Essential Oils for Unresolved Trauma

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After Max died, a well-intentioned friend recommended a grief group for parents who had lost children. I contacted the organization and one of the women in the group called me. She had lost a child over 20 years ago and was still a hysterical mess. I don’t remember much of the days shortly after Max died, but I distinctly remember thinking, “If that is me in 20 years, please kill me now.” There has to be a better way to work through grief – and it turns out there is.

But it is not what mainstream psychologists and even trauma therapists recommend. It has to do with accessing and reprocessing the part of the brain and the body that store and classify your memories. EMDR and somatic therapy work on these principles, which is why they are effective. And… there is an even more direct and more effective way to work through this trauma and classify it in your brain – moving it from the “stored trauma/active threat” file, which triggers the maladaptive stress response and the sympathetic nervous system, to the “processed trauma/safety” file.

Many of us forget that nose cells are brain cells and the inhalation pathway travels directly to the part of the brain that classifies our stored experience as threat or safety.

The fastest, easiest, and least traumatic way to release the sting of past trauma is literally through your nose!

And no one is talking about it… until now!

Scent and Trauma

Scent can be used to modulate mood and emotion.

The areas of your brain that process smell are deeply connected to those responsible for processing memories and emotions. More specifically, the tissue structures that identify odors are anatomically connected to the area of your brain that governs your emotions, memories, and feelings.

This deep neuroanatomical connection makes sense, as your sense of smell is critical to survival. You smell food, you smell water, and you smell danger. This is why your brain prioritizes the smell pathway over your other four senses.

Nerve signals that relay information about sight, sound, and touch travel through the part of your brain known as the thalamus – the area that receives signals from the external world and decides where those signals should go. Smell signals bypass the thalamus and directly access your emotional and memory centers – in part because these scent memories help you stay alive.

Let’s break it down.

Your sense of smell starts when molecules in the air (odorants) travel to your olfactory bulb, then to your amygdala – the emotional center of your brain. If there’s a strong scent memory or emotion correlated with the smell, your amygdala signals the nearby hippocampus, where memories are stored. Nerve signals are also sent to the frontal lobes of your brain, which play a role in your higher-level thinking, including memory, learning, decision-making, and your capacity for emotional regulation.

Research has found that the inhalation of essential oils may “trigger strong, emotional memories and elevated activity in the brain areas strongly linked to emotion and memory.”

Research also found extensive evidence to suggest that memories triggered by an odor (like the scent of a rose) were accompanied by greater activity in the limbic system. In other words, scents – such as those from essential oils – directly reach and activate the limbic system and can be used to help modulate your emotional response and mood, with research finding that “odors can overtly or subliminally modulate mood and emotion.”

What is Unprocessed Trauma?

Trauma isn’t just an isolated event. It isn’t a “thing” that happened to you. It’s the lasting impact on your nervous system when an experience exceeded your capacity to process and respond.

Let me say that again. The ongoing experience of trauma is what happens inside of you after a physical, mental, or emotional experience exceeded your capacity. It’s how your nervous system responds when an experience overwhelms your ability to feel safe and cope.

Trauma is thought to alter the area of your brain responsible for safety and memory, convincing the amygdala that perceived threats are stored everywhere. Unprocessed or unresolved mental or emotional trauma can keep you stuck in the “fight or flight” danger response. This is due, in part, to the connection between your brain and your nervous system.

Spoiler Alert: The connection between your brain and your sense of smell can be used to unravel this.

Any trauma that has not been unraveled or processed is stored in the body. Your brain and body are inseparable; what your mind can’t process, your tissues and energetic biofield often hold. Your body and brain archive every sight, smell, and sound tied to danger. When trauma leaves its chemical mark on the vagus nerve, the subconscious and the body remember trauma even when the conscious mind forgets. This means that unprocessed trauma sends a continuous signal of danger to your nervous system, which then informs your thinking, perceptions, and experience of life.

Here’s how it works: Your brain is made up of sophisticated networks of nerve cells that act as powerful information transmitters between your brain and your nervous system. These nerve cells receive information from both your external and your internal world and store this information – much of which you may not even be consciously aware of. These memories and experiences inform who you are and how you respond to the world around you. They also inform what you perceive and attract or repel in the world around you. Negative experiences – like trauma – can train or even disrupt this information flow, like a short circuit.

When you’re in danger, your brain spends less time coding the memory properly and more time getting you to safety. The poorly coded memory can become fragmented, not unified. This can contribute to unprocessed trauma—when your memories, feelings, and ability to cope are out of your control.

It may be why you feel stuck.

Processing through this trauma helps you feel unstuck!

Causes of Unresolved Trauma?

