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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s emerging deal to end the Iran war is drawing heavy criticism from some fellow Republicans who favor a harder line against the government in Tehran and fear a lost opportunity to finally rein in a longtime Mideast nemesis.

The deal the Republican president had said was “largely negotiated” has left a range of lawmakers, former Cabinet members and conservative analysts wondering aloud whether the terms as currently known will render the conflict all “for naught.”

READ MORE: Trump says not to rush as U.S. nears potential Iran deal

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the president’s decision to strike Iran was the “most consequential” of his second term and that he should not let up now.

“If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime — still run by Islamists who chant ‘death to America’ — now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake,” Cruz wrote Saturday on the social media platform X. It was in reaction to Trump’s update after he had spoken with the leaders of Israel and other U.S. allies in the region.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who also is close to Trump, panned any deal that would leave Iran perceived as being a dominant force in the region and in which it would retain its ability to destroy oil infrastructure throughout the Gulf.

Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned the merit of a proposed 60-day ceasefire, saying it would be a “disaster.”

“Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!” said Wicker, R-Miss.

Trump says it will take time to ‘get it right’

Trump, who has said he only makes good deals and detests being seen as not having the upper hand in any negotiation, dismissed objections to a deal that he said was not “even fully negotiated yet.”

“So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about,” he said on his social media platform.

Trump said the deal he and his representatives are working out is “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of a nuclear pact that Iran agreed to under the Democratic Obama administration. Trump pulled out of that agreement and has been trying to iron out a new one.

“Both sides must take their time and get it right. There can be no mistakes!” Trump said.

READ MORE: Trump says deal with Iran, including opening Strait of Hormuz, is ‘largely negotiated’

He added that a U.S. military blockade of Iranian ports would remain “in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.”

Some support for Trump came from Capitol Hill, too.

GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, often a thorn in the president’s side, defended the White House’s approach.

“War virtually always ends with negotiations,” Paul wrote on X. “Critics of President Trump’s peace negotiations should give President Trump the space to find an American First solution.”

Under the proposal, the war would come to an end and Iran would reopen the strait and give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, with the details and timelines to be worked out during a later 60-day window, regional officials told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Critics air objections as details trickle out

Polls show the war, which began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, is unpopular with the American public and has cost U.S. taxpayers at least $29 billion, as of this month. Thirteen service members have been killed during the operation.

Trump initially said the war would be over in four weeks to six weeks, but the standoff continues. Iran’s closure of the strait, through which about 20% of global energy supplies transit, has jolted the world economy and sent prices for gasoline and other goods climbing.

READ MORE: Senate advances bill aimed at ending Iran war as Cassidy, after primary loss, flips to support it

Mike Pompeo, one of Trump’s first-term secretaries of state, asserted on Saturday that the emerging deal seemed to him to be the same as the Obama-era one from which Trump withdrew.

“Not remotely America First,” Pompeo said on X, prompting a profanity-laced rejoinder from Steven Cheung, the White House director of communications.

John Bolton, a national security adviser in the first term who has become a critic of the president, said the emerging plan details seemed to favor the Iranian government.

“If news reports about the impending Iran deal are correct, the ayatollahs will have won a significant victory,” Bolton wrote Sunday on X. “They will be back on the road to nuclear weapons, supporting global terrorism and repressing their own people.”

Rubio says a nuclear Iran is ‘not going to happen’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back on Sunday during a diplomatic mission in India, telling reporters at a news conference that no president has been stronger against Iran than Trump.

“His commitment to that principle that they’ll never have a nuclear weapon shouldn’t be questioned by anybody,” Rubio said. “And the idea that somehow this president, given everything he’s already proven he’s willing to do, is going to somehow agree to a deal that ultimately winds up putting Iran in a stronger position when it comes to nuclear ambitions is absurd. That’s just not going to happen.”

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Trump antagonist who had pushed legislation to restrain the president’s ability to wage war against Iran, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that while the terms are not yet fully known, “if Lindsey Graham and Ted Cuz are crashing out last night, I’d say it’s probably a pretty good deal.”

Massie will leave Congress in January after incurring Trump’s wrath and losing his GOP primary last week to a Trump-backed challenger.