The Body’s Recipe for Remembering

Memory Cookies

Imagine you’re making cookies. You gather the ingredients — sugar, flour, salt, vanilla — and mix them together into something new. Once the dough is baked, it’s impossible to pull them apart again. You can’t keep the sugar but remove the salt; they’ve fused into something inseparable.

Hillary McBride, in The Wisdom of Your Body, describes memories formed during intense or traumatic experiences in this same way. When something overwhelming happens, the brain takes all the “ingredients” — the smell in the air, the sound in the background, the time of day, the body’s posture, who was nearby, the emotion of the moment — and mixes them into one unified memory. That’s the memory cookie.

It’s the body’s brilliant survival strategy. If the brain ever encounters one of those ingredients again — that same smell, or tone of voice, or light in the room — it can quickly recognize potential danger and activate the stress response. The problem is, sometimes the danger isn’t here anymore. The body reacts as if the trauma is repeating, even when the present moment is safe.

Maybe it happens when I hear footsteps behind me on a quiet street, and my body braces even though I know I’m safe. Or when I walk into a classroom and the smell of dry-erase markers tightens something inside me without warning. Or when someone hugs me unexpectedly, and I freeze — caught between the longing to be close and the old reflex to protect. These moments come uninvited, quiet reminders that the body still carries stories the mind may have long moved past.

Nothing is wrong in those moments — the body is simply remembering. The nervous system says, “I’ve tasted this before.”

Triggers are, in McBride’s words, “false positives” — moments when the body tries to keep us safe based on information from the past. It’s not betraying us; it’s protecting us, even if the context has changed. The body can’t tell the difference between the cookie’s ingredients and the memory they represent.

Healing doesn’t mean erasing what’s baked into us. It means learning to notice when an old ingredient has resurfaced and offering kindness to the body that still remembers. When the heart races or the muscles tense, the invitation is not to push it away but to respond softly: Of course.

Of course this feels familiar.
Of course the body is remembering.
Of course it’s trying to help.

The more this gentleness becomes our reflex, the more safety grows from the inside out. Over time, the memory cookie stays the same, but our relationship to it changes. The ingredients no longer overwhelm us — they remind us of what the body has survived and how faithfully it has tried to keep us alive.

Whether home is across the world or right here, each person carries these embodied stories — mixtures of what has been painful and what has sustained. Healing begins when we stop fighting the body’s way of remembering and start listening to it with compassion. Because even when the recipe includes salt, it’s still part of what makes us whole.

About the Author: Breanna Thompson is a registered therapist who integrates EMDR, somatic, and Internal Family Systems (IFS)-informed approaches to support trauma healing, embodiment, and reconnection. With a background of living and working internationally, she offers therapy to clients in Canada and abroad, helping them find safety within themselves and nurture a more compassionate relationship with their inner world.