This spring, a patch of red sprouts emerged in my garden. To someone else, they might have looked intriguing or even beautiful. But for me, their appearance instantly triggered an unwanted body memory from childhood trauma.

At that moment, my nervous system wasn’t reacting to plants. It was reacting to an implicit memory stored in shapes, colors, and sensations rather than words. In trauma, the brain often encodes experiences as sensory fragments: the curve of a form, the hue of a surface, the sound of a shoe on pavement, the way light falls across an edge.

When those sprouts appeared, they matched a sensory imprint from long ago. My brain’s predictive systems rapidly concluded, “This looks like danger we’ve seen before.” Within milliseconds, my body shifted into high alert, responding with tension, unease, and readiness to defend, long before my thinking mind could make sense of why.

This is what makes trauma triggers feel so sudden and disorienting. They bypass reasoning entirely because they live in the survival circuitry of the nervous system, not in verbal memory.

Instead of turning away or trying to suppress the reaction, I painted them just as they were. I kept their red, their shape, their angled lean. But by bringing them into my own creative space, on my terms, I changed the relationship. I could decide where they sat in the composition, how they were lit, and what surrounded them.

This process didn’t erase the old memory, but it began to loosen the automatic link between that shape and that danger. In neurobiology, this is called memory reconsolidation: the ability of the brain to update an old memory with new emotional and contextual associations.

Creative engagement, whether painting, music, movement, or writing, can give the nervous system a safe way to revisit a trigger and rewrite some of its meaning. You don’t have to make it “pretty” or “positive” to heal from it.

You can’t erase the original memory, but you can change how your body responds to its echoes. And in that is liberation.