Yeah. You know, as I because I sat with that, and I and I realized the impact that this will have on parents to be able to see truly the definition of trauma and be able to now recognize when their children are going into this response in this state. And I sat with it trying to figure out how do I how do I not depress parents, and how do I still give them that, no. Like, here's what you can do about it. And the way that I wanted to present it to them was very much as, and this is what I go into in chapter eleven, the the filter that we all have and that because of our filter, each one of us is doing the best that we can with what we have. Each one of us. And so as we look back at what we've done in our past, and I can look back in my past and see a lot of things that I did wrong with my son. So many things that I did wrong, just not understanding. And rather than beat myself up, I can look back and have compassion on myself and him. I can be like, oh, poor kid. And I can have compassion on myself because I can see how I was doing my best at that time given the support that I had, the information that I had, the financial resources that I had. And so every moment, we have this background calculation that's happening. Again, in my book, chapter eleven, we call it neuroception, this idea that our nervous system is constantly calculating how should I be in this moment that will best help me in my survival. And when times are good and we feel in a place of abundance, then we're coming from a place of security, and we will always be acting in our best self. We will be in our best health. We will be our best, parent for ourselves, reparenting ourselves and for our children. So that's the state that we can always expect that outcome. And it's when we are stressed or we are overwhelmed. Both of those are survival responses. And that is when we will be making decisions that are coming from a place of scarcity, coming from a place of desperation, coming from a place of, I don't know if I'm going to be okay. I don't know if my family's going to be okay. And the decisions that we make from that place are always different than the decisions that we make when we're coming from a place of abundance. It's not bad. It's not good. It just is what it is. But being able to look back and say, I was doing the best that I could at that time with what I had, and now I can learn to do better. I can learn to come from a place of security. I can learn to come from a place where I'm feeling calm, and I've resourced myself so that I'm not making decisions or parenting from that place of fear and scarcity and desperation.

Yeah. That gets into some of the things you lay out in the book about how we can, alleviate these symptoms or address this, and I wanna do that. But I wanna come back to a couple of things that you've touched on. You talk about the difference between stress that helps us grow and trauma that breaks us. I'd really love to dig into that before we sort of get into the what to do about all this.

Stress can grow us. Trauma is what breaks us. So I see that you've got some guitars behind you. Do you play?

Yes.

I love that. So every every tissue has its breaking point. Every string has its breaking point. And when you play those strings, you're stressing them because you are moving them in such a way that they're that they're stretching, and that's how they make noise, and that's how they make a song, and that's how they play a melody, and it's beautiful. But if you pull that string past its point, well, then it will break. And when it breaks, it's not going to play any song for you. It's not gonna play any note for you. It's not gonna be able to play any melody for you. So that's the same thing with us. When we have things that stretch us, that challenge us, but we stay within what I call our window of capacity. So even though it's hard, I can be present in it. I can stay with it. I can continue to respond to it and think of what do I need to do now? What should I do now? But it's when I cross a line that's the breaking point. I've crossed the line that now it's not going to do anything productive for me. It's now just going to sit there. It's now just going to hibernate and wait until that feels that the danger is over. So I had a patient, Kenneth, and he came in. He was a veteran. He came in. He had been lifting weights that morning as many veterans do in order to channel their trauma, their stored trauma. So he's in the gym. He's lifting weights. It was any other day. But today, he had a less capacity. Whatever the situation was, his capacity was less than usual, not realizing that and not being connected with his body to be able to feel that. He's trying to lift the same amount of weight to grow his muscles. Well, he comes into the emergency room and his bicep is in the middle of his arm. It's no longer attached to his shoulder like it should be. And so in looking at this, he had crossed that line. Rather than having those weights grow his muscles, it had broken his muscles that morning. That's the difference. And in within each of us, we also have our line between, yeah, this is hard, but I can respond to it, versus this feels so big that my body is just caving in, collapsing, and saying there's no way we can successfully overcome this. We shouldn't even try. There's a fascinating research