Any experience that overwhelms your ability to cope or process emotions at the time they occur can linger in your body as unresolved trauma. Common sources of trauma may include:

Childhood Abuse or Neglect: Any physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, as well as growing up in a household with emotional unavailability, instability, or unmet needs.

Loss and Grief: The death of a loved one or the end of a significant relationship can leave lasting emotional wounds. Abandonment by family members can also cause significant emotional trauma.

Domestic Violence or Toxic Relationships: Ongoing emotional, physical, or psychological harm in intimate relationships can cause lasting trauma.

Sexual Assault or Harassment: Sexual violence often leads to shame, fear, and long-term emotional distress.

Accidents or Medical Trauma: Serious accidents, injuries, serious illness, or invasive medical procedures can leave a psychological impact.

Long-term stressors: Living in an unstable or unsafe environment, battling a life-threatening illness, or experiencing traumatic events that occur repeatedly, such as bullying, domestic violence, or childhood neglect and emotional abuse.

Witnessing or Experiencing Violence: Experiencing life-threatening situations or sudden horrific events, such as an unexpected or violent accident, attack, war, injury, or natural disaster, especially if it happened in childhood.

Emotional Invalidation or Betrayal: This includes being repeatedly dismissed, gaslit, or betrayed by someone trusted, especially in formative years.

Physical Symptoms of Trauma Held in the Body

Trauma is often stored where blood flow is highest and muscles are most tense, including:

Vagus Nerve: When you experience unresolved trauma, your sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”) stays activated, causing the body to hold low-grade physical tension, known as protective bracing.
Neck and shoulders: The trapezius acts like shoulder pads for threat, bracing against perceived threats.
Jaw: The muscles in the jaw naturally clench as a defense mechanism to suppress feelings like fear, anger, or helplessness. The jaw is anatomically linked to the vagus nerve and the social engagement system. When you feel unsafe, this system can cause you to pull back, tighten your facial expressions, and brace your jaw.
Chest and heart: Grief collapses the sternum, making the lungs shallow. Many people who have experienced trauma describe chest tightness that feels like they can’t fully inhale—evidence of “frozen” intercostal muscles.
Abdomen/gut: The enteric nervous system is sometimes called “part of our brain” because serotonin lives there. When stored trauma tightens the gut wall, physical ailments such as IBS, nausea, or appetite swings may emerge.
Lower back and hips: Psoas muscles cling to the spine during flight responses, so childhood trauma or adult assaults often echo as lumbar spasms and uneven hips.
Spine: Unresolved trauma can be stored in your body as Sustained Muscle Tension or “Armoring” (More here), which causes muscles in the spine to lock into a constant, low-grade clenching state, impacting every vertebra and the information it transmits between your mind and your body.
Fascia: Under sustained stress or unresolved trauma, fascia can become dense, stiff, and dehydrated (often described as muscle armoring), restricting movement in areas like the jaw, neck, shoulders, and hips. Your fascia communicates with your nervous system through sensory and autonomic nerve endings. Physical restrictions can perpetuate feelings of anxiety, disconnection, or emotional overload, while physical work can sometimes trigger sudden emotional releases.

Mental & Emotional Symptoms of Trauma Held in the Body

When trauma is not resolved, the conditioned patterns of fear and helplessness may contribute to emotional patterns like:

Emotional Numbness: Trauma can lead to a sense of emotional numbness or detachment.
Increased Anxiety or Agitation: Trauma can trigger heightened anxiety, leading to restlessness, hypervigilance, and a constant sense of unease.
Difficulty Trusting: Mistrust forms early if you cannot consistently rely on your caregiver to meet basic needs for love, safety, security, food, or shelter. This mistrust in infancy can affect your ability to feel safe or secure in relationships.
Mood Swings: Trauma can lead to frequent mood swings and emotional reactions, with emotions fluctuating between anger, sadness, and numbness.
Constantly on the Go: A common “flight” trauma response is the desire to constantly try to do more in order to outrun childhood pain. This may include a pattern of overachieving, over-committing, workaholism, or perfectionism as ways of trying to emotionally numb unprocessed trauma. At the root of this behavioral pattern are unmet needs to feel good enough and accepted for who you are.
Inner Critic: You may experience deep feelings of shame or feel unworthy of love.
Poor Boundaries: If you grew up in an environment that did not offer stable or consistent boundaries, you may struggle to set clear boundaries and default to people-pleasing tendencies out of fear of being shamed or abandoned.
Fiercely Independent or Avoidant: If you were shamed or harshly disciplined for being vulnerable, you may avoid relying on others, believing you can only count on yourself. You may also find yourself shutting down, pushing others away, and preferring time to yourself.

