The Hidden Difference Between Stress and Trauma In How The Body Keeps Score
The Hidden Difference Between Stress and Trauma In How The Body Keeps Score
Most people think stress and trauma are just different points on the same scale. But what if that belief has kept people stuck in cycles of chronic illness, autoimmune flare-ups, and emotional overwhelm?
Many people are doing everything “right.” They’re eating well, exercising, going to therapy, yet they still struggle with gut issues, brain fog, anxiety, and fatigue that won’t go away. They can’t understand why their body seems to be working against them instead of healing.
In this episode, Dr. Aimie reveals the crucial difference between stress and trauma, and why understanding this distinction changes everything about how you heal. She explains how unresolved trauma gets stored in the body and creates a Biology of Trauma® that keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode.
You’ll discover why trauma doesn’t have to be “big” to be significant, how it shows up as chronic health conditions decades later, and the repair tools that address trauma at the emotional, somatic, and cellular levels, creating accelerated healing that single approaches cannot.
Helpful Links Related To This Episode
Guides, Tools & Resources:
- Biology of Trauma book – how the body experiences and holds fear, pain and overwhelm, and how to heal. Pre-order now and, at the time of this recording, you’ll get over $400 in bonuses included! Those bonuses are only for the pre-order window which goes until Sept 22, 2025. When you’ve already pre-ordered it on Amazon head over here to receive your bonuses.
- Essential Sequence Guide
- The Foundational Journey – If you’re ready to create a felt sense of safety in your body and experience the benefits of 26% decrease in daily physical pain, 28% decrease in sleep issues and digestive issues, 30% decrease in anxiety, depression, or want to learn how to do this for those you help – join me.
In this episode, you’ll hear more about:
- [2:30] The simple question that reveals childhood trauma you may have downplayed
- [6:45] How chronic conditions like autoimmunity follow predictable trauma patterns
- [9:00] What happens during nervous system shifts and why they affect your whole body
- [15:30] How brain inflammation fuels “body trauma loops” that keep you stuck
- [19:44] Why brain inflammation is part of your trauma response (and how to recognize it!)
- [25:00] The three levels of repair needed for lasting trauma healing
- [27:30] How generational trauma passes through epigenetics (and how to break the cycle)
- [30:15] The #1 thing to prioritize for nervous system regulation and recovery
- [32:45] Daily habits that increase resilience, healing capacity, and overall well-being
The Hidden Difference Between Stress and Trauma: Why Your Body Keeps Score Decades Later
“If it makes you sick 20 years later, that wasn’t just stress. That was trauma for your body.”
I spoke these words to David, a social worker who’d messaged me about his digestive issues, brain fog, and exhaustion. His doctor said it was just work stress. David wondered if he needed better stress management. But here’s what I recognized immediately—those symptoms weren’t from current stress. They were patterns of stored trauma.
What’s the Real Difference Between Stress and Trauma?
The biggest myth I see is that we’ve called stress trauma. We’ve called trauma stress. We don’t know the difference. And the result has been devastating for our health.
When we mislabel trauma as stress, we minimize what our body experienced. We shame ourselves when our body has responses and reactions. We go into beliefs about ourselves and self-criticism that aren’t necessary if we actually understood the science.
Here’s my physician’s lens: If something makes you sick 20 years later, that was not just a stress. That was trauma your body was experiencing in childhood. You may not understand why it was trauma, because you’re looking at it through your adult perspective now. But that’s not how you experienced it as a child.
My definition of trauma is anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed your ability to understand, process and respond. For a child, trauma often comes down to one simple thought: “I don’t know if I’m going to be okay.”
How Trauma Gets Stored in Your Body Through Patterns
I first learned how to recognize patterns when I was going through medical school. It’s how we diagnose any health condition. We look for patterns in the lab panel. We look for patterns in the imaging. We look for patterns in the story.
My brain was trained to look for patterns everywhere. Then I started noticing something fascinating with my foster-adopted son. He’d go from a playful child one minute into a raging, out of control human body flying at me in the next second. At first, I didn’t see the patterns. But then I recognized them—every time I told him no, every time we had a moment of connection.
There are patterns that trigger him, and this is the pattern of what he does when he gets triggered. I started seeing the same patterns in my patients with chronic health conditions.
I started to see emotional patterns in those patients with autoimmunity, and then I developed autoimmunity myself. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just other people who’d had trauma. I’d also had trauma. I didn’t know it, but it was still stored in my body.