study

that was done back in the nineteen sixties with a psychologist. Seligman was his name. And he did a study on well, what they found was what they were learning about was learned helplessness. Learned helplessness. How interesting is it? So he takes a group of dogs and half of the group, he ties them to a wall with their harness so that they can't jump over a low barrier that he has. And on then one side where the dogs are, he puts a mat that creates electrical shocks. On the other side of this barrier is no mat. They are safe. They are not going to get shocked. So these dogs, half of them are now tied to the wall where this electrical mat is. He turns on the mat, so now all of the dogs are getting shocked. For the dogs who are not harnessed, this is a stress for them, but they're like, let me try to escape. What do I need to do? And they jump over the wall and they get to the other side and they're like, danger's over. I can return to a sense of safety. However, the dogs who were tied up to the wall, they try to jump, but they can't, and they continue to get shocked. And now all of a sudden, this has become an inescapable life threat. They think they're going to die by being shocked. So this is inescapable. They can't they've tried and they can't, and it feels like a life threat. Those same dogs, he put he puts all of them together on the same in the same container. This time, he does not tie up any of them. They are all free. He turns on the electrical mat, and the shocks start happening. For those dogs who had been through this before and had been able to jump over the barrier, this was not even a stress for them because they'd seen this before. They know this. They know what happens. They know how to escape. It's more of, inconvenience. It's it's annoying, but it's not even a stress because they know what to do. They jump over the barrier, and they're fine. The dogs who had not been able to jump over before, did they even try? No. They had been programmed to believe. You could say that. You could also look at it at a muscle tissue level that had taken on this belief. It was holding this experience from the past that said, you can't. There's something wrong about you. There's something broken about you. You're defective. And those dogs laid on the mat and started whimpering, even though they were free to jump. So this is how trauma actually gets programmed and wired into us, even at that tissue level where we as people don't even try anymore to overcome a challenge because we've been in challenges before. We've been through hard things before, and we've come to believe that we can't do hard things or we can't feel big feelings. And maybe we experience a loss. Someone significant to us passes away or a pet passes away or we didn't accomplish something that we really had worked hard for. There's a grief associated with that. And we have come to believe and to have the experience in our past that those kinds of feelings are too big for us to feel. We shouldn't even try. And so we end up just shutting down in defeat and going into depression rather than being able to sit with our grief, feel it, and move through it, and then move through the other side into joy and renewed purpose and other relationships and connection. But when we have these programmed beliefs that have become part of our tissues and part of our body, we continue to believe that there's something wrong with us, something wrong with me. And I shouldn't even try because I'm I know that I'm going to fail, so why even try? I don't know. Does this make any sense?

Oh, yes. And, I mean, I feel it all the time. I talk to people all the time. I I haven't heard it framed that way, but, certainly, I think we can all relate to looking at other people and the success that they've achieved and be like, yeah. I I just couldn't do that. And I've never thought of it in terms of shutting down, but, certainly, there have been times, I think, in all of our lives where we, yeah, we didn't try something because we thought for sure that we would fail. That kind of success is only meant for other people. And I you know, and it's overwhelming. So that absolutely, doctor Amy, I love that. The other the thing that you talked about about the window, I'd love to understand that better. How do we know what our window is? Like, how do we know that I can work within this window? I wanna stay in this window. Maybe I wanna increase this window so that I don't get to that critical line of overwhelm. And how do I know once I've crossed it? Does that make sense?

