Elizabeth Smart's Unexpected Journey: From Trauma to Triumph in Bodybuilding
Elizabeth Smart was only 14-years-old when she was abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, and sexually assaulted by a street preacher and his wife.A year after her disappearance, Smart safely returned home. But the traumatizing wounds remained. Since her horrifying experience, the now 38-year-old has become a child safety activist, has launched a program teaching women self-defense skills — and more recently shed light on the healing potential of weightlifting after she won first place at a bodybuilding competition in April.“My body has carried me through every worst day, every hellish, grueling experience; it’s created and nurtured three beautiful children, my body has risen to every single challenge life has presented it with, and carried me through, so I refuse to be ashamed of it,” Smart wrote in an Instagram post celebrating her bodybuilding successes.Elizabeth Smart, 38, is now a child safety activist who just won first place in a bodybuilding competition. FOX Image Collection via Getty Images“This was a big change for me, it was hard, it pushed me, challenged me not to give up. I am so proud of myself for doing this. I am so proud of my body, and I want to celebrate it,” she added.The activist received an outpouring of support from her hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom are fellow survivors, calling her a role model and admiring her “courage, determination and work ethic.”Smart brought light to the healing potential of weightlifting when she won first place at a bodybuilding competition in April. National Physique CommitteeTaylor Ann Pappas is one of them.During a recent lifting session at the gym, the South Florida run coach couldn’t help but notice a random man re-racking her weights — before she’d completed her set. “2017 Taylor would have been like, ‘Oh, I’ll just go get a new plate,’ Pappas recounted. “2026 Taylor was like — ‘Bro, what are you doing?’”The 37-year-old told The Post that she wasn’t always so sure of her place or power — describing the version of herself from almost a decade ago as “meek.” Despite achieving much success in her career — she holds a master’s degree in education and is now a full-time running and lifting coach — she neither recognized nor valued who she was.For trauma survivor Taylor Ann Pappas, weightlifting has transformed the way she sees herself — and the space she takes up in the world. Andrew Gallinaro“I hated myself,” she said. “I hated what I looked like. I hated my height. I hated my waist. I hated my boobs. I hated my butt.”A survivor of sexual assault, Pappas confessed she’d felt disappointment in her body — and a disconnection from it — for the majority of her life, similar to Smart.“From a very young age, I thought that my body belonged to other people, that it was for the consumption or for the pleasure of someone else,” she said. Leaning into competitive cheer and ballet growing up, Pappas always had a strong desire for constant movement — but never felt nourished by her passions, saying that both “really became an experience of not being good enough.”Forced to assume the role of parent due to a dysregulated, chaotic upbringing, Pappas was already operating in a place of fear, depletion, overexertion, and people-pleasing way before adulthood.There are a lot of things she hopes her clients take away from training with her — but one of them is learning to love to simply take up space in the world. Andrew Gallinaro“There was this feeling of constriction, of scarcity, of shrinking and shapeshifting to be the version of me that was palatable to someone else.” Despite her athletic background, Pappas never considered or engaged with weightlifting. But it’s something that women with her background, like Smart, are increasingly turning to in an attempt to heal — subsequently finding that it’s helping them work through the pain.Pappas was first introduced to the concept in the wake of a broken engagement. Deciding that she wanted to feel rather than disassociate from the intensity, she began lifting for the first time. “I squatted really heavy, over and over again. At one point, as I reracked, I just started crying. It was cathartic, and the sense was one of hollowed lightness,” she recalled.Through the strain, she found, for the first time, she was connecting with her body — and processing her history. “There’s something really symbolic about choosing to lift a weight and then put it back down. It begs the question of ‘well, what else are you holding on to? You put the dumbbell down, what else can you put down?’” Deciding what to carry, what to unburden and when to stand up, Pappas noticed other shifts. “I saw the echo into my life outside of the gym; saying ‘no,’ stating my actual needs and wants, responding in place of reacting, setting boundaries with people. The heavier I physically lifted in the gym, the heavier the energetic weight I allowed to drop outside of the gym.”Feeling like it was “gatekeeping” not to share her experience and support other survivors, Pappas began training others — earning her certification in Trauma-Informed Weightlifting (TIWL), a concept growing in popularity in recent years, in 2023. Traditional trauma treatment protocols include cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, and talk therapy, but experts maintain that weightlifting is an underutilized method of healing, as it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowers cortisol, and sends a cellular message of presence, capability, and safety — leading to improvements in symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression, and emotional regulation.Studies have shown that weightlifting is an underutilized healing method — one that’s recently growing in popularity. Maridav – stock.adobe.comCandace Liger, TIWL’s director, told The Post that for survivors like herself and Pappas, muscle can serve as a symbol of what can be endured and eclipsed.“Witnessing the body become stronger through consistent training can reshape deeply held beliefs about helplessness,” Liger told The Post.“For many, safety and agency have to be felt or even expressed in the body first, before the words can actually form,” she added. “Strength becomes felt and observable, and that serves as a reminder to survivors that they aren’t simply the sum of the violence against them, but much, much more.”Previous research has found that 70% of U.S. adults report experiencing a traumatic event in their lifetime — and that trauma directly correlates to health conditions such as diabetes, COPD, heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure.That’s because trauma is recorded and remembered by the body, Liger said — processing it through the physical experience of weight lifting can be revolutionary.“In strength training, so many physiological things happen at once: elevated heart rate, muscular strain, fatigue, and stress occur within a structured environment where the participant has choice, support, and recovery periods,” she explained.As trauma disproportionately affects women, minorities, and marginalized groups, who have been conditioned to perceive themselves as powerless, Liger said that strength training can function as embodied defiance.“Resistance training can itself become an act of resistance: resisting the idea that strength has a specific body type, identity, or aesthetic; resisting narratives of helplessness; and building the capacity to take up space,” said Liger.Liger shared that over time, this type of training allows survivors to move through activation without collapsing, panicking, or dissociating.Pappas credits the craft and TIWL with transforming her life — the way she moves, the way she sees and feels herself.“I can do all the talk therapy I want, but if I’m not moving and excavating and exploring my body, then those experiences are getting stuck,” she said. “I see weightlifting as bridging the mental, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual.”She urges her clients to come in ready to heal — but also to feel the “entire kaleidoscope of human emotions” as they progress; especially white-hot anger. “I tell them to scream,” she said. “Our anger is just as sacred as joy. “It just wants to be felt, just wants to be seen, just wants to be witnessed, but we spend so much time suppressing it.” Lifting has transformed Pappas’ life — and she loves sharing her experience with others. Courtesy Taylor Ann PappasMore than anything, she wants the women she works with to learn to love the art of simply taking up space — and she’s leading by example. “Walking into a gym now, I put the dumbbells wherever I want. I’m not going to get small,” she laughed. “Women need to be lifting heavy s–t. You will not be bulky. You will get stronger.”She believes that the culture at large has reinforced the myth as a means of diminishment.“If we’re not strong, we’re shrunken; if we’re not strong, we’re quiet; if we’re not strong, we are easier to control,” she said.And the stronger she feels, the more she’s able to step outside of her own experience and see that ultimately, it’s led her somewhere she never expected to be — thankful for where she came from. “I’m so grateful to younger me for going through what I did,” she said. “Because if that means I get to spend the rest of my time on this earth helping other individuals to feel good in and connected to their bodies, it was so f–king worth it.”
