The Nervous System, Trauma and Migraine
What part does our body play when it comes to finding peace and healing deeply?
This is part 1 of a 3 part series that I’m sharing with you, following last month’s Migraine World Summit event.
I’ve wanted to turn stand out topics on the Migraine World Summit into articles for you for so long (we’re talking years)! Taking the interview and imbedding my story and aspects of my journey into a piece of content that you can glean insight from, learn and reflect upon.
March this year was the first time tuning in that I haven’t been unwell during the live event. In recent years I’ve watched topics that (through no fault of anyone) I have found to be triggering. Leaving me in a tail spin for who knows how long. I want to be able to turn these into posts for you as well – just not from a triggered or reactive place.
A new boundary this year has been not to listen to the ones I know will trigger me and that has meant listening to an even smaller number than I usually do. My point of sharing this with you is to highlight the need and relevance for boundaries. Even when we are doing something that is ultimately for the good of our health. We get to choose. We get to take our time. We get to heal in our own way. Not on someone else’s timeline. Not on someone else’s agenda. I don’t need to do everything perfectly and that includes researching my illness and making changes that align with what I want. And neither do you.
This year, I was looking forward to this particular interview the most. It was to be 3 years into my journey that I became aware of the nervous system. Simultaneously finding myself with a nervous system that felt somewhat regulated. With a realisation that this wasn’t the case in the years before. I’ve been wanting to understand the part this plays ever since.
Amie Apigian (CEO and Founder of Trauma Healing Accelerated) shared her story of training as a physician then taking time out to foster a young child early in her career.
As part of her fostering care responsibilities, she was instructed that love, time and stability would be what the child would need. What she came to discover was that her love for the child was terrifying him. What she’d been told to be true and what she experienced in real life didn’t add up.
This was to act as a catalyst in Amy shifting her understanding of what it took to heal trauma versus what she had learned and studied by the text book. Her approach became to find out what he needed through his healing journey. She later went on to adopt the child and, once her career took off, began to see similar patterns of trauma and unmet needs in her patients. Correlations relating to trauma and pain attachment manifesting in symptoms and diagnosis.
Through researching trauma experts such as Gabor Mate, Amy has brought trauma into her medicine practice. During her interview she informs what trauma is and isn’t as well as how we need to approach and look at it, what’s working and what isn’t.
Below are notes I made on the interview. Reading through it to proofread has been a lot to take in. There is a ALOT of information here. If its new to you, consider saving this post and re-reading in smaller sections to help make sense of it. Highly educated and medically trained physicians are still yet to digest it so please go easy on yourself.
What is trauma?
The trauma is a body response. It is in our physiology.
Trauma is not just something happening in the brain.
Its not just something that’s going to change our thoughts or our emotional processing or that we just need to talk about.
Trauma is not an event. It is an experience of the body.
Once we understand this, we can look at trauma as the body experiencing overwhelm.
The body has a different story. A story that is expressed in symptoms and disease (like migraine).
Amy continues in the interview to state that
The overwhelm we have experienced in the past has become chronic in the today and that we might think of this as stress.
A traumatic experience can either be taking on too much too fast, or receiving too little for too long.
The body carries a burden if unable to carry a trauma response. Which loops back and forth between stress and trauma, creating havoc in our body.
The nervous system becomes dysregulated when feeling stressed and overwhelmed. When it doesn’t feel safe, secure, happy.
The autonomic nervous system communicates with the brain.
Stress is not bad.
The critical line of overwhelm appears when the stress we are faced with is perceived as an inescapable danger and is so big that it is perceived as a life threat. The line of overwhelm is crossed and the body goes into trauma response.
The body moves into energy conserving mode in order to survive and our systems in the body take over. The body perceives what it needs to do to survive and what it needs to do in order to adapt to the environment and situation.
Our nervous system acts as a guardian angel, it is there to keep us alive.
The problem occurs when the nervous system perceives danger everywhere.
Our biology can be more sensitive/vulnerable to overwhelm.
We can change the nervous system’s perception of the experience so that even if it feels hard, it doesn’t feel like a life threat.
Until we bring the understanding of trauma into the medical field, we are just using band aids.
We can use symptoms to understand body patterns. Inflammation has a big effect of the trauma physiology.
Which can develop auto-immune disease and long-haul syndromes.
There is A LOT of data to evidence this. Which is both encouraging and discouraging.
All the science is there. ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) – all relate to every condition.
Lots of science to confirm the connection.
However, physicians (in general) don’t know what to do with it. This insight hasn’t changed their practice even if they know the science.
The solution is not necessarily to go to therapy.
Trauma has become our biology.
We have got to learn to regulate the nervous system.
How do we do this?
Through somatic work and somatic healing.
The mind-body connection is not enough.
We need to learn how to work with our body.
We need to learn how to respond to our body.
We need to educate the body to take a spontaneous deep breath.
Breathwork and other modalities can still be a case of managing symptoms.
Traditional ways are not working. For example reframing childhood experiences, looking for the good or not thinking about it.
When we retell a story, the body goes in to overwhelm which only reinforces the response and effects on biology and health.
The story isn’t important. We need to create a felt sense of safety, we don’t need the story.
Use modalities to stay in the present moment.
It’s the state of the nervous system that will drive symptoms.
What does this mean?
The leading symptom of autoimmunity is fatigue.