Makes so much sense. And this is the big question. Right? Like, okay. If I no longer wanna go into overwhelm or this trauma state, then how do I know that I'm even approaching that that I can avoid it? This window of capacity, this window of capacity is going to include both our, what we would call, parasympathetic or rest and digest state where we are feeling perfectly calm and per feeling perfectly safe and secure, and this is when we are creative and connected. So it includes that because that's definitely within our window of capacity to manage those emotions and those responses, but it also includes this stress. And really, it depends on how much stress can you hold and still respond to in a healthy way. Once we get to a point where, okay, you can no longer hold that much, now we're gonna cross that line. So we're looking at, well, how how much stress can a person hold? It's not even just stress. We call it activation. So this idea that our nervous system gets activated, and it can be activated with a challenge, maybe we're running a marathon. This has nothing to do with danger, but it's still an activation of our nervous system and how much activation can it hold? How much joy can a person hold? It's been surprising for many people coming through my courses to realize that joy has not felt safe to feel because it then triggers all of this other stuff. It seems to poke into our grief and our sadness, and we don't want that. So we temper how much joy we allow ourselves to feel. So how much can we hold is our window of capacity. Now this is actually also happening at the physiological level. And in medicine, we have this term called homeostatic window, which is the window, the range in which my body, my nervous system, my autonomic nervous system can fine tune and make pivots in my blood chemistry. All of this is the window in which my body says, yep. I can keep things functioning for you. I gotcha. So that's what our window of tolerance is or our window of capacity is our ability to respond. I think of it as out surfing the waves on the ocean. And what's the size of the wave that you have the capacity for and not get tossed off your board? What is the size of the wave that will toss you over? What is the size of the wave that will crush you, that will overwhelm you? Well, if we were out on the ocean, out on our board, could we have a sense of, woah, that wave looks too big. I should wait that one out. That's not for me yet. You you have a sensation in your body that says, I'm approaching what feels like panic. I'm approaching what feels like terrifying. And our body will tell us that. The problem is is that most people are not connected to their body. They're not getting these messages from their body, which means that they're ignoring the messages. They're overriding the messages. They're trying to tell their body, I don't care how you feel. We're gonna do this because my mind wants to do this. And our body is saying, I'm telling you, we don't have the capacity for this. And what happens is that when we are then in any kind of a situation, whether it's emotional or whether it's physical, like we're out on the ocean waves, or whether it's biochemical and we're being exposed to toxins that are just too many and too much, Our body says, well, we've exceeded our capacity and now we need to have a different survival strategy. No longer is the survival strategy to, well, try to stay up on your board. No. That that's gonna just make it worse. We should just give up, lie down on our board or get into the ocean and give up, and then we'll, you know, try again later on. So this idea that if we were connected with our body, we would be able to recognize when something feels like a stress that, Yeah. I got this. Let me give it my best. I can do this. Versus, I don't think we can do this, and we should really be pulling back. And I'm not listening to my body though. And that's when we're getting into the overwhelm and this trauma state is because we're not listening to our body.

Yeah. Well, there's a couple things about that that really strike me, doctor Amy. One is that the problem for me is always that I don't know what a comfort what waves I can handle until I try one that I can't handle. So it's like you gotta cross that line and be like, whoop whoop. That's too much. Yeah. It's not like I get to live in this comfortable, window that you talk about. It's sort of like I'm always flirting with that line. So what are the signs when you talk about the signals that your body is sending you? Like, what should I what how do I listen to my body better to know when I'm approaching that line so I don't have to keep stepping over it to find out the hard way?

And I want to make sure that people know that it's not bad to go into a trauma response. It's it's one of the innate designs of our body. So it's not bad. What is damaging is when we then stay in that state and it becomes chronic. Like, we don't know how to resolve that experience. We don't know how to complete that experience, and so then it lingers. And now we're back to talking about how our body is holding on to things from even decades ago. That's what we want to also learn how to complete this response so it doesn't become just one more thing that my body is holding on to in a chronic state. So when we are flirting with that line, and believe me, so many of us do, and I think that most high performing people do. This this is where they are all the time because they like that edge. They like to be at their best, and their best is at that line. So we we know we know that line. We know what it feels like to cross that line often, but how do we know before we cross the line? How do we know before we cross that line? A lot of it is our sense of adrenaline. Now, again, for high performing people, this is where it gets tricky because they love adrenaline. They love the feeling of adrenaline. Adrenaline makes us superhuman, makes me super smart because it drives blood to my brain, so I'm more focused than what I usually am. I'm stronger because it's taking blood to my muscles, so I'm superhuman with adrenaline. Why wouldn't I want to feel this? So that's why we tend to flirt with this line because what makes the difference between what I can handle and what is going to overwhelm me is the amount of adrenaline. So get this. Inside of our body, we have our nervous system that is constantly calculating the perception that we have of the size of the demands and the danger that we are facing. Based on our perception of the size is the amount of adrenaline that will get released. So if it's a small problem, I receive an email and there's a problem, but it's relatively easy. I just need to make a few phone calls. I need to do this. I know what I need to do. Well, then just the amount of adrenaline is released for me to be able to do those things, but not have all of this excess adrenaline that's gonna cause you damage. But if I perceive a big danger, that's a lot of adrenaline that my body is going to release because my body is going to say, then you need to be this superhuman to overcome this size of danger. But when that adrenaline goes to our cells, our cells are looking at the size of the danger through the adrenaline that's now surrounding it, and it will say, look. I understand that this is what you want me to do. I can't do that for you. I can't do that level for you. You're asking me to make so much more energy, and you need it in the next five seconds. I I can't. And so it's really a cellular decision that makes us cross that line where our cells are saying, I can't make the amount of energy that you're asking me to make based on the amount of adrenaline that you have just released. And so in order to keep you alive, we have now exceeded our homeostatic capacity or my capacity to be able to regulate all of these blood chemistry levels and c o two and oxygen and all the things that our body does for us. I can't I can't regulate that with this amount of adrenaline. And so the best survival strategy is for me to just shut everything down. And it's literally like our body pulling on the emergency brake. It won't let us respond. It releases cytokines and chemokines in our brain that creates this immediate brain fog so that even if we wanted to think clearly, we can't. It creates a sense of heaviness in our muscles so that even if we wanted to outrun the tiger, we can't. And so our body is doing everything it can to immobilize us, which is why we call it the freeze response. This is where we see if if someone is in some type of real danger, maybe like a robbery, they end up just handing everything over that that they're asking for. They're they're no longer fighting them. They are doing exactly what they're asking the robbers are asking them to do, not because they actually want to, but because their body says it's no use to fight. It's more dangerous to fight in this situation, and we just need to go along. And in our, kind of the equivalent in the animal kingdom is play dead. Just play dead. So it really is all so much dependent on the amount of adrenaline that's released, which is fascinating that it comes down to adrenaline and our perception, not reality, our perception of the size of the danger that's happening right

