The first time Elizabeth Smart stepped on stage at a bodybuilding competition, she was terrified.

She says her smile froze. Her hands shook. Every movement had been choreographed and practiced over and over again, down to the turns and poses she would hit beneath the bright stage lights.

But there was only so much she could do to prepare for the pageantry. Unlike in training, she was wearing oversized costume jewelry, including a large ring. The blonde hair extensions were new, too.

Then, as she flipped her hair over her shoulder, the ring snagged one of the extensions.

“I just ended up ripping through the extension and just taking out a chunk of my hair, and then turning around and smiling,” she says, laughing about it now.

At the time, she says, she wanted to run offstage.

Instead, she kept posing in towering heels as the judges rated the body she’d spent years trying to survive inside.

Smart lift weights in her home gym with bodybuilding coach and friend, Robyn Maher.

Kim Raff for NPR

Advertisement

hide caption

toggle caption

Kim Raff for NPR

Advertisement

For Smart, bodybuilding isn’t about the trophies. Yet, four competitions and several medals in, she’s earned something she never expected: confidence in her body.

“I’m at a point in my life where I want to celebrate it,” Smart says, “I don’t want to carry shame about my body.”

A traumatic detour

In 2002, Smart was just 14 years old when a self-proclaimed prophet abducted her at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom while she slept beside her younger sister.

Volunteers head out to search for Elizabeth Smart in Salt Lake City a few days after she was kidnapped in 2002.

Douglas C. Pizac/AP

hide caption

Advertisement

toggle caption

Douglas C. Pizac/AP

For months, the world watched the search for her unfold. Her face was plastered across television screens and the front pages of newspapers. All the while, she was living in the woods just miles from her home.

Now, at 38, Smart remembers the ways she tried to survive the nine months she was held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted. She endured frequent humiliation and psychological manipulation.

Smart attends a White House ceremony in 2003, after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Amber Alert package which would create a system to help find kidnapped children.

Alex Wong/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

hide caption

toggle caption

Advertisement

Alex Wong/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

In her latest book, Detours, Smart describes trauma as a detour — a path you never planned for and never wanted. She’s says she survived captivity in part by holding onto small memories and moments that reminded her that her life existed outside those woods.

“My body was hurt, and it had felt like it had been crushed,” she says. “But it carried me through.”

Disconnecting from the body

That kind of positive relationship with the body after trauma can take years — and sometimes decades — for survivors to develop, says Robyn Brickel, a licensed therapist in Virginia who specializes in trauma-related disorders.

“When early childhood trauma happens, especially sexual trauma, people disconnect from their bodies because it’s unsafe,” Brickel says. “That’s how they survive.”

During the abuse, some victims mentally leave their bodies, focusing instead on small details in the room, she says.

“Lots of trauma survivors will tell you, ‘I know exactly how many light bulbs there were in the chandelier,’ how many cracks were in the ceiling, the pattern on the wallpaper” while the abuse was occurring, she says. “Because that’s where they are.”

She says the body becomes something to escape rather than inhabit. For many survivors, that disconnection doesn’t disappear once the abuse ends.

Brickel says survivors often struggle with feeling shame, confusion and betrayal connected to the body.

“Lots of survivors believe their bodies betrayed them,” she says.

Smart says she understands that feeling.

Raised in a conservative Mormon home, where modesty and purity were heavily emphasized, Smart says she struggled with profound shame after the abuse. She spent much of her time playing the harp, avoided boys and had few close friends.

For years, after she was back home, she says she felt pressure to become what she describes as “the most innocent of victims,” she says. “I had to always do the right thing, always say the right thing.”

By the time she was rescued in 2003, nine months after she was kidnapped, millions of people already knew her name and face. Unlike many survivors, Smart had to heal while in the public eye.

Smart trains five or six days a week, usually 45 minutes at a time.

Kim Raff for NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

Kim Raff for NPR

Advertisement

Today, Smart says, she sees herself differently.

“I can be an advocate for women and children,” Smart says. “But I also can step on stage in a bikini and strut around and strike a pose. And that’s OK.”

To Brickel, that shift — from invisibility to visibility — is significant.

“Trauma survivors will [often] make themselves as unattractive as possible to not get attention,” she says. “They want to disappear. Be invisible.”

Smart competes in the Wasatch Warrior bodybuilding competition in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Mitchell Gilbert

hide caption

toggle caption

Mitchell Gilbert

Advertisement

‘There’s no finish line’

Smart says her relationship with exercise has changed dramatically over the years.

After she was rescued, she says she occasionally ran but didn’t stick with it. She eventually became a marathon runner, though recurring knee pain forced her to stop.

“I always need a goal and I need a deadline,” she says.

Bodybuilding offered both. So, she started strength training about a year and a half ago.

Now she trains at least five days a week, for about 45 minutes at a time. She tracks her meals carefully, counts macros and walks roughly 10,000 steps a day, often on an incline treadmill.

Mounting research shows weight lifting may help some trauma survivors reconnect with their bodies in healthy ways. According to a study published last year in Frontiers in Psychology, resistance training was linked to reduced post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and improved emotional well-being. And a 2023 study published in the same journal found that many trauma survivors described weight lifting as empowering — saying it helped them rebuild confidence, regain a sense of control and feel safer in their own bodies again.

Still, Brickel says physical training and trauma recovery don’t always intersect in healthy ways. For some survivors, exercise becomes another form of disconnecting rather than healing — similar to how some use drugs, self-harm, eating disorders or overworking as a way to outrun emotional pain.

The difference, Brickel says, often comes down to intention and emotional awareness.

“Can I think and feel at the same time?” she says. “Am I running from something, or am I adding to my life?”

That question sits quietly beneath much of what Smart describes. She talks less about perfection than presence. Less about punishment than appreciation.

One of her favorite book passages comes from Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Smart describes Mr. Rochester telling Jane he could crush the cage around a bird, but never destroy the bird itself.

Smart says that metaphor stayed with her.

Though her body felt broken, she says, “it never let my soul be destroyed. It carried me through my kidnapping. It gave me three beautiful children.”

Then she says something that still surprises her: “My body is incredible.”

For Brickel, positive statements like that can represent years of emotional work. “We work on that in therapy all the time,” she says.

But she also notes that healing is rarely linear. Some survivors speak about their trauma right away. Others wait decades. Some never talk about it at all.

“There’s no finish line,” Smart says. “I hope I never stop progressing.”

Smart is considering another bodybuilding competition later this year.

Kim Raff for NPR

hide caption

Advertisement

toggle caption

Kim Raff for NPR

These days, Smart says she’s seriously considering another bodybuilding competition later this year in Nashville — an all-female event that recognizes women who have survived trauma.

Her face lights up as she talks about it.

Not because she believes trauma disappears, but because she no longer wants survival to be the only lens through which she sees herself.

“We can be lots of things,” she says.

When she doesn’t feel like walking outside during training season, Smart climbs onto her treadmill and watches The Great British Bake Off while dreaming of sweets.

“I want that,” she says, laughing. “I am adding that to my post-show treat list.”

“And I want the whole thing,” she adds. “Not just a slice.”