Podcast because there’s so much healing that can be done, and your book is so accessible and you’ve organized it so well. You got all these, you got three sections, all these chapters laying it out, so you’re explaining what’s happening, easy to understand what’s happening, the mental, the soma, the physical, your symptoms and the biology, what’s happening on a cellular level, all that science, you can’t really debate what you’re discussing there, right?

That science. And then you bring in all the tools, allopathic functional medicine, and you’re probably not even aware of it, but Chinese medicine and clinical hypnosis, when I was looking through this stuff, clinical hypnosis, talking to your inner child, that’s a form of hypnosis. Having that little discussion there and reprogramming, giving yourself that childhood that you never really got because your current self can’t tell the difference being your subconscious. And it starts to live as if you already had that childhood. It’s like you’re just, I’m old enough. Maybe you’re old enough, but remember CD players where if you had a CD and you burned a new song on it, it would play the new song. So let’s say you’ve been playing, I’m not pretty enough, I’m not good enough for 40 years. And then you go and burn a new song on it, even though for 40 years, three times a day you played the soul song. If you burn a new song the next time you put in the CD player, I am enough plays. And so to me, that’s what Inner Child work does, is you’re putting a new program, the song on it, and then you adult goes out to life and all of a sudden your lens has changed and you start to experience life and behave and take action differently because you’ve worked on your inner child. Has that been your experience as well?

Aimie Apigian 

You’re sounding like Bruce Lipton, his biology of belief.

Lorne Brown 

Biology of belief. Yes.

Aimie Apigian 

And that was a big influence for me on my healing journey. So yes, all of these elements that you mentioned are woven into my practice for what to do, what are the tools that we have to repair? And so you are correct that you’ll see elements of Chinese medicine. You’ll see elements of everything that I’ve dabbled into or studied deep into because we’re really all talking about the same thing. We’re really all talking about this nervous system, whether you call it the unconsciousness, the subconscious neuroception. These are the principles of how the human body goes through life even gets formed in life, and how we can actually change our programming, which is incredible to think about and brings me so much hope, not still for myself, for the rest of my life, but for every person, no matter how old they’ve been, no matter what they’ve been through. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re living, we can work with your nervous system to reprogram it.

Lorne Brown 

And like you said, truth is truth. It’s the terrain. Everything in common is the terrain. That’s us. And then there’s different maps, Chinese medicine, hypnosis, these are just maps. How can different maps work is because it’s the terrain that’s the same. And so the book is called The Biology of Trauma, how the Body Experiences and Holds Fear, Pain and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It. One of the links that you can look at is biology of trauma.com/book. We’re going to put this in the show notes. Dr. Aimie has podcasts, has YouTube channels, and also has training, so we’re going to put all that stuff in there. She’s got an Instagram channel, Dr. Aimie, she’s on LinkedIn, YouTube, I’m looking at your website podcast. She’s got a lot of outreach, which I thank you for to really get this message across. I’m glad I had the opportunity to talk to you. Hopefully we get to have more conversations, just excellent. I collect these behind me. I have a whole bookshelf in front of me that I collect books signed by people I’ve met or have interviewed, so now I have to find you one day. I like to get books signed. I want that Chi on my book. I like to listen to books, and I only buy the books so I can get them signed, so I always get two copies.

Aimie Apigian 

Well, it sounds like I’m making a trip up to Vancouver then

Lorne Brown 

coming up to Vancouver. Any closing remarks that you would like to share with our audience before we close up for today?

Aimie Apigian 

I really just want to express gratitude for the work that you do and how you’ve brought things together to really help people. Again, we’re working on the same thing. We’re working on the same neuro programming, and so to be able to see you and the work that you’re doing and have you as a colleague in the space is really because otherwise it can feel very lonely because I am different from most other allopathic physicians. And so it’s so nice to have people like you that are rallying around this and doing the work already and seeing such great results with people.

Lorne Brown 

Well, like I had to heal myself because I wasn’t doing so well on the inside. Well, on the outside, not on the inside. And there’s lots of people like you on our podcast, so check out our guests. You can make lots of friends with the MDs on there. Dr. Aimie., one more time. Check out her website, biologyoftrauma.com/book just to get a look at Dr. Aimie’s book and biologyoftrauma.com is the website. Check out the show notes. I’ve been enjoying your podcast. I’m listening to them. It’s wonderful. And again, thank you for making time to have our discussion, and thank you for writing this book. Writing books is difficult, so well done. Thank you.

Aimie Apigian 

Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. That’s Acubalance.ca

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_official. That’s Instagram, Lorne_Brown_official, or you can visit my websites Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.