Under chronic stress and when our body is in a trauma state we develop a magnesium deficiency which leads to more nervous system dysregulation.
Our body needs magnesium which helps the nervous system.
The symptoms that develop are the ways in which the body is trying to help us.
By slowing us down so that we don’t exceed our capacity. Because we are deficient in energy, magnesium etc.
Migraine patients often have higher levels of childhood trauma.
Our modern lifestyle and diet is also involved. Its all linked.
When we experience trauma, it does change our biology and makes us more susceptible to disease.
When we are born, our biology can make us more susceptible.
Our environment contributes to our nervous system (emotional and social).
It doesn’t matter what caused overwhelm (diet, toxins, chemicals, abuse etc).
There has been a huge uprising in trauma-related disease.
Amy considers nervous system regulation as work every human has to do. We have to work with our body. It’s the most powerful thing that we can do to create the best lives for ourselves.
To find out more about Amy’s work and register for Steps to Identify and Heal From Trauma check this out.
The biggest takeaway for me from this interview is the confirmation that “we need to learn to work with our body. We need to learn to respond to our body”. This is what I’ve been practicing for the past 6 years. From the moment I “woke up” to complete disability by illness, I learnt to let my body lead the way. I started listening to what it was trying to tell me, screaming at me in fact.
I began to drown out the noise of everybody else and tune in to what I knew to be true all along. I connected with beliefs my body held (that “I matter. My health matters”). I knew that change was what was needed. That it was going to take a long time.
Learning to let my body lead the way, learning to work with it, respond to it and listen to it helped reduce all the (potentially) conflicting information I received such as the medical advice I was given not to bother making any changes, that the only option for me was to get on the drugs (even though my body was saying no) and that there was no support available for me.
It also explains why bodywork has been such a major player in my road to recovery and why I get so much from holding space for clients on their journey. I am always fascinated when the body takes a spontaneous deep breath and I notice this happens to clients from the moment they arrive to Retreat With Me as well as repeatedly throughout their bodywork sessions. It is not forced, it is not symptom management. It is not a control approach. Rather a way to create health.
Back when I asked my body what it needed, it told me that it needed support, was beyond desperate for it. When I asked my neurologist what support was available to me, he replied “there is none”. As brutal as it was at the time, I knew where I stood. I knew what my body needed and if that need couldn’t be met then at least it freed up the impulse in me to seek it elsewhere. Which meant finding other ways and means to put in place support.
This very much started with putting in place support for myself. (You can read more on how I went about that in Invisible Me). Receiving the message loud and clear that no one was coming to my rescue was devastating. As deeply uncomfortable as this was, it played its part in me taking back the reigns of creation for my own health.
Though there was no quick fix, no overnight solution, no magic miracle that saw me disabled by illness one day then completely recovered the next, the direction I found myself going in with my body now leading the way, went on to open doors to healing that I never knew existed. I recovered to a point that many in the medical profession consider impossible.
Allowing my body to lead the way uncovered every next step, nudged me in each new direction, opened up to me everything that I needed, all at the time that I needed it.
Such radical action (re)connected me to an inner strength, an inner power and determination that I never knew existed. I tapped into a wisdom that was there all along, an inner guidance system that appeared to know and understand the way – way before I did on a conscious and fully informed level.
It’s why I ask not only myself the following questions often, I encourage you, dear reader, to practice the same:
When you ask your body what it needs, what does it respond with?
How do you feel in your body today and how can you support how your body feels?
What is your body trying to show you? Teach you? Tell you? Communicate to you?
At the time of this post being scheduled to go out, I’ll be away overseas. I may not respond until my return. However, I am eager to see how this one lands, what you make of this research and how useful you find this kind of information and insight.
I’ve just followed you because this - every word of it - resonates so powerfully with me. In the last seven years I’ve gone through traumatic job loss, breakdown, major surgery, huge relationship adjustments with partner and children, growing awareness that I’m neurodivergent, lockdown, being unable to meet my grand-daughter until she was several months old because she was born abroad in lockdown, breast cancer treatment and getting COVID while I was on chemo, and now perhaps unsurprisingly chronic fatigue. I’ve also had a year of therapy revealing a mass of childhood trauma. It’s still complicated and raw and I don’t feel quite ready to talk about it. I’ve been silent for so long. I am married to a university professor who loves me dearly but treats every discussion involving feelings and intuitative knowledge as a viva for a PhD (I failed). Last night we had one such discussion and when I looked at my Polar monitor I discovered my HR had been consistently well over 100 for an hour and a half - and I hadn’t moved from the sofa. So yeah, there is a lot there, but I’m beginning to reach out and find people who understand. FWIW, I’m also 66 and on Letrozole so my body doesn’t produce oestrogen any more. Anyway, I’ll dip a toe in and when I feel ready I’ll start blogging here. Thanks for opening a door and letting light and hope in.
Trauma and the body holding emotions is something I’m storing. If I’m in distress, for whatever reasons, my pain levels are always higher. Always. The effects of a stressful month don’t always show immediately either, it can take three months for it to show in my cycle.
I think emotional links (but not blame) is the next revelation in wellness. We’ve known for a long time emotions have links to physical symptoms, but it’s been used as a form of blame and not as a signal or signpost in the direction of wellness.
Work like yours is the forefront of this change. I love this nitty gritty let’s get healing stuff ❤️🩹