Trauma

Elnora Van Winkle's research, which Aajonus referenced repeatedly and directed people toward by name (searchable under "Elnora Van Winkle" and "The Biology of Emotions," with both a technical paper and a layman's paper available), established that the body produces specific neurological hormones during any traumatic event. These hormones carry waste products as part of their chemistry. In healthy individuals on an extremely clean diet, those waste products can be eliminated promptly. But in virtually everyone else, they store in the tissues, in muscle, nerve, and other cellular structures, and remain there until the body initiates a detoxification cycle.

When detoxification of these stored traumatic byproducts begins, the person experiences emotional states that closely replicate the original trauma. Van Winkle documented this by cataloging the blood of individuals who were experiencing apparently sourceless emotional episodes. In one case she described, a woman was angry at her husband for no apparent reason; when questioned, she began describing things her father had done to her. The husband had done nothing to provoke her. The anger was not about the husband at all. The stored chemical byproducts of the original experience with the father were detoxifying into the bloodstream, and the body and mind were re-enacting the emotional state those compounds originally produced.

Aajonus described this dynamic clearly: the body produces hormones during a period of trauma, those hormones cause physiological changes that incorporate toxins, and those toxins store exactly like any other toxin. The blood concentrations of these compounds during detoxification periods are measurable and were measured by Van Winkle's team. The emotional experience of re-living old trauma is therefore not psychological in origin; it is biochemical. The chemistry of the original event has been preserved and is being processed.

One specific nutritional detail Aajonus gave about trauma byproducts concerns starches. He stated that starches are the only substances that can attach to these stored neurological waste products from trauma, in the same way that starches bind to other categories of stored toxins. This makes starch consumption relevant to the detoxification of traumatic chemical residues, though Aajonus did not expand in detail in the available passages on whether this attachment was desirable or to be managed carefully. The statement stands as a specific biochemical claim within his framework: when the body is moving traumatic byproducts, starch is the material that binds them.

Aajonus disagreed with the resolution proposed by Van Winkle in her paper. Van Winkle had concluded that primal therapy was the appropriate clinical response to the biochemical re-living of trauma. Primal therapy, as Aajonus described it, involves screaming, expressing rage, kicking pillows, and discharging the stored emotion through explosive physical expression. He distinguished this sharply from his own use of the word "primal," which refers entirely to raw food and nutritional reconstruction.

His objection to primal therapy as a method for resolving traumatic chemical storage was direct and biochemically grounded. If detoxification of traumatic byproducts recreates the emotional and physiological state of the original trauma, and if the person then undergoes a full re-enactment of that rage and terror, they will produce more of the same neurological hormones and their waste products. The body will generate new stores of the very compounds it is trying to eliminate. The cycle perpetuates rather than resolves. Aajonus said that when he went through primal rage therapy himself in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, it kept the momentum going rather than releasing it. His practical conclusion was that high anxiety and traumatic re-emergence called for walking, moving among nature, and allowing the body to process the detox cycle without amplifying the chemistry by re-enacting the original state.

The degree of physical trauma Aajonus sustained beginning in infancy is relevant to understanding how he understood the body's capacity for both damage and recovery. His brother began harming him on the day he came home from the hospital. The pattern continued through pushing him onto rusty nails, rusty rakes, and rusty lawnmowers, which repeatedly necessitated tetanus injections, each of which introduced mercury (as thimerosal), formaldehyde, aluminum, and ether-like compounds into his body. The third tetanus shot, given at 18 months old after his brother pushed him onto a rusty hoe, sent mercury directly to his brain's communication center and caused developmental autism. From that point until age 22, he was unable to associate words with meaning, unable to form dialogue, and was operating almost entirely on instinct and sound-pattern repetition.

