Safety, Strength, and the Whole Self

Year of You Staff
Oct 30, 2025
6 min read

Welcome back to the Year of Y.O.U. newsletter!

Today we will reflect on take-aways from the Spotlight video series while also highlighting themes as they relate to Domestic Violence Awareness month.

The Mind - Body Connection to Physical Wellness

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as we reflect on last month’s three-part Year of Y.O.U. Spotlight series, we’re reminded that physical wellness begins with safety in both body and spirit. For many, healing the body isn’t about strength, it’s about permission: permission to rest, to move at your own pace, and to feel safe again. The body often carries both pain and protection. It remembers harm, tension, and fear, yet also holds the capacity for healing, restoration, and peace.

True physical wellness isn’t measured by endurance or performance, but by the ability to live freely, breathe deeply, and move through life without fear. This month, as we continue exploring physical wellness, we also honor those who are rebuilding their sense of safety and learning to regain trust in their bodies as instruments of freedom instead of fear.

Movement, Mobility & the Power of Strength

As we close the multipart Year of Y.O.U. Spotlight series on Physical Wellness, we return to the heart of it all: learning to listen to, honor, and move our bodies with intention. In the same way emotional safety supports healing, intentional movement helps rebuild trust in the body and deepens our sense of connection to ourselves.

Over the past few months, we’ve explored the full spectrum of physical wellness. We went from physical awareness and finding moments to reset to injury prevention and recovery to fitness and function to finally strength and longevity. Together, these conversations remind us that movement is not only physical, but also deeply personal, emotional, and empowering.

Part I: Knowing Who to Talk To

We began the video series by addressing a common question: Who do I turn to when something feels off in my body?

Dr. Erica Wade shared her own journey with injury and the uncertainty that follows when pain lingers without clear direction. She was joined by Khadijah Williams, LAT, ATC, and Julia Baden, LPC and CrossFit Level 2 Coach, for a discussion that clarified the distinctions between athletic trainers and physical therapists. Two professions that often overlap but serve unique purposes:

Athletic trainers specialize in prevention, emergency response, and rehabilitation, often bridging the gap between injury and recovery.

Physical therapists diagnose and treat more complex conditions, restoring mobility and strength after injury or illness.

Takeaway: Your wellness team is a network, not a hierarchy. Knowing who to talk to ensures you receive the right kind of care and helps you move with both confidence and safety.

Part II: Finding the Right Fit for Your Fitness Journey

The second spotlight shifted from healing to building, focusing on how to choose the right personal trainer to meet your needs. Julia emphasized that scope of practice matters. A good coach or trainer knows when to refer out and when to guide you forward. Alongside Khadijah and Dr. Wade, they explored how fitness becomes most meaningful when guided by safety, motivation, and consistency. While fitness professionals can help prevent injury and promote strength, when pain appears it’s essential to consult medical or rehabilitative experts.

They also explored the emotional side of movement where choosing what you enjoy makes all the difference. Whether it’s dance, cycling, weight training, or walking, movement should feel sustainable and joyful rather than forced or punishing.

As Julia shared, “The key to overall fitness is finding movement you love.”

Dr. Wade closed with a powerful reminder that curiosity and education are the first steps toward empowerment. Knowing who to trust and what to ask helps us move smarter, not just harder.

Part III: Redefining Strength as Movement for Every Season of Life

The final conversation took a deeper look at strength training and the myths that hold many people, especially women, back. Julia spoke candidly about how societal expectations to stay small or avoid “getting bulky” can harm long-term health. In reality, lifting weights builds resilience, supports bone density, and sustains mobility as we age. Khadijah added that “you won’t get bulky just by lifting,” anyway. True transformation depends on nutrition, rest, and consistency, not fear.

Together, the speakers emphasized that strength training supports bone health, posture, and longevity. Most importantly, strength training prepares us to move through life’s stages with freedom. From carrying groceries to lifting grandchildren. As Dr. Wade reminds us, movement is medicine, and strength is less about size than it is about sustainability and self-care.

As mobility can have social consequences, these conversations bring up how physical wellness is never just physical. It’s emotional, relational, and deeply personal.

How do you show compassion toward your body?
What kind of movement brings you peace and joy?
How can you honor your body’s wisdom in this season of your life?

A Story: Reclaiming the Body as Home

These ideas come to life most clearly in the stories we witness. Moments when someone begins to see their body not as a problem, but as a place of safety.

I want to share a story about a client I’ll call Lena.

When I first met Lena, she described feeling detached, “like I live in my head and drag my body around behind me.” After years in an abusive relationship, she no longer trusted her own sensations. Even rest felt unsafe. She saw herself as weak, unmotivated, broken. Instead of asking her what she wanted to achieve, I asked, “How does your body feel when you think about starting something new?” There was silence. Then she said softly, “Tight. Heavy. Like I already failed.”

As we explored that moment, she remembered growing up in a home where rest was never allowed. Movement was punishment. Her body was something to control, never to trust. So we began to shift the conversation. Rather than focusing on goals or performance, she was encouraged to notice how her body felt.

Instead of measuring progress, she noticed moments of connection: walking as meditation that calmed her mind, lifting as empowerment that showed her strength, stretching for flexibility that softened anxiety, breathing for warmth, sound, and space that can break through tension. I encouraged her to notice what movement felt welcoming instead of obligatory and she started to see what restored her instead of what exhausted her. Slowly, her body began to feel less like a battlefield and more like a home she could return to.

She eventually began to see her body not as a project, but as a partner providing a living record of her experiences, boundaries, and beliefs. One day during a session, she smiled and said softly, “My body isn’t my enemy anymore. It’s mine. I think I’m learning to trust my body again.”

That’s when I knew something had shifted, not just in her routine, but in her relationship with herself. For survivors of abuse, this trust can take time, but for all of us, learning to listen to our bodies is an act of reclaiming safety and wholeness.

Why We Talk About the Body

If you’ve followed the journey from Who Do I See? to Reclaiming The Body as Home, you’ve probably noticed a thread that weaves through every conversation: Connection.

Our bodies tell the truth about our stress, our joy, our fear, and our resilience. When we learn to listen, we uncover a deeper wisdom that links physical wellness to emotional healing and personal growth. We don’t live in isolation. Our bodies, minds, and emotions are in constant conversation with complex relational, environment, and biological systems. Our nervous systems serve as the bridge between these worlds, regulating how we respond to stress, connect with others, and find balance.

When someone experiences anxiety, physical pain, fatigue, or stress, it has ripple effects on their emotional world: focus declines, relationships strain, and self-worth falters. The reverse is also true. Unresolved emotional pain can show up as poor concentration, changes in appetite, insomnia, irritability, isolation, headaches, stomachaches, or muscle tightness.

That’s why counselors listen to the whole person and what their body, emotions, or mind are trying to say. Helping clients translate the messages of the body empowers them to build a relationship with themselves rooted in the physical and emotional truths they carry.

That’s why this conversation matters.

The body is often the first place we lose trust and the last place we learn to reclaim it. Talking about physical wellness is not stepping outside the scope of counseling. It’s actually deeper into the heart of it. Physical wellness is a language of balance. With it we can translate healing into motion, peace into breath, and safety into presence. Caring for the body is not separate from caring for the self — it is the same sacred work.