Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time

INTRODUCTION

WHEN I WORK WITH CLIENTS INDIVIDUALLY, I understand and appreciate that they are making the choice to include me on their path. The same goes for you, dear reader. Experiencing your own agency is an important piece of trauma work, and I want to acknowledge that you are doing so in choosing to pick up this book. Thank you for including me as a guide on your healing journey.

What I also do when I start working with a client is introduce myself. As such, before we get started, I want to give you the opportunity to learn a bit about me as a practitioner as well as what to expect from this book.

MY EMBODIMENT JOURNEY

I am not your typical fitness professional. I became a trainer and intern at a barbell club in my late thirties. I decided to start my new career path because I felt called to become the trainer I had sought myself, but could not find, following [ ]. I wanted a personal trainer who understood how trauma changes the way people experience their bodies and the world around them. It was my experience, which I later found was supported by research, that exercise had the power to help me heal, but could also exacerbate trauma symptoms.

Immediately following [ ] and before I started doing research, I longed to find a trainer or coach who understood this too and reflected back to me that they also understood what it was like to live with trauma—how hard it was to move well as I struggled to tolerate daily life in my body. As alone as I felt at times, I found it hard to believe that I was the only person out there like me; I wanted to strength train, but trauma was making it difficult for me to feel safe while doing so. I found that without safety, healing was impossible.

And I was right. As soon as I began practicing as a trauma-informed personal trainer, clients around the globe reached out wanting to work using this approach. Over four years I have done some great work with individuals in person, but I want to be able to share the body-based modalities for healing trauma with more folks than I could humanly work with one-on-one. So I wrote this book.

Another thing that makes me different from many fitness professionals is that I am not a jock and never was. Growing up, I hated gym class and was confused by my friends who chose to play sports. Not immediately revealing myself to be coordinated or athletic, my gym teachers and classmates wrote me off as such. I thought I didn’t really mind because I was happiest when I was sitting and reading, writing, drawing, or talking to friends (which matched the rest of the rebel persona I had adopted anyhow). But some part of me internalized the idea that I was unathletic and had no business in the gym. I interpreted that to mean my body was less deserving of love than those of my more athletic-appearing peers. Over time, this poor self-esteem around my body, in both its appearance and ability, made me increasingly disinterested in physical activity.

Flash forward twenty years and I have become a fitness professional, my accomplishments even highlighted by my college’s alumnae association. The college (where, as a student, I had deigned to participate in mandatory PE for what I thought was the last time in my life) interviewed me for two publications and included a photo of me seated comfortably in workout clothes on a weight bench, a rack of dumbbells in soft focus in the background. Those photos revealed just how much had changed since I graduated. My hair still hangs in curls around my face, but they are no longer dyed purple. My body, still soft and average appearing, is considerably stronger than it was at twenty-two. The most important change is not visible: I understand that my body is mine, that I am entitled to have boundaries around it and to take up space with it.

Next to my photo is a pull quote from the interview: I came into my voice. And not only did I learn what I wanted to say, I felt ok saying it. I was referring to my experience of gaining confidence at a women’s college as an insecure teen, but these words also apply to my post-graduate experience: through strength training, as an adult woman, and as a trauma survivor. I went from resenting physical activity to doing it begrudgingly, then habitually, and eventually joyfully, over the course of fourteen years. Strength training helps me continue to step further into my power each day, including in writing this book.

The seeds of my own movement practice were planted back in 1999 when my back went out for the first time. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of college, and I was getting out of a chair at my student job when my back seized up all of a sudden. I could barely walk and spent the rest of the summer recuperating so I could be well enough to sit without excruciating pain in long seminars and lectures the next fall. The orthopedist I saw suggested that strength training could alleviate the pain. While I was relieved that he wasn’t suggesting surgery, exercise felt punitive because going to the gym was all tied up in a messy knot with my experiences in physical education class in school, my poor self-esteem, and an internalized societal rejection of the shape and size of my body. I did the prescribed physical therapy and then promptly put strength training, and my body, on the back burner.

Three days a week at a local commercial gym, I saw my physical therapist, a reticent young woman with a shaved head dressed in the unofficial physical therapist uniform of a polo and khakis. On arrival I would get on the elliptical for five minutes or so and then we would head into the treatment room, where she’d spend thirty minutes doing soft tissue work on my back and adjacent muscles, relaxing their spasms enough so I could move. She often did this by finding a tender point with her thumb, knuckle, or elbow, and staying with it until it released. Then she would massage the surrounding area and move on to the next tender spot and the next. Then we’d do a few core-strengthening exercises before going back to the elliptical for five minutes. It would be ten minutes the following week, and so on until I could tolerate thirty minutes.