The sustained physical violence from his brother included nightly attacks: punching him in the stomach, pulling his hair backward, striking his spine with a knuckle. His father popped both eardrums by striking him across the head and drove a nine-iron golf club through his skull into his brain. Aajonus described being in the hospital multiple times as a child, always documented as accidents or falls. He spent three to five months per year bedridden with colds and flu, and broke bones easily because his bone tissue had been damaged by the formaldehyde, mercury, and other compounds from repeated injections at very early ages. At 12, he developed peritonitis, misdiagnosed as appendicitis; his appendix was removed despite being found in perfect condition. By his own account, he was not allowed to play with other children in sports because his bones were so brittle they would snap.

The autism produced by vaccine-induced mercury poisoning was itself a form of ongoing neurological trauma. He could not communicate, could not explain what his brother was doing to him, and was beaten by nuns and other students at school because his silence and odd speech patterns were interpreted as insolence rather than neurological damage. His response, developed as a survival strategy, was to pick the largest student at his school at the start of each year and strike first, using an elbow to the throat, which incapacitates a person for 30 to 45 seconds. This kept other students from attacking him throughout the year. He described this not with pride but as a feral, instinct-driven adaptation of someone operating more like an animal than a normally socialized child because of the damage done to his communication capacity.

Aajonus sustained several severe physical traumas as an adult, and his account of each illustrates both his refusal of medical intervention and his understanding of what the body requires to self-repair.

**The Thailand SUV Rollover (approximately 2004)**

While riding in the third seat of a new Nissan SUV in Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand, after an evening of raw salmon tartar, the vehicle was struck broadside at high speed by another SUV traveling without lights. The SUV rolled and hit a pole. Because the impact came from the side opposite to the direction his shoulder harness was oriented, the harness provided no restraint. Aajonus was thrown laterally toward the opposite window. His head broke through the window and his shoulder struck the door panel. He lost consciousness at the moment of impact. He regained consciousness approximately 40 minutes later, upside down in the overturned vehicle, with the real estate agent in his group lying across him, both of them bleeding from the head. A jackhammer was being used on the door to extract them. Another worker with a sledgehammer was shattering the window directly near Aajonus's head, sending glass across him. He screamed for them to stop. It took him approximately three minutes to scoot himself out of the vehicle.

The injuries were: a concussion, a broken left clavicle (collarbone), and two broken ribs. The clavicle fracture was severe enough that the bone had passed through multiple neck muscles, stopping just short of the jugular vein. Aajonus described the pain as excruciating throughout the neck, shoulder, and rib area. When he was placed on a gurney at the small hospital, which was overwhelmed because a second accident had simultaneously brought in other patients, he knew he had to appear composed enough to refuse all medication. He was aware that anyone reporting a head injury who also refused treatment would be treated as mentally incompetent. He had the presence of mind to clean the blood from the wound in his head and cover it with his long hair before the doctors saw it.

He allowed two X-rays only, one from the back and one from the side, and refused everything else. The X-rays showed nothing was dislocated. The doctors were astonished that the clavicle fracture had not caused dislocation given the violence of the impact. He went directly from the hospital to the hotel. He did not accept any medical treatment beyond the two X-rays.

The mugging in Thailand, which occurred roughly three and a half years before one of the workshop accounts, involved being struck with a two-by-four board that split his forehead open from brow to brow, with his supraorbital tissue (he described his "guts" hanging out over his eye, referring to the orbital fat pad), and then while his head was still recoiling backward from the first blow, being struck with either a crowbar or a hammer, which shattered his lip, broke and disarticulated the bone from one side of his jaw to the other, knocked the bone and three teeth completely back under his tongue, split the nerve canal running through the jaw in two places, and left the bone held together only by the gum tissue. A forensic doctor confirmed the nature of the weapons from the wound patterns.

Aajonus had enough awareness during the attack, even while absorbing the second blow, to make a tactical decision: he flipped his body, hit the pavement, kicked one of his attackers in the knees with a raised leg, and ran to a nearby restaurant. The camera he had been using to film in the late-night neighborhood was strapped to his hand and was not taken.

