How Fitness and Strength Training Help Trauma Survivors Reclaim Control
Editor’s Note: April is Child Abuse Awareness Month, and May is National Physical Fitness Month. In recognition of both, Anna Rhymer shares her personal experience alongside research exploring how fitness and strength training can support healing and recovery for trauma survivors. This article contains detailed discussions of abuse and trauma, and reader discretion is advised.
There are some things we carry for so long that they become part of the way we breathe. For me, it started in a tiny rural town of 500 people in Nova Scotia, Canada.
From grade seven through grade nine, I lost my virginity (well…I was being raped by someone who should have been safe. He was my math teacher, a colleague and a close friend of my mother’s, and a trusted adult in the community! All the things you would NEVER expect until you DID. Again, and again, and again, as I walked into the hornet’s nest regularly, shamefully, terrified, and alone… with no recourse to deny him access from 11 to 13 years old.
I was just a little girl – sweet, kind, quiet and oh so innocent. I didn’t have words for what was happening. I recall it like it was yesterday. Sitting at my dining room table for supper and I couldn’t look at anyone. I couldn’t swallow my food. I couldn’t speak. I was shaking from the inside. For what seemed like months. Alone with my dirty little secret.
Looking back, this was the beginning of a 30-year battle with eating disorders that almost killed me. It was also the prelude to drugs, alcohol and a long history of abusive and toxic relationships with men because I didn’t have any self-worth. Or maybe I just didn’t know what ‘self-worth’ was after this experience…that’s more like it: I didn’t know then, and I’m not even sure how deeply my subconscious brain knows it now.
I didn’t have coping skills. I didn’t have the language for trauma, shame, dissociation, hypervigilance, nervous system, or PTSD. Gosh. I had fight or flight (whatever that was) and that “sympathetic nervous system response” was where I lived for the last 30 years. I think they call it “survival mode” or some other crap that ultimately doesn’t mean shit to me unless you get it. If you don’t feel that to the depths of your soul, then you have no idea what I’m talking about.
I didn’t know it at the time, but every sprint, every game, every practice, every hour in the gym was giving my body something trauma had taken away:
A sense of power.
A sense of control.
A place to put the pain.
Because trauma creates trapped energy. When we are hurt and unable to fight back, flee, or fully process what happened, the body stores it. The emotions remain unfinished. The stress hormones remain elevated. The nervous system stays stuck.
That is why people who have experienced trauma often feel restless, anxious, disconnected, numb, exhausted, or on edge…all at the same time. Their bodies are still carrying what their mind has tried so desperately to forget.
Why the Barbell Helps Support Trauma Recovery
There’s a reason so many people who have survived something difficult eventually find their way to the gym. The gym is one of the few places where pain becomes purpose. You walk in carrying something heavy inside of you, and then you pick up something heavy outside of you.
You push, pull, sweat, breathe, and fight. And somehow, for a little while, your mind quiets down. There is real science behind that, including the neuroscience of training and how exercise can help regulate focus, stress, and emotional processing.
Exercise increases dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins—chemicals that are often depleted in people with trauma histories. It increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps the brain heal and form new neural pathways. It lowers cortisol. It regulates the nervous system. Most importantly, it teaches the body that it is no longer powerless.
Trauma says, “You are trapped.”
The barbell says, “You are strong.”
Trauma says, “You are broken.”
The gym says, “You are becoming.”
Every rep is proof that you can survive discomfort, keep going, and that your body belongs to you. That last one matters more than most people understand. For survivors of abuse, the body often becomes a place of shame, fear, betrayal, or numbness. Training changes that because it can create a new relationship with the body.
Instead of seeing your body as the thing something bad happened to, you begin to see it as the thing that carried you through; the thing that is still here and learning to trust again.
When Fitness Became the Healthier Coping Mechanism
I often think about how differently my life could have gone because when you grow up carrying a secret that painful, there are hundreds of ways to numb it.
Drugs.
Alcohol.
Toxic relationships.
Self-destruction.
I didn’t know about those things when I was young.
What I knew was basketball, competition, and that when I moved my body, I could breathe again. After my athletic career changed due to injury, I found the gym and never looked back.
The gym became the place where I rebuilt myself; not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
It became the place where I learned that healing is not linear. It can look like crying in your car after a workout, deadlifting your bodyweight, or just getting out of bed and showing up anyway.
All of it counts.
In full transparency, once my young adult athletic career ended as per tenure at University, I had no coping tools left. So, I found the usual suspects as aforementioned. But that’s a whole other deep dive.
Why So Many Survivors Find Strength in the Gym
We spend so much time in fitness talking about discipline, aesthetics, and results, but we don’t talk enough about what people are carrying when they walk into the gym. Mental health struggles in bodybuilding, including post-show depression, anxiety, identity loss, and emotional burnout, are far more common than most people realize.
The woman crushing her workout beside you may be surviving heartbreak. That man chasing a PR may be fighting demons he has never spoken about out loud. And believe it or not, the strongest person in the room may have once been the most broken.
There is a reason so many of us are drawn to heavy things; because heavy things make sense. You can see them, measure them, and put them down.
Emotional pain is not like that. That follows you, hides in your body, and whispers that you are not enough.
The barbell interrupts that voice, not forever, but long enough for you to hear a different voice. That voice says, “You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to do next.”
Trauma and the Body
One of the greatest myths about trauma is that it’s only psychological, which it isn’t. Trauma is physical. It’s both, really. It’s EVERYTHING. It lives in the shoulders that never relax, the stomach that is always tight, the jaw that aches, the chest that feels heavy, and the nervous system that cannot settle.
It becomes so deeply woven into both the subconscious and conscious mind, that every movement, every thought, and every behaviour begins to emerge from a trauma response.
That is why healing has to involve the body. You can’t think your way out of trauma; you must move through it, literally. You have to teach your nervous system that the danger is over while, at the same time, gently rewriting the subconscious beliefs and conscious thought patterns that were shaped in survival. And we wonder why so many people struggle for a lifetime without ever truly learning how to thrive.
You must create new experiences of safety, power, strength, and trust from the inside, outside, and spiritual side as well. For me, that happened through sport and training, then the gym, then through years of deeper work.
The barbell was not the entire answer, but it was the beginning and the real strength. People think strength is what you can lift. I disagree. Real strength is surviving what should have broken you. Real strength is carrying pain without letting it turn you cruel. Real strength is trusting when you shouldn’t know what trust means, showing up for yourself over and over again, even when you’re tired, grieving, and still hurting.
The strongest people I know are not the ones who have never been wounded. They’re the ones who took their wounds and turned them into wisdom, compassion, discipline, and purpose.
Maybe that’s why we all end up in the gym and under the barbell, picking up and putting down heavy things. Because somewhere deep down, we are not just training our bodies. We are teaching ourselves that we can carry what life gave us, and that maybe—just maybe—we are stronger than we ever knew.
If you are reading this and you have your own story—your own pain, your own secret, your own thing you have spent years trying to outrun—I want you to know this:
“You’re not weak because it hurts. You’re not broken because it changed you. And you’re not alone. It’s not too late. Everything happens for a reason and at the right time. It’s now!”
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