Episode 135: The Hidden Difference Between Stress and Trauma In How The Body Keeps Score
- THA Operations
- Nov 28
- 11 min read
Updated: Dec 2
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 healing. What your body needs to recover from a trauma is very different than what you need to recover from something stressful. She explains how unresolved trauma is what 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.
You'll hear more on:
[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
Whether you're personally dealing with chronic health issues and unresolved trauma, or you're a practitioner helping clients understand the mind-body connection, this episode provides the scientific framework and practical tools you need to start addressing trauma at all levels and create lasting healing.
Helpful Links Related To This Episode
Resources/Guides:
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.
Essential Sequence Guide - Discover why doing the right things in the right order is key to releasing trauma and achieving your full potential. Get the insights you need to make lasting change.
Foundational Journey - If you want to be guided through The Essential Sequence laid out in the Roadmap and the book, join me and my team for this 6 week journey into your inner world with practical somatic and parts self-practices to lay your foundation to do the deeper work safely. These are the daily practices I have found that change one’s biology and health symptoms the fastest.
Related Podcast Episodes:
Related Youtube Videos:
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
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.
Helpful Research:
This Episode Is For:
✓ People stuck despite doing everything "right"
✓ Anyone with chronic gut issues, brain fog, anxiety, or fatigue
✓ Those with autoimmune conditions and unresolved trauma
✓ Practitioners needing mind-body connection framework
✓ People who've minimized their childhood trauma
✓ Anyone interested in trauma biology ✓ Those ready for multi-level healing approach
✓ People wanting to break generational trauma cycles
What You'll Learn
Listen to understand the crucial hidden difference between stress and trauma. Between stress with capacity to handle and trauma exceeding capacity creating overwhelm. Discovering the simple question revealing minimized childhood trauma you've dismissed before. How chronic conditions follow predictable trauma patterns in their development over time. What happens during nervous system shifts affecting your whole body's functioning. How brain inflammation fuels self-reinforcing body trauma loops keeping you stuck. The three essential repair levels of emotional, somatic, and cellular work. All needed together for complete healing instead of temporary symptom relief. How generational trauma passes through epigenetics and can be broken intentionally. Why safety is the number one priority for nervous system regulation. And daily habits including morning regulation, consistent sleep, gentle movement, safe connection with others, and nature time that build resilience steadily. And healing capacity over time creating sustainable transformation in your life.
Stress and trauma are different—heal trauma at all three levels.
Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.
Join the Conversation
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. What resonated with you? What questions came up?
Please keep comments respectful and supportive. This is a community of people committed to healing. We welcome diverse perspectives and honest questions, but we don't tolerate personal attacks, spam, or content that could harm others on their healing journey.
Comments