Mental Health Performance - Why Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy For The Yips Is A Form Of Athlete Mental Training & Performance Enhancement
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Athletes, Sports Performance & PTSD
Most people think of sports as fun and entertaining experiences. We also view sports as learning experiences that we can use to better understand both ourselves and those around us. Unfortunately, while there are many positive aspects to sports performance, there are also many negative aspects as well. Some of these negative experiences can lead to traumatic memories for participants. Sports injuries, sports humiliations, abusive coaches, abusive fans, and many other experiences are just some of the examples that many athletes will encounter.
Because so many Americans participate in sports, I believe it is important that we address the reasons why athletes need to engage in mental health therapy to both overcome these obstacles and achieve peak performance. For this issue of the Training Report I am going to discuss why athletes should use trauma-informed psychotherapy to help overcome mental health issues and how this will help them in their training. Let’s first begin by exploring one of the most common issues that athletes frequently have to overcome: the Yips.
Part I. Athletes, Sports & The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks)
Of all the psychological issues we could have chosen to review, I believe the Yips is both one of the most common psychological issues that occurs in sports, yet is one of the least understood. The yips goes by many other names such as the Twisties or Focal Dystonia. Most people view the Yips as the diagnosis, or the underlying issue, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The Yips is actually a collection of symptoms that results from a much deeper, unresolved psychological issue.
The Yips is actually caused by psychological trauma. Whenever we experience a stress-overload event (e.g. car accidents, a death in the family, sports-related injuries such as ACL tears, concussions, sports humiliations, being a victim of abuse) or an accumulation of many smaller stress events (e.g. excessive training without rest, repetitive minor to medium intensity injuries, repetitive high pressure stresses), our brain will transition to a high alert disposition that keeps us in a chronic state of hypervigilance. So what is happening on a neuropsychological event to create the Yips?
Part II. Athletes, Trauma & The Neuroscience Of The Yips
In the book The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk gives us a glimpse into the process that creates the yips: the emotional brain has first dibs on interpreting incoming information. Sensory information about the environment and body state received by the eyes, ears, touch, kinesthetic sense, etc. converges on the thalamus where it is processed and then passed on to the amygdala to interpret its emotional significance. This occurs with lightning speed. If a threat is detected, the amygdala sends messages to the hypothalamus to secrete stress hormones to defend against that threat. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this the low road.
The author continues ‘The second neural pathway, the high road, runs from the thalamus via the hippocampus and anterior cingulate, to the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain, for a conscious and much more refined interpretation. This takes several microseconds longer. If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency response, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts.’ The reason this is important for athletes to understand is because it is inevitable that they will experience traumatic events in sports, and as such need to use the right interventions to stay ahead of these symptoms.
Part III. Athletes, the Yips & Trauma Informed Therapy (EMDR & Brainspotting)
What athletes and the general population need to understand, is that the majority of sport psychology based interventions use the incorrect approaches to deal with the Yips. This is because most sport psychology is rooted in what is known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While CBT can be helpful to some athletes, many individuals that are trying to overcome trauma symptoms will not find success with this approach. This is because one of the main goals of CBT is to provide the client with insight to their psychological issue.
The reason this is not effective is because neuroscience research shows us that the vast majority of psychological issues are not due to lack of insight, but rather from pressure emanating from deeper regions of the brain. Basically, the regions of the brain that are causing the Yips symptoms are responsible for the creation of dysregulation behaviors, and will not respond to logic based approaches. Only trauma-informed psychotherapy approaches such as EMDR and Brainspotting will give athletes the best chance to overcome and stay ahead of sport-related trauma.
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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