now. Yeah. That's a lot so I there's a lot about that that I like. So I understand, I think, the window. I love that idea of flirting with that line and and recognizing some of the symptoms of stepping over it. So how do we stay in that pocket, or what are some of the things that we can do to either stay in that pocket, maybe grow that window? And then what do we do once we step over it and we find ourselves overwhelmed? We're shutting down. How do we manage all of this?

Yeah. Well, let's start there because actually when we come out of that shutdown, people pleasing, people finding state, we are gonna go back into stress. So let's talk about when we do find ourselves in that state of and I'll just call it heaviness now. When we find ourselves in that state of really low energy, there's three things that it needs to come out. It needs energy, it needs safety, and it needs time. So when I notice my body having gone into that place, I liken it to a turtle that's retreated back into its shell. There had been a danger, and the turtle had been trying to crawl away, but the danger was too much, and the turtle realized, no. I can't out crawl this danger. The best thing for me is just to retreat into my shell. So what does the turtle need in order to come out? Well, it needs to know that the danger is over. Right? It needs to know that there's true safety for it to even poke its head out. It also needs energy because it needs the energy to be able to do that. It takes energy to move. So it's going to pop its head out and start walking again. It needs the energy to do that. And when we go into this heavy state, that our metabolism, our energy does get affected. It gets slowed down, so we don't have the energy. And then we need time. And many people don't realize this. Our body is it goes on some kind of timer where once it crosses that line, it's like it's been stunned. And why is it stunned? It's stunned because I can't believe what just happened. I can't believe that I'm stuck. I can't believe that there's nothing else that I can do here. I can't believe this. So there's this element of being stunned, and that just takes time to come out of being stunned. So we don't give ourselves a true sense of safety. We don't allow ourselves the time to just rest or hibernate or be in this low energy state. It's it's uncomfortable for us. So we try to bring in stimulants. We try to drink more coffee. We try to eat more sugar, carbohydrates in order to have that fast energy. We do everything to not give ourselves, our body the time that it needs. And then this idea of energy. Many of us are now running on nutrient imbalances, deficiencies. We're not eating well, even when we're not in this state. So by the time we go into this state then, our body already has maybe a magnesium deficiency or a zinc deficiency. I mean, there's so many deficiencies that will impair our body's ability to bounce back faster and have the energy that it needs to come out of this state. So it's interesting then to look at those aspects of our biology and how they really do impact and interface with this emotional state. But when we do come out, what happens is that our body retraces the steps that it took to get in. And so many people think that when they come out of this heaviness and depression and low energy state that they're gonna be able to come back immediately right into parasympathetic, which is you're feeling calm and alive and connected. And that's not true. The body retraces its steps, so you're gonna come out into that anxiety that overwhelmed you and put you into the low heavy or the low energy state. So as we come back out, now we're in this state again. And if we don't know what to do, we're gonna cross the line again. That's what many people do. Then they just get into a loop, and they're always living in either stress or overwhelm. So when we are in that stress and we have not crossed that line yet, what do we need to do? And how do we grow that window of capacity so that we can hold more and not cross that line? This is the idea of support. And when we have support, we can go through very hard things and not cross the line. I think of people perhaps in the military, and they are in a war zone. And if they have someone next to them, if they have someone who has their back, if they have someone who's by their side, they can go through very hard experiences and it not be a trauma that breaks them and they come back with PTSD. It's the feeling all alone in something that makes it become overwhelming. And so how can I bring in support so that I can grow my window of capacity and not go into overwhelm? Well, I can become that for myself, so I can start to listen to my own body. So what I do is I start to create pauses throughout a stressful situation, be like just checking in. How is my body feeling with this? Is it feeling like it's still resourced? Is it feeling like it's going into overwhelm soon? So that I'm I'm in it with my body as opposed to feeling all alone in something. I'm also resourcing myself with looking at who can I bring in with me? Is there even if it's just a friend. Okay. Having a friend who knows what's happening still has me not feeling alone. And then we're expanding our window of capacity by intentionally bringing in this support. How am I feeding my body? Am I hydrating my body? Am I still getting the rest that I need so that I can maintain whatever stress I need to maintain and not cross into overwhelm? So it's all this idea of resourcing myself and supporting myself so that I have a larger window of capacity.