**The Motorcycle Accident**

On a large Harley-Davidson, which Aajonus had not ridden since age 21 or 22 (making this accident approximately two years before the workshop account), pedestrians stepped directly into the road in front of him. He had approximately 15 feet of stopping distance, which was insufficient. He chose to lay the bike down on his leg rather than hit the pedestrians. This split the tibia from the knee to the ankle, broke off the top of the tibia where the femur sits on the joint, sent bone splinters up into the femur joint, tore one tendon downward and the other upward at the knee, and removed all skin from a large area of his leg, part of his foot, part of his arm, and shaved down the ankle bone. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. He lay on the pavement for approximately 40 to 45 minutes waiting for the pain to subside. He had previously broken seven bones in his foot in a bicycle accident and bicycled 12 miles that same day, so he was not without reference for this degree of injury.

He took a pickup truck taxi back to his hotel, treated the wounds himself, and waited. His knee continued to swell and he eventually went to a hospital, where an intern refused to touch the wounds and told him he needed skin grafting. He did not accept this assessment and treated the injury himself. Specific treatment details from this account include the application of honey and meat to burns and open wounds, cleaning with lime juice, and patience with the body's own repair process. He described the skin and bone damage in detail but refused all surgical intervention, including grafting.

**The Truck Rollover in Water**

In a separate incident, Aajonus was in a truck that rolled onto its side and then onto its roof in or near water, shattering the windshield and partially crushing the roof. He and his companion Pawadee were suspended upside down by their harnesses and seatbelts, uninjured by the crash itself. Water immediately began filling the vehicle through what had been the floor. He released his own seatbelt, fell headfirst into the ceiling debris and shattered windshield glass, and cut his right knee, having braced his fall with his hands. He lowered the window, released Pawadee's seatbelt as water poured in, and guided her out through the window before the vehicle fully submerged.

**The Thailand Stingray Recovery**

After one severe incident (appearing to be separate from the identified accidents, involving a chemical poisoning rather than impact trauma), Aajonus described being so ill he could not stand without hitting the floor. He could not drive. He crawled rather than walked. He found a stingray that had been caught approximately two days earlier and was therefore ripened. He ate approximately a quarter cup of it at intervals of roughly one serving per period. He attempted half a cup at one point and experienced dry heaving, so returned to quarter-cup portions. He continued on that regimen for approximately 36 hours, at which point he knew he was out of immediate danger, though he was unable to drive himself for another three to four days. Within 12 to 14 hours of beginning the stingray consumption, substances were erupting through his skin, which he described as looking like shrapnel impacts, leaving scars across his arms and body.

Aajonus explicitly categorized anaphylactic shock from vaccines as a traumatic reaction to chemical poisoning. He described the body's response to vaccine injection as a traumatic poisoning event in which the body interpreted the damage as potentially incompatible with survival. The inclusion of mercury, formaldehyde, and aluminum in vaccines was, in his account, a deliberate formulation designed to prevent death from the initial poisoning while ensuring that nervous system and brain function would be permanently compromised. He connected this to the population-wide reduction in independent thinking and critical self-governance.

The covert injections he received in a Philippines hotel room (from individuals he described as resembling American CIA operatives), in which he woke to find a hypodermic already largely emptied into his arm with two additional full hypodermics on the bed beside him, produced effects consistent with severe chemical trauma: every bone and muscle going into knots simultaneously, nausea, three injection-site bumps with red pinholes visible on his skin. For the next 24 hours his body purged the injected material. He described spending more than a year not disclosing what had been done to him, concerned that anyone who knew would pressure him toward hospitalization.

A consistent pattern across all of Aajonus's major accident accounts is his method of managing contact with hospitals. He allowed X-rays when necessary to assess whether bones were dislocated in ways that would require repositioning. He refused all medication, all injections, all surgical intervention. In the Thailand SUV accident, he specifically cleaned blood from his head wound and covered it with his hair before hospital staff could see it, knowing that a visible head wound would complicate his refusal of treatment. He described getting off the gurney and composing himself as essential strategic steps, because he knew the hospital staff would treat a person with a head injury who was refusing medication as mentally incapacitated and override his choices.

He observed that the doctors who examined his X-rays after the Thailand SUV accident were astonished that his clavicle, which had broken and passed through his neck muscles, had not produced dislocation. He regarded this as consistent with his experience that a body operating on raw food and without accumulated toxic interference is more structurally resilient than the medical framework expects.