Using Scent to Process Trauma

Your sense of smell may help you gently and easily process through traumatic thoughts and memories.

As stated above, the connection between your brain and your sense of smell can be used to process and release traumatic memories.

Just as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) accesses the brain’s natural healing mechanisms – mimicking the rapid eye movement that occurs in the brain during REM sleep to process and integrate traumatic memories – your sense of smell can be used to activate the part of the brain that processes the emotional charge of traumatic memories. These modalities both work well because they work with your brain’s natural system for processing previously frozen and fragmented sensory experiences, like trauma.

Smell also helps you bring awareness to how your body is reacting to stress, trauma experiences, or memories.

While your brain is constantly processing and storing your experiences as memories, scent offers a highly effective therapeutic tool for trauma processing. This is because your olfactory system is the only sense that directly bypasses the brain’s rational filtering center (the thalamus). Instead, olfactory signals travel directly into the amygdala (the threat and emotion center) and the hippocampus (the memory center).

This hardwired neural pathway makes odor-evoked memories more vivid, emotional, and deeply engraved than visual or verbal cues. Smells elicit feelings before the conscious mind can even identify what the odor is. This biological shortcut allows scent to serve as a direct gateway to and a potential healing mechanism for unprocessed or unresolved psycho-emotional trauma and emotional experiences.

When a traumatic or highly stressful event occurs, the brain archives the exact sensory context of the threat to protect you in the future. Because the olfactory system is intertwined with our survival instincts and has a direct, highway-like connection to the amygdala (the brain’s threat detector) and the hippocampus (the memory center), smell bypasses the logical brain entirely. This unique wiring makes it one of the fastest, most effective tools to short-circuit an anxiety loop and ground a hyper-reactive nervous system.

While unresolved trauma or chronic anxiety is often correlated with a nervous system in a state of hypervigilance, your sense of smell is deeply tied to your sense of safety, belonging, and primal boundaries. In other words, because the connection between olfaction and emotion is structurally reversible, the sense of smell can actually be used to short-circuit anxiety loops and retrain the nervous system, according to research on “When the Sense of Smell Meets Emotion: Anxiety-State-Dependent Olfactory Processing and Neural Circuitry Adaptation”

Parasympathetic®

Unresolved trauma traps your autonomic nervous system in a continuous survival loop, preventing it from returning to a baseline state of safety.

You have to be able to regulate your nervous system in order to process and release trauma. Unfortunately, when your body is in a heightened state of stress or arousal (sympathetic dominance), the ability of your subconscious mind to get programmed may be hindered.

Parasympathetic activation helps you become less reactive and more responsive: You develop the ability to consciously hold a space between your brain’s reactive movement and your subconscious awareness. This ability, as it grows, is what allows you the feeling of “freedom” from being a prisoner to any unresolved trauma.

When you are caught in a sudden spike of anxiety or fear, your logical brain goes offline, making it difficult, if not impossible, to process overwhelming experiences and unresolved trauma. Parasympathetic® helps to calm the “fight or flight” stress loop, allowing you to discharge stuck adrenaline. Its strong, sharp scent of clove and lime may also shock your system back into the present moment. It is hypothesized that the intensity of the aroma acts as a sensory interrupt, forcing your brain to shift its focus away from the internal panic loop and back to the physical environment.

Essential oils are natural, non-invasive, and easy-to-use tools that can activate your parasympathetic nervous system and activate relaxation and a flow state that help enhance clarity and awareness, which may help process unresolved trauma.

Essential oils possess both olfactory (smell) and transdermal (topical application) properties, making them easy to inhale and apply to the skin to stimulate the vagus nerve and activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Topically applying the Parasympathetic® blend behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps stimulate your vagus nerve, which triggers your “rest and digest” parasympathetic state, alerting your body and your amygdala that the danger has passed so they can stop overreacting. Your vagus nerve helps your autonomic nervous system communicate fear and danger information to your amygdala. In simple terms, the vagus nerve detects the release of the stress hormone epinephrine, which acts as a “something important just happened” signal that is communicated to other fear centers in the brain. Activation or inhibition of this signal “can enhance or decrease the rate of fear extinction.”

Research titled “Fear and anxiety take a double hit from vagal nerve stimulation” documents how activating your parasympathetic nervous system via vagus nerve stimulation helps to quell an overactive limbic system. By enhancing fear extinction while quelling anxiety, vagal stimulation delivers a double hit against maladaptive fear. This may make vagal stimulation particularly useful in cases where severe anxiety prevents effective exposure therapy.

