The Biology of Trauma® With Dr. Aimie

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian explains what growing up in an emotionally unsafe or narcissistic household actually does to the developing nervous system — why hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and the inability to fully rest are biological adaptations rather than personality traits, why genuine safety can feel more threatening than the chaos the body learned to navigate, and what it takes to teach a body that has never fully rested that it is now allowed to.

This is the biology behind something many people have spent years trying to understand about themselves. Not what happened to them. What happened inside them — and what it will take to change it.

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

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

In this solo episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian walks through the biology of how trauma gets stored in the nervous system, why the event matters far less than what the body did with it, and what the body actually needs to begin to update. She covers the five physiological steps into a trauma response — from startle through shutdown — the four patterns stored trauma produces in daily life, what true resilience looks like in biological terms rather than the push-through performance most people were praised for as children, and the practical things that shift the biology: adrenaline discharge, magnesium, zinc, sleep, movement, and specific supplements that support what the nervous system is trying to do. In her study of somatic therapy participants, the group doing somatic exercises alone — before any supplementation — reduced depression by 30%.

She also traces the origin of the ACE study — which began in Dr. Vincent Felitti's obesity clinic in San Diego when patients who were losing weight started dropping out, and shared that the overeating was not the problem. It was the solution. And what it was a solution to was the trauma the body had been holding long before the weight arrived.

This episode is for anyone who has been managing symptoms for years and is ready to understand what the body has actually been holding — and what it needs.

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

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

In this episode, Dr. Aimie talks with Dr. Betty Murray, hormone metabolism expert and functional medicine PhD, to connect two things medicine has kept separate for too long: stored trauma and hormonal health. Estrogen has receptors on every cell in the body except two. When it declines, every cell registers it — and for women carrying decades of chronic stress and stored trauma, that decline removes part of the biological buffer that was holding everything together.

Dr. Aimie brings the trauma biology (as referenced in the ACE research, the PTSD and estrogen study) and the Biology of Trauma® framework that explains why menopause is the moment when what the body has been holding finally surfaces. Dr. Murray's hormone science confirms what that framework predicts: how a trauma-informed approach can actually help, why bioidentical hormones and the right labs matter, what the 10-million-woman study actually found, and how the Women's Health Initiative misrepresentation changed women's care for decades.

This episode is for every woman who has been handed a prescription instead of a conversation about her hormones.

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

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

Attachment trauma persists in the body as implicit survival programming — not as memory, but as an operating assumption the nervous system keeps running long after the original environment has changed. In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian traces the attachment and trust cycle — the precise biological sequence in the first year of life that either builds or disrupts the nervous system's capacity for safety and connection. When that cycle breaks down, the body adapts. Those adaptations don't feel like adaptations. They feel like identity.

Using the Biology of Trauma® framework, Dr. Aimie unpacks why attachment trauma patterns feel like personality rather than learned survival strategies, how children lose themselves to preserve the bond — the attachment vs. authenticity tension — and what that costs the body decades later. She also addresses why adrenaline, not cortisol, is the real driver of the stress response, and what the biological link between early attachment trauma and adult chronic illness actually looks like in the nervous system.

This episode is for anyone whose body has been holding patterns that predate any story they can tell about themselves.

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

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

In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian — double board-certified physician and author of The Biology of Trauma®  — explains why chronic pain and chronic trauma follow the same biological pattern, and exactly how the body gets stuck in cycles that feel impossible to interrupt.

Once the nervous system crosses the critical line of overwhelm, three survival strategies take over: dissociation, immobilization, and energy conservation. Healing goes offline. That's not a failure of your approach. That's a shift in operating mode — one where the body only has enough energy to survive.

What determines whether a flare happens is neuroception — the nervous system's subconscious safety scan, running below conscious awareness at all times. When it reads threat, the physiology shifts. That shift is where chronic pain lives.

What moves this pattern is building capacity through five specific nervous system skills — so the body spends more time below the line, where healing is actually possible.

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

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

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

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

That's what this episode is about.

Gregg Ward accidentally took someone's life at 18. For 46 years, it lived in his body — flushed skin, tense shoulders, a loop that no amount of success, service, or self-improvement could stop. In this conversation with Dr. Aimie, he shares what moral injury actually is, why the body keeps reliving a story with no ending, and how movement became his nervous system's path through what therapy alone couldn't reach.

This is not a story about grief resolved. It's a story about grief metabolized. And the moment the burden finally lifted — not when the pain disappeared, but when the purpose stopped being about him.

If something in you has never fully quieted — no matter how much work you've done — this conversation was made for you.

Gregg Ward is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Respectful Leadership. He is a global speaker, thought leader, and bestselling author. Gregg’s TEDx San Diego talk has been selected for TED Global publication.

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

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

In this episode, Dr. Aimie talks with registered dietitian and author Ashley Koff to unpack the hidden world of weight health hormones: GLP-1, leptin, ghrelin, and more — and why optimizing them matters for everybody, not just people trying to lose weight. What you'll hear will change how you see your body — not as something failing you, but as a sophisticated ecosystem sending you signals worth decoding.

Ashley reveals why 93% of Americans are metabolically dysregulated, how trauma and chronic stress directly suppress the hormones that regulate metabolism and body composition, and why "weight loss" as a goal is actually working against your biology. Whether you're curious about GLP-1 medications, perimenopause weight changes, or just why the scale never seems to match your effort — this conversation will shift everything.

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

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

This episode reveals how children in unpredictable families redirect their brain’s resources from play to survival, how addiction’s rhythms become the child’s operating manual, and why chronic survival physiology leads to digestive dysfunction in midlife. Whether addiction was part of your family or not, these dynamics may be running your body today.

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

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

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