Embodying Resilience

The human experience is rife with challenge in all capacities. None of us get through unscathed. How we respond to these challenging life events in the moment, as best we can, and how we respond after the fact gives us more than just damage control. It gives us an opportunity for growth and an opportunity to pay it forward through our difficult experiences. We all go through shit in this human life of ours from birth to death; we all do it. We are all intertwined in life. Loss and hurt are inevitable. I am a strong believer in cleaning up our wounds, both physical and emotional, not just putting a band-aid on them as I had done in the 15 years after the things had happened with me. When we don’t clean things up, things fester. Nasty growths happen. Other people start to smell that festering wound and it begins to impact them, too.

I decided to embark on a journey of healing and reconciliation. I didn’t just decide one day to file a police report and bring a man to justice that took so much from me and so much from many others. It took years of struggling with my own health and my own relationships to finally get to a place to even be equipped to start this process in October 2022.

I was 14 when the grooming started. My high school basketball coach was known to be hard nosed and strict. He used my love and devotion to the game of basketball to harness control over every aspect of my teen years. I was not allowed to engage in any other activity outside of school and basketball. He would use the girls basketball equipment room to demonstrate sexual and psychological control over me for 2.5 years. If I didn’t comply, I was threatened with losing basketball and future opportunities of being a full-scholarship division I basketball player.

When I went off to college in the immediate aftermath, the maladaptive coping strategies ensued. As an 18 year old college athlete, I should have been living. I found myself frequently shutting out social opportunities and honing my skills of 9pm Irish Goodbye’s when I did finally show my face. I continued through college basketball and undergrad averaging more surgeries than points after my freshman year. I began handing over my internal locus of control and started accepting that I was the injured kid; the one on crutches and hanging out with the athletic trainers more than my own teammates. In this generation, the sports and orthopedic landscape was not one of conservative approaches. Surgery and injections always seemed to be first in line to address ailments that were diagnosable through imaging. Every surgical intervention and injection I received in college was unnecessary in hindsight but that is no one’s fault considering where medicine was. I was in college from August 2005 until May 2009, when pharmaceuticals were blindly thrown and refilled willingly. There was no addressing the ‘why’ for anything.

I went down this path of ‘things happen to me’ and ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’. That same mindset led me to take opioids nearly around the clock for months after my second knee surgery simply because the bottle told me to take as needed for pain. I should have been trying to move my knee but it hurt so I did what the bottle told me to do. As a result, I lost 30 lbs of muscle and nearly my athletic scholarship because I stopped going to class and was on the cusp of losing eligibility with the NCAA. Eventually I began moving my knee and working to walk independently again. Lucky for me, I’m not a glutton for depressants and I did not like the feeling of narcotics so those faded away and a problem was not created. Meanwhile, so many others lost their lives going down similar pathways especially in the mid-to-late 2000’s.

The Hidden Pain from the Human Brain

I made my way through undergrad and entered a world of post-athletic adulthood. Almost immediately, I was stricken with low back pain. The low back pain interrupted my social life, travel, and work significantly. I did nothing productive about it besides taking muscle relaxers as instructed by my doctors. They told me there was nothing I could do and I eventually needed to have surgery for my two disc herniations and disc degeneration that made my 23 year old self look like an 80 year old woman on MRI. I told them that I’d had enough surgery for now, thanks, and I would just figure it out on my own. I slapped TENS units on my back, took the pills, and continued to do things like yoga and Insanity with Shaun T by Beachbody, refusing to do weights so that I could shrink my shoulders down to normal size since I was now a normal adult and not a basketball player. For a person with global hypermobility, this was one silly-ass move. It temporarily made me feel better through movement but as soon as I stopped, the spasms returned and the floor was my favorite place to be. By the time I was in school for my doctorate in physical therapy, I was having significant difficulty walking further than 30 feet without needing to sit down from back spasms and pain going into my right leg. This was exacerbated by a patellar tendon rupture in my 2nd year which likely occurred from my past unnecessary surgeries and injections. I reached 4 knee surgeries before turning 30 years old. I blamed my past trauma. I blamed him for everything. I could quite literally link every single thing that physically was failing on me to the evil human who damaged me. I felt like I was ‘Damaged Goods’ with no way to help. I felt like I needed to stay in this world just long enough to take care of my parents and then I could Irish Goodbye my way out when my brother and sister were happily partnered to make sure I did my part with posthumous damage control.

