“Strength is a Product of Trust”: An Ethnographic Study of Trauma-Informed Weight Lifting in the United States

Abstract

Since the initial recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, a growing repertoire of evidence-based therapeutic options have become available for people impacted by trauma. In the past few years, several American gyms have served as generative sites for people impacted by trauma to share their experiences of healing through weight lifting. Committed to increasing access to weight lifting as therapy, a community of weight lifting coaches and psychotherapists have begun to offer trauma-informed weight lifting— an emerging approach to addressing the impacts of trauma premised upon the perceived therapeutic aspects of weight lifting. As its central question, this research asks: what is trauma-informed weight lifting, and how might it reconfigure both the bodies and embodied subjectivities of people who have experienced trauma? Through 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores what possibilities for healing emerge when weight lifting becomes the medium through which trauma is processed, interpersonal bonds are formed, and new forms of embodiment are accessed.