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I have spent years as a trauma therapist sitting with people as they heal.
Noticing the held breath, the shift in posture, the stories the body tells before words arrive. My work, at its core, is helping people come back to their bodies. So when I walked into a CrossFit gym a few months ago and started lifting heavy for the first time in my life, I expected a workout. What I found was a contemplation on somatic healing.
Trauma is not the event itself.
It is what happens inside the nervous system when an experience overwhelms our capacity to cope: too much, too fast, too soon, without enough safety, support, or say in what was happening. It lives in the body long after, shaping how we breathe, how we brace, and how we connect.
Every nervous system has a window of tolerance: the zone where we can meet activation, emotion, and challenge while staying present.
Trauma narrows that window. Healing widens it, and not by avoiding intensity. The window widens by meeting intensity with safety, again and again, until the body learns it can handle more.
That is exactly what keeps happening at the gym. I show up as an athlete, but the Somatic EMDR therapist in me never fully clocks out.
Workout after workout, I watch my own nervous system do the very things I help clients do in the therapy room.
1. Intensity is not the same as threat.
Thirty seconds into an echo bike sprint, arms pushing and pulling, legs at full throttle, my heart is pounding, my breath is ragged, and my nervous system is fully activated. This is sympathetic activation: fight or flight, the body’s surge of energy to meet a demand. Sensation alone does not tell the nervous system whether this is a workout or a crisis. Context does. At the gym, I ride primal activation while anchored in cues of safety: the coach’s voice, the people around me, the clock promising rest. Activation with safety builds capacity. And that capacity does not stay on the bike. It carries into hard conversations, big emotions, and everyday stress.
2. Healing happens in connection.
Co-regulation is the process by which one nervous system settles in the presence of another. It is how we are wired from the start: long before we ever learn to regulate our own emotions, our caregiver’s nervous system does it with us. When I want to quit mid-workout and someone says “you’ve got this,” my body responds before my thinking brain does. My shoulders drop, my breath finds a rhythm, and I find another gear I did not know was there. For trauma survivors, whose bodies often learned that other people are the threat, repeated steadiness from others is quietly revolutionary. The class format and coaching is a co-regulation machine.
3. The body speaks. Interoception is how we listen.
Interoception is the ability to sense what is happening inside your own body: heartbeat, breath, tension, fatigue, hunger, the early whispers of emotion. It is the foundation of the felt sense, and trauma disrupts it. Many survivors learned to leave their bodies to survive, or to override every internal cue. Lifting heavy re-trains that skill rep by rep. Is my core braced? Is this fatigue or is this pain? Do I have one more rep in me? The barbell asks me to listen to my body constantly and respond to what I hear. Strength training is embodiment training.
4. Agency is rebuilt one choice at a time.
So much of trauma is about what happened to us, what we could not stop, control, or consent to. In overwhelm, it can feel as though choice disappears. Reason, our prefrontal cortex thinking goes offline, hijacked by our limbic primal defenses. Weightlifting reverses that relationship to intensity with choice. I choose the weight. I choose when to lift and when to rack it. I sense what my body is telling me, and I act on it: add 10 pounds or take 10 off, push for one more rep or call it. For a body that learned choice was not an option, every rep can be an embodied experience of bodily autonomy and sovereignty. Empowering is an understatement.
5. The nervous system needs to finish what it starts.
The workout ends and the nervous system practices the return. Heart rate settling, breath deepening, chatting with new friends while rolling out our hamstrings, the shift from full effort back to rest and connection. This is the completion of the stress cycle: activate, mobilize, discharge, return to rest. In trauma, that cycle gets interrupted. The body starts a survival response it never gets to finish with safety, and the unfinished energy stays in the system. Lifting heavy lets me finish the cycle, on purpose, week after week.
All of it adds up to resilience: a nervous system that can meet what comes, stay connected through it, and find its way back.
And it has me rethinking what strength actually is.
In my practice, I often see the belief that emotional strength means needing less. Less help, less rest, less feeling. I carried a version of it myself. But real strength, the kind the body-mind builds, is capacity for more.
I do not train to become harder. I train to hold more. Not just more weight. More of life.
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