Yeah. So you talked about pauses. I really like that. In the book, you also talked about something, and, honestly, I had to look it up. What's a somatic self practice? What's an example of something that people could use? I felt bad. I felt like this is something I probably should know, what it was, but I had to look it up.

No. Most people don't, and that's why I'm bringing this in is because so many people don't know these resources that we have. So I'm gonna invite you to just bring your hands up to your shoulders as close as possible. We're gonna just do one right now, and you're gonna experience what it's like. Alright. Now I want you to imagine that there's a huge rock in front of you. In fact, go ahead and feel this huge rock. It's huge. You feel how thick it is too? Oh my goodness. Alright. Well, we're gonna need to push this rock away. So as you bring your hands back to your shoulders, we're going to push this rock away. I'm bracing my legs, my hips, and we can start pushing, but this rock is so heavy. It's so thick. We have to go very, very slow. And in fact, I have people go as slow as they can. Some people can't go slow because their muscles start to fatigue, and they wish that they'd been going to the gym and working out because their muscles are fatiguing. But we go as slow as we can, and we push this heavy rock away. And then when we get to full arm extension, just pause for a moment there. And when it feels right, you can let your arms rest. I just get a deep breath with that. What are you noticing?

Yeah. I would say maybe a calmness.

A calmness. Yeah. Where do you feel that calmness?

In my chest, in my arms, in my shoulders. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I'm noticing that your shoulders dropped a little bit. Alright. Did you notice that?

Yeah. I guess so. Mhmm.

Yeah. Oh, isn't this lovely? Isn't this this is a somatic self practice. And we know the anatomy. We know the physiology that even just pushing something away creates what feels like space, and space feels like a little bit of safety. So this is one example of a somatic self practice.

This is definitely a conversation, doctor Amy, that I'm gonna be reflecting on for a while. It's so so much richer than even I was expecting. There's a couple things that I love about it. One, I think I can look back on as early as early childhood, but just in my past with a different lens. I think I've got some new tools in my everyday life to recognize this window, the the stress, the adrenaline, the overwhelm. But I also think too I wonder and I'm hoping that it better arms me for things that are coming. And I love that past, present, future kind of lens. And I'm starting to realize why this is number seven on the best seller list because I have a feeling this is resonating with people far beyond kind of the audience that you originally wrote it for.

Yeah. I really wrote it so that people could have a manual for their body, for their nervous system, and to be able to understand it so they can work with it. But we weren't given a manual for here's how your body works. It was just like, well, good luck. And and we've we've been doing our best, but, boy, to be able to have a manual to understand even our own reactions and our own responses and be able to have then a road map for if I wanted to change my responses, how would I do that? No. It's this is it. This is it. Working with our nervous system that drives our survival.

The book is called The Biology of Trauma. So I assume people can find it wherever they get their amazing books. Where else can they find you, doctor Amy, if they wanna learn more?

Yeah. They can find me at biology of trauma dot com. And in fact, I have some free resources that I'm sharing that go with the book if they wanna go to biology of trauma dot com forward slash book.

This has been just eye opening, so thought provoking. Like I said, I know I'm gonna be reflecting on this. It's gonna spark some conversations probably that I never thought I'd have with my friends, and I just can't thank you enough. This has been amazing.

Well, thank you. Really appreciate it.

The Growth Mixtape podcast with Bob Mathers is produced by Bespoke Projects. Music by Jean Michel Walter Cronkite. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow and rate us. When you do this, it helps to raise our podcast profile so that more people can find us. If you wanna connect, you can find me on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes.