Where Are My Swim Cap & Goggles? Healthy Ways to Cope with Trauma
What if I told you that exercise could be used as a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma?
Its being a coping mechanism is not a marketing tool we see being used by companies in persuading consumers to buy their latest and greatest home gym gadgets. Nevertheless, exercise is a healthy alternative in escaping trauma. Now that we trauma victims are living lives that we did not sign up for, we are finding every way possible to escape from our earth-shattering reality; exercise is a healthy way to deal with trauma.
During the summer of 2018, I was still on the search for an escape from my current reality, for I was in year six of what would be a seven-year-long trauma. Yes, I had been a Christian since I was a third-grader. Yes, I have heard the phrase “Give it to God.” Yes, I was reading my Bible during this time. Yes, I was listening to Praise and Worship songs. I knew to do a lot of these things, but I was not getting relief from my trauma. There were times I felt my Heavenly Father was near to me, but most of the time, I felt He was very far away.
Since March of 2012, I was trying to find healthy “escapes” when dealing with those times that I did not feel His presence. I found reaching for my previous life – my life before my traumatic experience occurred - to be one of those healthy “escapes.” I had really taken for granted my previous life. A life that was easy. So I started this searching and reaching for my previous life in every way imaginable, whether it was rekindling a friendship from my younger years or revisiting our favorite childhood family hangouts in town. Each time I would come up empty-handed. I would find that our favorite family hangouts as a child were now demolished and replaced with newer and bigger buildings, or I would find my determined pursuit of rekindling a friendship from my younger years not to be reciprocated. Either way, I was still not going to give up this pursuit.
What other ways could I reach and obtain that easy life that I once had?
Exercise was the last thing on my mind. I was not about to willingly place my body in a state that was grueling and painful. And I sure didn’t want to wake up the next day battling with muscle soreness. No thank you. My body was already unwillingly put under relentless amounts of stress and hardships on a day-to-day basis for years. In dealing with the overwhelming number of disappointments in my life, I turned time and time again to overindulgence in food as an escape. Food tasted so good and gave me relief from the stress that my body was undergoing. I had no boundaries with food, for it was always there for me, and it never let me down. Although I was using food as an escape, I still wanted to keep reaching for my previous life. What persuaded me to choose exercise during the summer of 2018? Why did I willingly join a Master’s swim team, as a middle-aged, overweight woman? Because of the most amazing childhood memories that were attached to this sport - swimming.
During my elementary and middle school years, I was on a competitive, year-round swim team and later on a synchronized year-round swim team. These four years consisted of daily workouts (three workouts per day in the summertime.) Not to mention the swim meets and water shows on the weekends. Those are a lot of memories. Wonderful memories of my previous life that I wanted to relive in my now middle-aged, overweight body. Reliving these idyllic memories trumped the pain my body would endure while swimming.
The first swim practice in over 35 years, with everything from wearing a swim cap for the first time, to see if my body still remembered how to do a flip turn, to gasping for air with every pull of freestyle, to seeing if my body could endure two laps of the pool, was medicine for my soul. The gratifying emotional effects of the sport overrode the physical exhaustion that overtook my body with each swim workout. Not only did I enjoy reliving these memories in my middle-aged body, but I appreciated aspects of the sport that still remain unchanged, especially since my trauma dealt with nothing but change for six consecutive years. From the chlorine smell to watching the black lane below on the bottom of the pool with every breaststroke pull was familiar, and therefore comforting. Yes, to see that modern-day technology had not replaced the gigantic analog time clock on the pool deck was medicine to my soul. Thank goodness something is still the same!
Even though joining the Master’s swim team (that would later dissolve with the COVID pandemic of 2020) turned out to be a successful pursuit in obtaining my previous life, when my other attempts failed, my Heavenly Father would use this as a powerful tool with me in keeping one foot in front of the other. Swimming is a vehicle that my Heavenly Father would use to guide me into something bigger and better than I could have ever imagined. My Heavenly Father would use this sport in a powerful way in my life and teach me more about the person that I am and the person that He wants me to become. I swim in awe of Him! My special relationship with Him that began when I was a third-grade little girl would grow and cultivate like never before in my middle-aged years, and swimming would be one of the many tools that He would use in my life. May we always be in pursuit of healthy ways to cope with trauma.