After six weeks of physical therapy I returned to campus with a bit of a limp, a crush on my PT, and the intention of sticking with using the elliptical machine two or three times a week. The limp lasted for years, the crush for days, and my commitment to the gym not at all. I rarely used the elliptical in college. I would only go to the fitness center if nothing else worked for a flare-up of pain and to keep up the habit just until the pain stopped.

Seven long years later, I showed up at New York Sports Club to begin strength training. In the time since that bout of physical therapy, I lived my life by moving around carefully; I was only twenty-seven, but I was frequently in pain and always afraid of my back going out again. I had discovered yoga as one modality that helped reduce my pain levels and cultivated a regular practice, but I still couldn’t be pain-free for more than five days. I finally accepted that I wasn’t adequately managing my back pain and that my original doctor (not to mention my mom, who was urging me to meet her trainer) was probably right.

The day I showed up to my mom’s gym, despite resisting it with every fiber of my being, turned out to be the start of a sustainable and healing movement practice. My first trainer, Big Ed Williams, who would become a mentor and lifelong friend, greeted me with a warm and genuine smile. (You’ll get to know him better in this book.) Over the course of eight years, Ed would not only help me train to get out of pain; he would create space for me to find pride in my body, as well as have fun in the gym. By our last year of working together, I had also found the curiosity and courage necessary to try the competitive sport of weightlifting (also known as Olympic weightlifting or Olympic lifting, presumably to differentiate it from the act of lifting weights to strength train). You may be familiar with the event from the summer Olympics, in which athletes use three lifts to get barbells weighing hundreds of pounds off the ground and up over their heads.

It took a couple more years before my movement practice evolved into its current form: embodied, healing, and joyful. Following [ ] I developed PTSD, and then sustained a second back injury that left me unable to do much of anything, especially Olympic lifting. In order to feel safe training, I decided to use movement to intentionally cultivate a relationship with my body; I listened to it more carefully and began to honor it, not just when it needed to move but also when it needed to rest. I had to, or else I ran the risk of getting hurt again and again, which would mean I couldn’t train at all. I changed the way I approached strength training in order to heal my back first, then to protect my body. I had no idea that this mental process would also play a pivotal role in helping me heal my emotional and spiritual self, as well as my relationships with others.

DISCOVERING EMBODIED PRACTICE

I deepened my practice, while also achieving long-term training goals, through self-directed education and practical exploration. I sought out classes and studied with trauma teachers and practitioners who worked with the physiology of trauma. It was during my initial studies that I decided to become a certified personal trainer, so I cracked those books, too—my shelves now bend under the weight of the books I have read on the physiology of trauma, Somatic Experiencing, mindfulness practices, polyvagal theory and its application to healing trauma, trauma-sensitive yoga, and human movement. These are the various modalities I use myself and with clients, some of which we’ll get into in this book.

In books and through experience, I’ve learned that our bodies have a lot of good information to share if we pay attention. This happens when we’re in a state commonly referred to as embodied, which is thrown around a lot in wellness circles without a very clear definition. We’re all in bodies, right? So how can we not be embodied? Unfortunately, that’s not quite everything.

When you are embodied, you are mindful of your body—its shape, weight, and density—and have the capacity to be aware of feelings and sensations that arise from it as and when they do (not after or before). It may sound simple to be embodied, but for many people it’s not—especially those living with trauma (we’ll go into this in Part II).

I first figured out how to be embodied in the gym and then in the world. This process helped me discover what I was capable of and what my boundaries, needs, joys and fears are. I stumbled a lot along the way. I spent a lot of money and time on orthopedists and physical therapists, body workers and energy workers, hypnotherapists and talk therapists, mindfulness and yoga classes, personal trainers and weightlifting coaches, wellness retreats and workshops, feng shui experts, and of course, books on all of these subjects! Of the many therapeutic modalities I tried, some worked for me and others didn’t.

By teaching you in this book how to listen to what your whole body tells you, I hope to help you bypass the services, modalities, and practitioners out there that don’t align with what you want and need from your own long-term journey with healing through movement. From an embodied place, you will be better equipped to decide what is actually safe and healing for you, as opposed to doing things because others tell you they’re safe and healing. Although my story is one that takes place primarily in the weight room, I know that yours may take place elsewhere—a Pilates studio, your own living room, or the great outdoors, to name a few places where embodiment may await you. The tools I share in these pages will work, no matter which movement sparks your curiosity and no matter where you practice.

