The Biology of Trauma® With Dr. Aimie

Cravings point to a need underneath. This episode covers the three unmet needs behind food. It looks at the childhood roots of reaching for it. And it helps you tell stress from something deeper. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/what-your-food-cravings-mean-nervous-system In This Episode You'll Learn: 01:11 — The difference between hunger and an unmet need 05:27 — When a cr...

An early read on your nervous system explains why reflux holds on. This episode covers reflux hypersensitivity, lost hunger and fullness cues, and the somatic tools that calm the gut, including diaphragmatic breathing after meals. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/nervoussystemandacidreflux-thegut-brainconnection In This Episode You'll Learn: 01:10  — Why Molly Pelletier cho...

This is where adoption, attachment, and addiction meet. An early attachment rupture leaves the nervous system braced and hypervigilant. A substance can feel like the first relief from that noise. Drawing on her own recovery, Lisa Coppola names the four hidden losses adoptees carry. She shares why recovery asks for more than abstinence. It asks for safe connection. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.b...

Vision is one of the primary signals your nervous system reads for safety or danger. Under stress, peripheral vision collapses and the body locks into central focus. Dr. Bryce Appelbaum walks through three eye exercises that begin retraining the eye-brain connection and the felt sense of safety. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/vagus-nerve-and-vision-how-your-eyes-signal-sa...

Attachment is a survival imprint that lives in the body, encoded before you had language. In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian walks through the 6 hidden attachment pains, the adult symptoms each one creates, and why inner work alone cannot reach where the pattern lives. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/episode-177-6-attachment-wounds-chronic-symptoms In This Episode You'll L...

Information alone does not resolve nervous system dysregulation. The body comes out of stored trauma in a precise three-step sequence: Safety, Support, Expansion. Skipping the order keeps the system stuck. Three Biology of Trauma® professionals describe the same shifts emerging in the same order, across three different conditions. ➡️ Full show notes: https://www.biologyoftrauma.com/post/nervous-sy...

Metabolic syndrome, long-haul syndromes, hypersensitivity, and autoimmunity are four ways the immune system adapts to a nervous system living in fear. Each one is the immune system adapting to a fear-driven nervous system. These are adaptations. The body is doing what bodies do. In this solo episode, Dr. Aimie walks through all four immune adaptive patterns. The fear pattern behind each one. What...

Grieving without getting stuck is possible. But most people don't know what that actually looks like from the inside. In this personal episode, Dr. Aimie shares seven principles she is living right now — attachment grief, heart shock, body holding, and toxic positivity. Not the theory of grief. The actual practice from inside it. If you have ever wondered how to grieve without shutting down — or w...

Food cravings are not a willpower problem. They are messages from a nervous system trying to survive. In this episode, Dr. Aimie Apigian maps the cortisol, blood sugar, and inflammation patterns behind cravings, why menopause makes them louder, and how stored trauma in the body keeps the loop running. ➡️ Full show notes: EP 173: What Sugar, Bread, and Salt Reveal About Your Nervous System in Menop...

Mother hunger is what the body carries when it missed one of three essential elements of maternal care: nurture, protection, or guidance. On this Mother's Day Bonus Episode, Dr. Aimie sits down with Kelly McDaniel — author of Mother Hunger — to map the biology underneath. They walk through how unmet nurture shapes adult eating patterns, how unmet protection leaves a nervous system that never learn...

 ➡️ Get the full show notes and episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - The 3 Hidden Costs of Being the Strong One - Burnout's Real Biology You've been the strong one. The one who keeps everything running. The one others lean on when things fall apart. Your body has been keeping score. And the bill has three items. There is a specific biology behind the pattern of holding everything toge...

➡️ 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....

➡️ 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 ha...

➡️ 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 abl...

➡️ 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 pred...

➡️ 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 sing...

➡️ 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....

➡️ 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 yourse...

➡️ 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 Ko...

➡️ 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 storie...

➡️ 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 dysr...

Grief, regret, loneliness, inflammation, pain. There are deeper layers than we are even aware of. Dana was a family physician who had managed gut issues for years. Constipation. Bloating. Acid reflux. She had every tool available to her. She rotated medications, over-the-counter laxatives, and antacids. She pushed through. Then one brave question changed everything. I asked her: what happened that...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast -  Episode 161: Dopamine and Depression: The Metabolic Link You Need to Know Dopamine doesn't just create pleasure. It signals unexpected experiences and primes the brain to learn. New research reveals that depression, anxiety, and ADHD have different metabolic phenotypes. Understanding your unique metabolic footprint explains why sta...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 160: How Creativity Rewires Your Nervous System with Adam Roa What if the key to healing isn't more therapy—but creativity? Adam Roa's poem "You Are Who You've Been Looking For" reached over 250 million people. But before that poem existed, Adam spent 25 years emotionally shut down. He didn't remember his childhood sexual ab...

➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 159: Why Trauma Blocks Your Stem Cell Repair System What if we knew how to repair cellular damage from stress and trauma? Stem cells are your body's repair system—replacing 50-70 billion cells every day. But chronic inflammation from trauma creates what Dr. Dan Pardi calls a "noisy neighborhood" where repair signals can't ge...