In a related discussion, Aajonus described research he conducted using blood samples from football players who were knocked unconscious during contact sport. He collected samples using half a cc at a time from unconscious players, drawing as little blood as possible at one-minute intervals after the player lost consciousness. Over the course of a football season he found four players who were revived on the field and two who were removed to locker rooms or hospitals for revival. The players revived on the field had the highest thyroxin levels in their blood. Adrenaline was elevated but within the expected range for contact sport; there was no dramatic adrenaline spike at the moment of the knockout. Thyroxin, however, spiked dramatically at the moment of the injury that caused loss of consciousness. His reading of this was that thyroxin, which he associated with lung function and expansion, was the compound the body produced in response to the physical shock of a severe blow rather than adrenaline, contradicting the common assumption that adrenaline drives the acute trauma response.

In a newsletter case study, Aajonus described a woman named Sandra from the United Kingdom whose wrist and forearm were severely lacerated when a blender was accidentally activated without its bowl in place, sending the blades into the air and catching her arm. An emergency room told her nothing could be done and that she required a plastic surgeon for major skin grafting. A naturopath who later saw her arm declared it terribly infected and insisted she would lose the arm.

Aajonus's protocol, relayed through her son: clean the wound with lime juice despite the pain this would cause, apply coconut cream to prevent scabbing and scarring, and consume raw milk shakes during recovery. He noted that Sandra was not on the Primal Diet at the time but still healed without major scarring. He stated that had she been fully on the diet, healing would have occurred in weeks rather than months. The whitish material visible on the wound in photographs was not pus but caked coconut cream serving as a moisture barrier.

He described the general wound care protocol for cuts and burns as: clean with lime juice (not lemon juice), apply honey, then cover with raw meat. He cited the case of James Stewart, who was ejected from a truck during a freeway rollover and lost all the skin from a large portion of his arm after sliding on asphalt. Emergency services attempted to compel him to go to the hospital; he refused. He went home, cleaned the road rash with lime juice, applied honey, and laid raw meat over the wound. No grafting was needed.

Van Winkle's work, as Aajonus described it, established that the waste products of traumatic neurological hormone production are what he called psychotropic compounds. They store in the body and when they are eventually mobilized for detoxification, they re-enter the bloodstream at concentrations high enough to recreate the emotional states associated with the original trauma. This is why, he explained, a person can become suddenly irritable, anxious, or enraged with no identifiable present cause. The blood is literally carrying those chemical byproducts at elevated levels during that window.

Van Winkle presented two papers on this: one written for a technical scientific audience with full chemistry detail, and one written for a general audience. Aajonus directed people to find both under her name through internet searches, using the specific spelling "Elnora Van Winkle" and the title "The Biology of Emotions."

His own experience of going through what he called the primal rage therapy model in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s confirmed for him that re-enacting rage and violent emotional discharge did not resolve the stored chemistry but rather added to it. His alternative was not suppression but movement: walking, being in nature, allowing the body to run the detox cycle without amplification.

Aajonus's book "We Want to Live" opens with an account of his son Jeff, who at age 22 was in an automobile accident in which his skull was fractured and approximately one-fifth of his brain was damaged. Physicians told the family that no one had survived that degree of brain injury and that Jeff would never recover. Aajonus helped him recover using raw foods. The specific protocols are discussed in the book. The story of working through Jeff's hospitalization, refusing medical interventions, navigating hospital administrators and attending physicians, and supporting Jeff's recovery through raw nutrition forms the narrative arc of the first volume.

In direct conversation with Jeff during his recovery, Aajonus told him: "Your conscious or unconscious decision to drive into the trees rather than kill your friends was loving." He told Jeff he did not expect him to remember much at first and asked him to request repetition as needed. He described the dietary approach to calming the injured body as including antibiotic-free and hormone-free fertile raw eggs, raw meat, raw cream, and no-salt-added raw cheeses to soothe and calm the system.

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