Looking In the Mirror

When I graduated from PT school, one of my first patients was a kid who had torn her ACL and was a big time basketball player at 13 years old. She was almost the same age that I was when the grooming began and I was the same age as my high school basketball coach when he began his textbook grooming process. It upset me deeply to think about a trusted person taking away her teen years and basketball like it felt like mine were. I had been relatively open about what happened to me after writing about it for an assignment in PT school. I had been met with large varieties of responses from “How could an intelligent young woman like you let someone like that do what he did?” And “how could you be so selfish and not report something like that when you know he probably is doing it to others” to the very loving and kind responses from the majority of listeners.

In 2021, I spoke to an old high school teammate who had been struggling and had similar experiences with the same person when she was in her early teens. A year later, she saw a therapist who told my teammate she needed to report him to the state because he was still coaching and filing a police report was optional for my teammate. I told her that if she wanted to file, I would file too.

Taking Control

And that’s what we did in October 2022. It felt incredibly scary to finally be doing something about this but at the same time, an opportunity for catharsis. From police report to the trial, nothing about the process is fun. But, I saw a therapeutic opportunity in moving forward with this. There was a way to also give potentially so many others a path to freeing their teenage selves, too. I decided that there was no point in half-assing this process so I sifted through online yearbooks, community members, former teachers, and former players and directed them to the detective in the event that they had something to add to my story and my teammates story. Many people came forward with similar stories but the only felonies they could get were 6 counts between mine and my teammate’s reports which was enough to arrest him. Everything else was deemed misdemeanor because of age being over 15 years at that time.

The entire process over the 2.5 years from start to finish, forced me to take one day at a time and use it as an opportunity to learn the healing process. To pay attention to my body and my mind. To look at the relationships that I was in that continued to trigger my animalistic responses of anger and avoidance. Just bury this shit and plow through.

I started with low hanging fruits: 5 minutes of meditation and 5 minutes on the stationary bike and then it was off to the factory PT clinic work life. This morning routine grew from 10 minutes to a couple of hours. I began giving myself a ridiculous amount of time in the morning with my new found job flexibility with MovementX.

Wake Up. Pause. Reflect.

I woke up and meditated. Just 5-10 minutes of stillness set the tone for the entire day. Meditation isn’t about silencing every thought or achieving some perfect mental state—it’s about observing. Sitting quietly, you focus on your breath. Inhale. Exhale. When your mind wanders, gently brought it back without judgment. Meditation helps train the brain to be present, to respond rather than react, and to create space between stimulus and response. It creates space between triggered stimuli and triggered responses. Over time, it has reduced my anxiety, sharpened my focus, and helped me feel more grounded. You don’t need candles or mantras—just a quiet moment and your breath. In a world that constantly demands our attention, meditation is an intentional pause that reminds us we’re in control of where we place our focus.

Walk

Not for exercise, but for clarity. Sometimes with podcasts, music, or phone calls but also in complete silence. Allowing yourself to be completely immersed in your surrounding regardless of city or a hiking trail. Walking reconnects you to your body and gives your mind space to unravel whatever it’s holding. With each step, you notice the rhythm of your breath, the feel of the ground, the sounds around you, allowing your eyes to scan and dart back and forth. How similar to EMDR and REM sleep, am I riiiight? Ideas come. Stress melts. Walking is a moving meditation—it doesn’t ask much, but it gives a lot. Just 10–20 minutes can lower cortisol, improve mood, and boost creative thinking.

Move

I trained with a kettlebell. However, any weight will do. Strength training isn’t just for muscles—it’s for the mind. Standing strong under the bell, hinge, grip, release, breathe, move. There’s no room for distraction when you’re under load. Strength training builds resilience, power, and body awareness. It’s efficient and raw—just you, your breath, and a piece of iron. After a session, you feel capable. More than strong—you feel ready. The discipline and focus it takes to move well with weight carries into the rest of life. It’s not just about fitness—it’s about ownership of your body and your mindset.

Pause. Breathe.

Pause and do some breathwork. I became certified as a breathwork practioner through Oxygen Advantage. I made a conscious effort to close my mouth especially in states of less physical output. Nasal breathing assists your efforts to slow the breath down. It sends signals to the nervous system that you’re safe. What happens to the body and breath when someone jumps out from behind a corner and scares you? A sharp inhale in a gasping fashion followed by the urge to either fight, flight, or freeze. It sends you immediately into a sympathetically driven state. A sympathetically driven state is a system under duress. Finding your breath, slowing the exhale, brings you back to greater clarity and calmness. It slows the heart rate, clears mental fog, and can even reduce pain.

Ground

Find the ground. Ground yourself in nature. Shoes off, feet in the grass, sun on your face. Grounding—also known as earthing—is the simple act of reconnecting with the Earth. It’s easy to overlook, but it’s deeply restorative. Research suggests that physical contact with natural surfaces may reduce inflammation, regulate sleep, and improve mood. Whether you’re standing barefoot in a park or lying under a tree, you feel calmer, clearer, more human. Forest bathing, or simply spending time among trees without distraction, takes it deeper. Breathe in the scents, feel the textures, listen to the quiet. Nature doesn’t ask you to be anything—just to be. And that’s enough.

Healing Myself to Give Back to Others

Through learning about the importance of these things and then slowly putting each one of them into my weekly plans, I began noticing things coming up in me more easily. I learned how to listen and talk to others about what happened to them and to me. I learned to write, voice record, or video myself and my thoughts and to do it without judgment. I found nature and reconnection to the outside world.

And then I started teaching these strategies to others in my physical therapy practice and approach. And quite honestly, any old time someone looks like they want to listen and nerd out. I am my father’s daughter.

The Final Stretch

This was just in time for the shit that was coming down the pipeline: a sting phone call with him in June 2023, a preliminary hearing where I sat within 10 feet from him while I was on the stand in April 2024, and the allotted 9 day trial set for February 2025. With each stage of coming forward, I was able to see the growth I was making. I could actually see myself standing more confidently and smiling more fully in pictures; being more present with family and friends. I realized that my back no longer hurt; soreness yes. Pain with sitting? No. I could also walk for miles without issue. Did my spine un-degenerate? No, that’s not a thing that happens.

When day 1 of the trial came, I put everything I had practiced and preached into action. The love and support poured in for me from family and friends, and I let it. I didn’t push it away. My people sat with me day in and day out in the courtroom from start to finish. I told my truth in front of a big courtroom full of strangers and my closest humans. Throughout the week, I frequently told myself that regardless of the outcome, you did this and it has been incredibly healing in so many ways. Though the verdict that came out felt like I wouldn’t be able to peel myself from the floor in the corner of the witness room or stop crying long enough to speak and thank everyone for being there, the month following the trial forced me to sit with all of this. Sit with the pain and then begin to feel the pride in what I and we had done. My teammate’s trial was slated to begin a few weeks later but because of an initial jury count heavily in favor of guilty for my trial, the defense attorneys talked him into taking a plea deal.

Reconciliation and the Art of Moving Forward

This entire process gave me insight into the physical manifestations of trauma, especially sexual trauma, and how important it is to look at these things and not just shove them down and say that’s that and there is nothing I can do about it besides treat the symptoms. Sometimes treating the symptoms is necessary but addressing the pain at its root is imperative. When you’re trying reconnect yourself to the life around you, it consists of both physical and emotional hurdles that don’t go away, ever. When we don’t address emotional hurdles, they manifest in physical tissues and become physical issues. When we don’t address physical issues, they manifest in your emotions. You just learn how to either jump over them, crawl under them, or unite with others to move them over to the side so they are the least interrupting that they can be.

This experience has allowed a cleansing of the pain-bodies within me. It doesn’t undo what happened and when it happened. I will always have a challenging experience that occurred during a crucial and imprintable time in my life but now that I have looked into it at the depth that I have, I now see my patterns and my triggers. The monster from my story likely has a story or stories of his own that he never addressed. Trauma begets trauma begets trauma. The more we look at our own shit, the less pain we inflict on ourselves and others.