Understanding How Your Nervous System Keeps You Alive
Our nervous system’s whole purpose is to keep us alive. I remember working with patients who had tried to commit suicide, and their nervous system was still fighting for them to stay alive. Mentally, they were done, but their nervous system refused to give up.
The nervous system shifts between different states in order to best keep us alive. Right now, as I write this, my nervous system feels safe. It’s in a parasympathetic calm state. But if there was an immediate threat, everything would shift.
When our body goes into the trauma state, everything changes:
- Our thoughts become hopeless and full of shame
- We feel physically heavy
- Our breath rate slows down
- We shut down into being “half alive”
It’s a whole state shift that takes over our whole body, not just one aspect. It doesn’t just take over our mind—it takes over everything.
The Biology of Trauma®: How Chronic Health Conditions Create Feedback Loops
Every chronic health condition has trauma patterns driving it. This isn’t just a theory—it’s what I share in my book based on years of clinical observation.
Not only does trauma impact our biology, but that biology creates a feedback loop and keeps our nervous system stuck in that trauma state.
Take autoimmunity, for example. Autoimmunity has this trifecta that you have to have in order to develop it, and one aspect is environmental exposure to toxins. We’re surrounded by toxins now, so that’s easy to acquire. But once autoimmunity develops, it creates an effect on the nervous system that decreases your capacity.
Anything that exceeds our capacity will put us physiologically into the trauma state. This creates what I call a body trauma loop—constantly cycling between stressed and overwhelmed, anxiety and collapse.
The Gut-Brain Connection: Your Second (or Primary) Brain
The research calls our gut our second brain. Some researchers say, forget the second brain. It is our primary brain. There’s so much connection between them that you can’t separate them.
When I started my own journey, I discovered everything in my gut was off—leaky gut, microbiome imbalance, bacterial overgrowth, acid production problems. When there is that imbalance in the digestive system, it’s creating imbalance in our brain. It’s creating imbalance in our neurochemicals.
Consider these facts:
More than 85% of our serotonin is made in our gut
GABA, which relaxes muscles and mood, is predominant in the gut
Glutamate, when imbalanced, creates anxiety and restlessness
Why Chronic Health Conditions Have Trauma Patterns
The research calls our gut our second brain. Some researchers say, forget the second brain. It is our primary brain. There’s so much connection between them that you can’t separate them.
When I started my own journey, I discovered everything in my gut was off—leaky gut, microbiome imbalance, bacterial overgrowth, acid production problems. When there is that imbalance in the digestive system, it’s creating imbalance in our brain. It’s creating imbalance in our neurochemicals.
Consider these facts:
- More than 85% of our serotonin is made in our gut
- GABA, which relaxes muscles and mood, is predominant in the gut
- Glutamate, when imbalanced, creates anxiety and restlessness
Brain Inflammation: The Hidden Trauma Response
What I discovered in my journey was brain inflammation. Brain inflammation is caused by an immune cell in our brain that has been activated to the degree that it sees so much danger that it has just unleashed inflammation everywhere and is killing everything, including the innocent bystanders.
I remember standing in front of my attending surgeon during residency. He was reprimanding me, just like my father had done, and I went into little girl mode. The moment I had this emotional response, I felt my brain shutting down. I was watching it happen in real time.
This is how our body protects us. Part of the survival strategies of the trauma response are to disconnect from our reality, to go numb, and brain inflammation is a great way to disconnect.
The Three Levels of Repair for Lasting Healing
The lasting impact that trauma has on our mind, on our body and our biology are just ones that need to be repaired. When we repair them, it allows our body to engage its natural healing strategies.
I don’t have to teach my body how to heal. It knows how to heal by itself. I saw this repeatedly in surgery—make a clean incision, provide the right conditions, and the body heals itself.
The three levels of repair are:
1. Beliefs (Mind Level)
We need to repair those fragmented still hurting parts that are still stuck in fear. That young version of me standing in front of her dad feeling ashamed? She needs repair.
2. Somatic Movement (Body Level)
When we are overcoming a threat, we are in movement. If we go into a trauma response, that movement stops. We need to repair those movements that we didn’t finish.
Sometimes this means:
- Speaking up for ourselves (even years later)
- Completing physical movements that were interrupted
- Releasing what the body held back
3. Cellular Repair (Biology Level)
Without the reset to safety, our body has held on to that trauma, and it’s created accumulative damage over the years.