ABOUT ME

I think it’s important for you as my reader to learn more about me generally along with the parts of my daily experience that have shaped my work, because these formed the lens I bring to my work and my writing. My work grew out of all of my own lived experiences, and my healing and growing was shaped by many factors that go beyond my trauma. My experience has roots in areas where I have had tremendous privilege, such as wealth and perceived whiteness and heterosexuality, which gave me access to a private education from high school through graduate school and have opened doors to networks of people who could help me. My privilege has also granted me access to excellent medical and mental healthcare, as well as making it possible for me to access many different wellness modalities.

My experience is also that of a Jewish American of Syrian descent who is not always seen as white. While I have benefitted from white supremacy, I have also experienced racism. I am queer and often assumed to be heterosexual because I married a cisgender man. I have experienced heterosexism. And like my sexuality, they may not be visible, but I am living with disabilities. I have experienced ableism.

I am also about a size twelve or fourteen. I have an average appearing physique. I mention this because although people come in all shapes and sizes, a lot of folks feel movement is off-limits to them, not because of ability but simply because they are not lean or small. I live in a body that is larger and softer than most fitness professionals’, yet I work in the fitness space. I have been told by colleagues I don’t belong because I am unhealthy. They don’t actually mean unhealthy—it is code for fat. In terms of my health, my bloodwork is excellent. I have healthy relationships, a fulfilling life, and a strong sense of my own boundaries. Those people, however, suffer from fatphobia. I have experienced body shame.

Professionally, I have worked with clients in barbell clubs, personal trainer facilities, and remotely with clients in their own homes or gyms. In barbell clubs, my clientele was diverse in age, gender, race and sexuality. My private clients tend to be white, cisgender women or gender non-conforming people in their late-twenties and thirties.

WHY STRENGTH TRAINING?

There are many movement-based modalities and more are being invented every day. For some of us, our movements can appear to flow one into the next, whereas others move more abruptly or forcefully. Some of us may move more stiffly and others appear floppy. But at the end of the day, our skeletons are designed to move in a finite number of ways; our joints hinge and sometimes swivel, our muscles contract and relax, and our nervous systems make it all happen. Human movement in all its forms comes from the movement systems working together: muscles, bones, and nerves all communicating in the same language.

This really sunk in for me one day when I was in a yoga class practicing the pose Warrior III. About two years ago, after countless times doing the pose where you stand on one leg, lift the other leg behind you, and lean your upper body forward to make a T shape, I realized it’s the same movement as a single-leg Romanian deadlift—something I’d done at the gym to improve performance. They are both hip hinges done on one leg. The only difference is the assumed approach to them. It is assumed in yoga that one is moving mindfully through the shapes, uniting breath with movement and maintaining presence of mind. That said, I know many people (past me included) who spend yoga class focusing on perception and performance—how to look the best, or even win doing yoga.

On the flip side, many folks assume strength training is all about performance and appearance. I am going to be honest with you: my unyielding desire to look like a strong badass is what got me under the barbell in the first place and is part of my motivation to keep coming back. But when I train now, it’s no longer a performance or in the name of performance. I don’t train to compete in weightlifting anymore and I don’t expect to win anything when I’m done with a session. That mentality doesn’t align with my own goals for training anymore.

I train to feel my body, uniting my breath to reps and focusing on what it feels like inside as my body moves against the resistance of the weight of kettlebells, dumbbells, barbells and more. In that way, I approach strength training the way one is intended to approach yoga. I train to deepen my relationship with myself and to feel my capacity for lifting heavy things. I train to be embodied.

Along with all of this awesome stuff, strength training—lifting weights, using weight machines, and training with resistance bands—benefits your heart, muscles, bones, posture, and balance. It makes you a more efficient mover and can eliminate certain types of chronic pain. It improves your mood and promotes better sleep. On top of all of these benefits, the experience of getting physically stronger over time builds feelings of self-confidence and self-efficacy, which is very empowering. While some of my clients have worked with me to become powerlifters, most of them are focused on everyday empowerment: being able to carry their groceries home, take long bike rides with their partners, or feel confident enough to take a group fitness class.

In terms of working with trauma, I find embodied strength training incredibly useful in cultivating a sense of safety within one’s own body, as well as helping survivors identify what they need to feel safe in their environment and relationships. In her seminal book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Dr. Judith Herman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, proposed a three-stage model for recovery from psychological trauma. The first stage is establishing a sense of safety, starting from within the body and then moving outward into the environment. She recommends hard exercise as