How Smells Are Tied to Trauma and Healing
This topic is near and dear to my heart as a Sommelier who’s suffered extreme trauma. Scent often comes from everywhere around you at once and when it arrives it blooms and can sometimes overtake everything around you.
Suddenly, you're not in the room anymore. You're there…wherever there is for you. For me, it’s in a tiny 600 square-foot apartment with the smell of iodine, blood, and gunpowder.
For you, maybe it’s a pine candle and your childhood Christmas or it’s diesel fuel and the moment your life split in two.
Of all the senses, smell is the most visceral, the most emotional, and the least understood. It bypasses language and goes straight for memory. It grasps on tight and shoots straight for pain, and climbs right into the wound…or the balm.
Sometimes the invisible can reach where the visible can’t.
A Shortcut to the Soul
Unlike sight, sound, and touch, which are routed through the brain’s thalamus (the relay center), scent takes a direct route.
Smells go straight to the amygdala, which has long been considered the emotion center of our brains. Smell tickles to life the hippocampus as well, which is the memory center, and dances its magic along the olfactory bulb, which sits just above the nasal cavity. You use this part of your brain heavily when doing a wine tasting with me.
That’s why a smell can trigger a flashback or a rush of calm faster than a photograph or a voice.
Your brain doesn’t process it like most things, it relives it instead.
For trauma survivors like me, smell is often the most haunting cue. The cologne worn by someone who hurt you could send your mind into a panic, or the sterile scent of a hospital corridor might make you sad when you think about someone you lost. The gasoline of a night you can’t forget laughing with your husband as he accidentally got his shoes soaked with gasoline. It could be as simple as the shampoo of someone who never came back but you swore they would.
These aren’t just associations, they’re neural pathways that have been burned into the brain through adrenaline, cortisol, and even survival in some cases.
One whiff, and the body floods as if it’s happening again, and that’s neuroscience, not sensitivity.
The Body Remembers What the Brain Tries to Bury
Trauma doesn’t live in the story, it lives in the sensation. A smell can reach deep and unlock a racing heart, some nausea, tears, dissociation, absolute panic, or, strangely, silence…the numbness of shutting down.
Honestly, it’s often involuntary too, smell doesn’t wait for your permission before it stuffs itself up your nose.
That’s why trauma therapy sometimes includes olfactory exposure or scent-based grounding, not to retraumatize, but to slowly, gently reclaim the air. I worked with this more than once.
Aromatherapy isn’t just a buzzword when it’s done right. While the wellness world can feel full of fluff, aromatherapy has real scientific grounding. Certain smells have been studied for their impact on mood and nervous system regulation for many many years now.
Lavender → Reduces anxiety and improves sleep
Bergamot → Eases tension and balances cortisol
Rose → Activates parasympathetic calming pathways
Chamomile → Soothes fight-or-flight
Cedarwood → Grounds and stabilizes the limbic system
This isn’t magic even if it might feel like it, it’s actually something more like molecular messaging. These oils activate receptors in your nose that speak directly to your brain's most ancient systems.
Vitruvi Stone Essential Oil Diffuser
Sleek, ceramic, and quiet, this diffuser turns your space into a sanctuary. Pair it with lavender or bergamot for gentle nervous system support.
The Quiet Side of Recovery
Healing doesn’t always come in words. In fact, for most people who aren’t me, it doesn’t come in words at all. Early on after my trauma, I was encouraged to write. Every day since then I’ve either read or written, so I take great strength from the written word and love to use words to create my own form of art and healing. A lot of people don’t take solace in words though, so sometimes it smells like fresh coffee in a safe kitchen, or citrus while you deep-clean the past. Palo santo on a new moon or mint in a sunlit greenhouse, or even bread baking while you finally exhale could be the scent that makes you feel safe finally.
Healing smells aren’t just about calm, they’re about new memory formation. Each comforting scent you pair with safety creates new neurological scaffolding. You’re not erasing the trauma, you’re rewriting its edges.
Healing isn’t linear, unfortunately for all of us, and scent doesn’t work like a pill.
It’s something you can use to form patterns and repetition. It’s the smell of safety, again and again, until your body believes it.
Try using the same calming oil before bed or lighting the same candle during journaling. It could look like wearing a grounding scent before therapy (or your husband’s sweatshirt that smells like him). Try diffusing lavender during EMDR, or applying cedarwood to your wrists before a hard conversation.
Your brain will learn…slowly, but it will learn eventually. I genuinely do wish there was a magic answer and solution to helping you (and me) heal, but we’ll continue to do our best together, and know that you’re not alone even on your worst days. I’m out there as well.
There’s a word, petrichor, for the smell of dry earth when rain finally falls. It’s one of my favorite smells on this planet. It’s a real chemical release of oils in plants and dirt being released into the air, but it’s also something deeper. To me, it feels like a grief so ancient we don’t even recognize it at first.
Scents like rain, baking bread, cut grass, or old books aren’t just nostalgia…they’re cues from the body that life goes on. Even after your worst days, you get to try again the next day. Isn’t that beautiful?
Smell is sacred, it doesn’t just decorate our lives, it defines them.
For those of us healing from trauma, scent is one of the gentlest, most powerful ways back to ourselves.
It bypasses the stories we’ve told, the rationalizations, and the therapy scripts and goes straight to the place that split.
If you try to use it specifically, it can help your mind learn that you’re safe now and time has indeed past. Life gets easier, and that weight on your chest eases with time.
A Letter To Anyone Who is Tired But Still Trying
Other Reads You Might Enjoy:
Why Does Trauma Make You Forget? A Look at Memory, and the Brain’s Kindest Escape
Revisiting My Trauma Three Years Later (don’t read this one if you’re not mentally prepared)
Feeling Worthless? Here’s Why the Odds of You Existing Are the Most Beautiful Miracle
The Sins of the Father: How Paternal Stress Etches Itself Into Sperm