This damage includes:
- Oxidative stress (which creates generational trauma)
- Immune system dysfunction
- Digestive system damage
- Brain inflammation
Breaking Generational Trauma Through Biology
Here’s something powerful: Oxidative stress is what creates the generational trauma that gets passed down through our epigenetics. Now that we know this, we can actually repair generational trauma and break the cycles.
You’re not stuck with inherited trauma. There’s repair that we will want to do for our immune system, for our digestive system. We want to repair the walls of our intestines so that it’s not leaky and causing all of this inflammation.
Practical Tools to Start Your Repair Journey Today
There’s this self embodiment that has to happen. We can’t run to other people to fix us, to save us. We’ve got to learn a certain level of self regulation, self embodiment, self awareness for ourselves.
Priority #1: Quality Sleep
If there’s only one thing that a person could do for their trauma work, I think this would be it—get better quality sleep. This has the greatest impact on your nervous system regulation than almost anything else.
I got myself an Oura ring to measure sleep quality, not just quantity. What if I stop eating earlier? What if I take magnesium? There’s all these things that we can invest in to improve our sleep.
Priority #2: Blood Sugar Balance
Our blood sugar levels really impact our internal stress, our anxiety, where that point is where we will cross from a stress into trauma response and overwhelm.
Priority #3: Align with Your Circadian Rhythm
Get outside. Get natural light as early in the morning as you can when you wake up. Don’t look at your phone first thing. Go outside and look at the sunrise.
It’s actually a time when you can get free red light therapy. Red light therapy is amazing for your mitochondria, which will help you have more energy, which will help you be less triggered.
The Truth About Mental Resilience and Trauma
The trauma that we experience in our life, even when we avoid it, it doesn’t go anywhere. We can stuff it down. We can shove it down. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s still waiting right there for us.
If we really want to be mentally strong, we need to go pull those weeds from the root, not just at the surface level. This is the only way to create true mental resilience, not something we’re faking.
A Message of Hope: Your Body Knows How to Heal
The title of my book, The Biology of Trauma, is actually a message of hope. I didn’t have any hope for myself until I learned this science. The science gave me the insights to know what my body needed.
I started making more progress in therapy than I’d ever been able to do before, because now I was looking at it at all the levels that needed repair. I wasn’t just trying to address my inner fears without also addressing the inflammation they had created.
For David and Everyone Asking “Is This Just Stress?”
David, to answer your question directly: Your body communicates to us with sensations and symptoms. Your nervous system is telling you that it is holding trauma, so just stress management is not the right tool for you.
Your digestive issues, the brain fog and exhaustion, are patterns of a biology of trauma. If those experiences are making you sick decades later, they weren’t just difficult. You were resilient because you survived. But that resilience came at a cost.
Your body knows how to heal. It just needs intentional repair. Not just anything in whatever order—intentional, strategic repair based on the science of how our body went into the trauma response.
It is possible to repair a biology of trauma. This isn’t your life sentence. You don’t have to have physical health issues the rest of your life. When you understand the difference between stress and trauma, you finally have access to the right tools for true healing.
Disclaimer:
By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical, psychological, or mental health advice to treat any medical or psychological condition in yourself or others. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your own physician, therapist, psychiatrist, or other qualified health provider regarding any physical or mental health issues you may be experiencing. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Under no circumstances shall Trauma Healing Accelerated, any guests or contributors to The Biology of Trauma® podcast, or any employees, associates, or affiliates of Trauma Healing Accelerated be responsible for damages arising from the use or misuse of the content provided in this podcast.
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Disclaimer:
By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Under no circumstances shall Trauma Healing Accelerated, any guests or contributors to The Biology of Trauma podcast, or any employees, associates, or affiliates of Trauma Healing Accelerated be responsible for damages arising from the use of the podcast.
One Response
When I first got into this journey, few doctors could define stress, let alone have any sort of effective relief. At least that seems to be changing. However, they definitely can’t define trauma either.
I have discovered that the mechanim of trauma, IS stress. What we call chronic stress, and it’s neurophysiological symptoms over time. It is the TS of any PTSD, slightly tweaked – traumatizing stress. The state of constant fight/flight. The state of constant mobilization. And health and growth aren’t possible in those states.
I agree on right tools. I’m fond of saying, due to my age, the right tools would be like trying to fix my ’67 Pontiac GTO with metric tools. It’ll be oh so slow, and likely incomplete, with a lot of skinned knuckles. My TMed saying is “Better tools, Better focus, Best outcome.” As Dr. Levine has said, “Trauma healing isn’t a life sentence.” I experienced a sequence in that healing, with overlap for sure.