What’s more, when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine, which calms anxiety by relaxing the smooth muscles in your artery walls, dilating the arteries, and slowing your heartbeat. It also may enhance memory consolidation and enhancement, which may help with the processing of fear memories, which helps inhibit exaggerated fear expression, like anxiety. (Read more about Acetylcholine.)

Unstuck™

Unstuck™ encourages gentle unraveling of trauma, allowing the body to release protective bracing that no longer serves.

These patterns may have helped you survive stress, trauma, grief, rejection, fear, or uncertainty. But over time, what once protected you can begin to limit you, keeping you locked in emotional loops, nervous system responses, self-sabotaging behaviors, and physical tension long after the original threat has passed.

Unstuck™ was formulated to support the gentle release of trauma, karma, subconscious imprints, and old emotional patterns that may be keeping you stuck. If you do not release but continue to hold unprocessed emotional responses, they can become habitual patterns of tension that may keep you stuck. Even after the emotion has passed, your body may remain locked in these braced postures, restricting the flow of energy that supports health and healing.

This expertly crafted blend of Blue Tansy, Roman Chamomile, Ylang Ylang Extra, Pressed Lime, Mandarin, Lavender, and Rose works through the olfactory pathway to help activate the limbic system, the part of the brain involved in emotion, memory, and subconscious patterning.

By supporting a felt sense of nervous system safety, Unstuck™ helps create the internal conditions for deeper emotional release, allowing your body to soften old defenses, shift outdated patterns, and begin letting go from the inside out.

Designed for inhalation or topical application. Topically apply 1–2 drops to the top of the head, base of the neck, over the throat, over the heart, navel, bottom of the feet, or behind the ears. Use 2 to 3 times daily.

You may choose to pair Unstuck™ with a practice that supports deep safety and relaxation, like meditation, journaling, or somatic practice. Over time, your brain creates a conditioned response, meaning the scent of Unstuck™ alone will eventually trigger calm. Once anchored, you may choose to carry Unstuck™ with you. When you feel anxiety rising, inhale it to actively signal to your nervous system that you are safe.

Fascia Release™

Fascia Release™ helps you try new things by calming your nervous system and eliminating the physical bracing patterns that keep your brain locked in a protective survival mode. It signals that fascia and nerves are unwinding, allowing trapped emotions and trauma to surface, then soften.

Your fascia is highly innervated and communicates directly with the nervous system. That means that when your nervous system perceives unfamiliar situations or stress, it may increase tissue tone as protection.

When you work on fascia, everything resets naturally – it helps to release tension and reduce guarding in the connective tissue web that surrounds every muscle, organ, nerve, and bone. When you are less guarded, it is easier to let go of unprocessed or stuck energy.

Fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils onto the skin allows for easy and immediate access to the fascia. The skin is your largest organ and is relatively permeable to fat-soluble substances like essential oils. The Fascia Release™ blend is uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages. Topically apply Fascia Release™ liberally around the jaw/neck/face, the shoulders/heart, the diaphragm/lungs, the stomach/gut, lower back/hips, the ankles, or anywhere that tension presents, 2–3 times daily.

Limbic Reset™

Your limbic system acts as the emotional core of the brain and a major driver of trauma responses, processing raw feelings, survival instincts, and automatic memories outside of your conscious awareness. It is constantly filtering and bringing to your attention information and stimuli that affirm your preexisting beliefs, as well as presenting you with repeated thoughts and impulses that mimic and mirror that which you’ve done in the past. If your subconscious mind is not addressed, it can undermine your healing by holding onto subconscious ideas or programs that undermine your ability to heal.

Your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system,” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system will then prompt your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response. This threat response can become maladaptive and overly reactive, leading to poor emotional regulation and overly reactive emotional responses.

Restoring proper function to the limbic system can help TURN OFF the alarm in your limbic system—in effect, rebalancing inhibition and activation—and TURN ON your body’s self-healing mechanisms by regulating your “fight or flight” response and rewiring your response to emotional triggers. Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system. This is because smell can access the limbic system of the brain to lower limbic system activation, which then enables your body to enter the parasympathetic “rest, digest, and repair” state.

Limbic Reset can be topically applied over Emotional Points located on the forehead (above the eyes and on the temples), an emotional release point located at the base of the skull at the back of the neck, on the bottom of the feet, and especially on the amygdala reflex point on the big toe. You can also apply over Filter points located on both sides of the back of the skull, which are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern. My most exciting discovery is different acupressure points that assist in releasing emotional patterns.

Emotional points above the eyes on the forehead for emotional release

Emotional Points located above the eyes on the forehead. You can also lay your hand over your forehead. I write more about the forehead points for healing emotional trauma HERE.
Release point is located at the spinal cord at the base of the skull
Filter points are located on both sides of the back of the skull. They are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern.