Sport Psychology Tactics - The Yips In Sports & Athlete PTSD
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, Sport Psychologists & Dealing With PTSD
When people think about sports, one of the last things that comes to mind is the idea that sports can cause trauma. This is because many people believe that the word trauma can only be exclusively used for extreme situations such as veterans returning home from combat or survivors of childhood abuse. But trauma can be much more inclusive and can include many different types of situations. After all, trauma has been defined as ‘a deeply distressing or disturbing experience’. When we think of the word from this perspective, there are many experiences within sports that can cause psychological trauma.
Because this is such a widely misunderstood issue amongst athletes, coaches and athletic directors, I wanted to take some time to write about what trauma is and how it regularly impacts athletes in all sports. In part I. I am going to review what types of situations in sports could be classified as traumatic events that cause PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). In part II. I want to discuss the neuroscience that explains how psychological trauma works. Finally in Part III. I want to review an intervention that sport psychologists are starting to use in order to help athletes overcome PTSD. Let’s first review how sports can cause trauma.
Part I. How Sports Trauma Causes Athlete PTSD
We recognize that sports can be dangerous, and as such we prepare accordingly in advance of a sports competition. Emergency medical services, EMTs, doctors, physical therapists and a whole host of sports medicine staff are readily available for the inevitable sports-related trauma that will occur. For some reason, most people view sports injuries as an event that should not be considered ‘traumatic’. But trauma is a subjective experience, and depending on the nature of the sports injury, these can leave a lasting psychological impact on individuals.
But there are other issues in sports that can cause PTSD amongst athlete populations. The following are just some of the examples of trauma events that athletes undergo: sports humiliations. verbal abuse by coaches, physical abuse by coaches, psychological and emotional abuse from opposing teams and fans, overtraining, concussions, TBIs, toxic parenting during sports events, and many other examples. So now the question is what happens in the brain during a trauma event that can cause PTSD for athletes?
Part II. How Sport Psychologists Explain The Neuroscience Behind Athlete Trauma, PTSD & The Yips (AKA Mental Blocks)
In the book This Is Your Brain On Sports by David Grand, the author goes into great detail to explain the neuroscience behind PTSD/trauma and how this is connected to the Yips. The author describes as follows ‘In parallel fashion, the brain attempts to always move toward a state of psychological equilibrium. Over the course of our lives, we are exposed to a variety of life experiences, some positive, some neutral, and some negative. Through a natural assimilation process, the brain adaptively processes these experiences so they are constructively integrated. What is useful from the experience is learned and stored in the brain with the appropriate emotion and is available for future use. When an experience is successfully assimilated or digested it is stored in the brain with little attached intense emotion or physical sensation. When we recall such an incident, we don’t reexperience the old emotion or sensation with it. In this way we are informed by our past experiences and memories but not controlled by them and with sports our present athletic performances are not burdened by emotional or physical baggage from the past, only learned experience. By contrast, trauma or any strongly negatively charged experience isn’t adequately assimilated or processed. Instead, the upsetting incident remains stuck in the system in broken pieces’.
The author continues, ‘ The body instantly memorizes the physical experience of the trauma in exquisite detail, including the body sensations of the impact and pain, along with the associated sights, sounds, smells and tastes. The attached emotions and where they are felt in the body are frozen as well. The brain is overwhelmed and instead of getting digested, all of the information attached to the injury, including the negative thoughts is stored in the brain in exactly the same form it was initially experienced. Days, week, months or even years later when the athlete is in a situation reminiscent of the original trauma or experiences prolonged stress, the upsetting experience may be unconsciously activated, thus interfering with the performance of the moment. These components represent all of the sensory details from the earlier event that were frozen in the brain and body in their original disturbing state: the images, lighting, emotions, physical movements, sounds, or smells. The unique sensory details later returning to consciousness cause the performance disrupting symptoms so common in mental blocks.’
There are other experts within the field of trauma-informed psychology that also understand the connection between trauma and the Yips. In The Body Keeps The Score, author Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk beautifully illustrates how the brain functions during a trauma event, ‘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 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.’ Now that we have a better understanding of some of the neuroscience behind PTSD (AKA The Yips), let’s explore a specific intervention that athletes can use to clear trauma and enhance performance: Brainspotting.
Part III. How Sport Psychologists Use Brainspotting To Help Athletes Overcome PTSD
Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy that sport psychologists are becoming aware of. The sport psychology community is becoming more curious about this intervention because of both the success that Brainspotting is having in working with athlete populations and also because it is specifically tailored to deal with athlete PTSD. Developed in the late 1990s by Dr. David Grand, he discovered the technique while helping an Olympic ice skater overcome the Yips. Using what was known as EMDR, he noticed that during this protocol there were specific eye movement patterns that appeared to be associated with certain traumatic memories. Why is this important?
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope, to not needing to cope at all. Through my work with professionals in the sports performance space, I have had tremendous success helping athletes clear their symptoms of trauma and PTSD! If you would like to learn more, use this link!
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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