Rebuilding Your Body and Mind After Trauma: A Conversation with JewelsRebuilding Your Body and Mind After Trauma: A Conversation with Jewels
The Elevate Experience
Jewels shares how childhood trauma, addiction and a desperate wish to change led her into recovery, the weight room and eventually the national bodybuilding stage. The conversation focuses on personal choice in sobriety, using fitness to process pain, and building a life based on your own beliefs rather than others’ expectations.
1:15:09•1 Mar 2022
Jewels on Trauma, Sobriety and Building a Strong Body at 49
Episode Overview
- Recovery and bodybuilding both work best when they respect individual differences rather than forcing a single method on everyone.
- Language matters: swapping terms like “unmanageable” for questions such as “What’s not working for you?” can make recovery feel less boxed-in.
- Strength training can be a powerful outlet for rage and stored trauma, helping emotions move through the body instead of staying stuck.
- Long-term sobriety means learning to trust your own judgement, question inherited beliefs, and build life on what truly fits you.
- Pushing through uncomfortable first steps—whether sharing in meetings or stepping into the weight room—often leads to the biggest growth.
“If you look good doing it, you’re not doing it right.”
What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? This conversation on The Elevate Experience follows Jewels, a two-time award-winning author and national-level figure competitor, as she talks about rebuilding her body and mind after years of trauma, addiction, and self-doubt. Angie Manson and Dallas Terrell keep things relaxed and funny, but they don’t shy away from the heavy stuff.
Jewels describes an abusive childhood, dropping out of school in ninth grade, and drinking and using for 19 years while trying to fit into everyone else’s mould. Traditional recovery language like “powerless” and “unmanageable” never sat right with her; as she puts it, “I don’t need to smash my ego.
Let’s face it, that ego saved my life.” You’ll hear how a casual comment — “I just wish I didn’t drink so much” — landed her in a noon recovery meeting, where the energy in the room cracked through decades of emotional armour. From there, she changed everything at 35, then walked into a gym at 40 just wanting to get “the cellulite off my thighs”… and ended up placing 3rd at the NPC North American Championships at 49.
The chat digs into why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to either recovery or fitness, the dangers of cookie-cutter programs, and how strength training became a way to move rage and trauma out of her body. Jewels explains how her book *The Making of a Woman: From the Inside Out* is structured around emotions like despair and darkness rather than a neat timeline, helping people recognise themselves in feelings rather than dates.
If you’re sober-curious, in recovery, or using fitness to hold your life together, this honest, raw, and often funny conversation might leave you asking: what parts of your life are still running on someone else’s rules, and what would it look like to finally make them your own?
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