You know what, girlfriend? They say that when we get to the end of our lives we’re going to regret the risks we didn’t take. I mean, imagine saying with your last breath: “I had a really safe life.” Yet, if you never felt safe, life couldn’t have yielded all of its joys to you.

Many of us experience a general sense that “I can never really fully let myself relax. It’s not safe.” Dr Aimie Apigian, a leading medical expert on addressing stored trauma in the body, says it’s because a part of you believes that nobody’s “got your back”.

When you look at the way in which a baby should be held, the origin of the term becomes clearer, she says. Babies should be held by supporting the head. You’ve got contact on the neck, and then the whole back is leaning up against your arms. Our back is where we feel support.

We might not consciously know this as adults, but our bodies remember the sensation of support that comes from our baby days. “Someone has got my back, and I can completely rest into their hold because they’re bigger and stronger than me.”

Dr Aimie says that unless we have that secure base as a child, we will never totally feel safe to go out and explore the world, try new things and be creative. Without that secure base, children keep themselves small. Even as adults, we keep ourselves small if we don’t have that felt sense of safety.

The problem comes in when we as adults expect ourselves to perform at a certain level without feeling the support and safety to enable that level of performance and productivity, dr Aimie says. The result is feeling overwhelmed. This leads to a very important component of the definition of a trauma: It happens when “our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelming”.

Trauma is a subjective experience of threatened survival, physical or psychological, dr Aimie explains. It means that there is a fear base to the situation, in which you believe that your physical or psychological survival is in question.

“People generally believe trauma is a past event. Trauma is not an event. Although it might occur around an event, it is not about the event. Trauma is the experience your body had going through the event. When that experience becomes stored in your body, it leads to present-day symptoms.”

The biological response to trauma starts with hyper-arousal to make “fight or flight” possible. If the hyper-arousal response does not succeed in one’s attempt to escape from the perceived threat, the body’s biology is shifted to one of hypo-arousal through the vagus nerve. This results in the “freeze” response and the accompanying immobility, helplessness, dissociation and denial, dr Aimie explains.

The effects of trauma linger in the nervous system, which wasn’t able to complete the survival response since it went into paralysis rather than action, and in the stress-response system known as the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis.

The chronic effects of this show up in one’s psychology and biology. We’re used to hearing of effects such as anxiety, depression and a general sense of paralysis in life, but actually the trauma response profoundly impacts the body physiologically.

Just one example from dr Aimie: Digestion is impacted, increasing one’s intestinal permeability and then the amount of gut inflammation you have. This inflammation travels up the vagus nerve to the brain . . . Talk about a message, a signal of danger and threat. Your nervous system becomes stuck in this trauma response. It turns into a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of.

So, this thing that impacts your biology started with a perceived threat you felt incapable of dealing with because nobody had your back. You froze and now you don’t know how to unfreeze again.

Would the answer lie in safety? Always feeling that somebody has your back? Or in perceived safety? Maybe the trick is to learn how to change your perception of what’s happening around you so that you can change what is happening inside you.

Let’s do it, girlfriend. After all, as the late Wayne Dyer always used to say: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.