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Psych
- e
- News
An Online Magazine from the
New York State Psychological
Association
Division of
Psychoanalysis
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About
Psych - e - News
This online magazine presents
psychological and psychoanalytic understandings of
contemporary issues in living. It is published by
the Division of Psychoanalysis of the New York
State Psychological Association.
Our
members are hundreds of highly trained, licensed
clinical psychologists currently practicing in New
York. We offer the understandings of our
collective expertise, based on our experience
working effectively with real people in various
treatment situations. Each topic is covered by a
contemporary expert in the chosen area.
We hope you find this interesting and
helpful. We welcome any comments at: NYSPADIV@gmail.com. |
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The
Sports Issue
Sports at their best
provide the opportunity to deeply engage and
take
pleasure in playing and competing, and enjoy
physical, bodily experience. Though perhaps less
obvious, sports also provide unique
psychological
opportunities: to
confront and overcome personal challenges and
barriers; experience the gamut of
human emotions; forge personal
connections
with others; and discover and create greater
meaning and vitality.
Bringing the Body and
the Mind Together
The three articles
presented here articulate some of the benefits
in
considering psychology as an integral, and often
determining, component of any
sporting event. From golf demons that
threaten to turn under par into
overkill, to uneasy splits in many elite athletes
between
their feelings and their
bodies, to the combination of competitive envy
and love
that both stymy and motivate the serious athlete,
this issue of Psych-e-news offers
unique perspectives into the pitfalls of
forgetting that mind and body are one.
Don Greif,
Ph.D.
Nick Samstag,
Ph.D.
Issue
Co-Editors
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Mastering Athletic Demons
Demons run amok on the athletic
field. They sometimes thwart even the most accomplished
athletes. Most of them populate the six-inch space
between an athlete's ears, often referred to as the place
where competitive sports are played, and they typically emerge
under pressure. Controlling demons--not succumbing to
them--is the central psychological challenge most athletes
face. Those who master their demons can fully display
their talents, while those who fall prey to them cannot play
their best. Who or what are these demons that often
prevent athletes from reaching their goals? Simply put,
they are the mental obstacles that plague even the best
athletes in the world.
Getting to Know Your
Demons
While
athletes battle many demons, some of the least recognized and
most pervasive ones are the fears of excelling and
winning. This may seem like a strange thing to say,
since it's at odds with the conscious experience of most
athletes, who believe and feel they want to play their best
and beat their opponents. If they do feel fear when
competing, it's usually the fear of playing badly, losing or
humiliating themselves, for which sports provides unparalleled
opportunities. The demons that emerge under the pressure
of competition, however, often spring from unconscious
sources-fears rooted in old experiences, beliefs, and
self-concepts.
Evidence of the power of
demons to sabotage performance is abundant. Mental
demons undermine achievement at every level of play, from the
weekend golfer on the verge of shooting his personal best, to
the high school soccer star trying to prove him or herself to
a college scout, to the major league pitcher making his first
start in the big leagues. For each athlete the personal
stakes are high. As pressure mounts and there is more on
the line, one's vulnerability to demonic interference
increases.
Most
athletes do not know why they suffered collapses or
letdowns-because these self-sabotaging forces largely operate
outside of conscious awareness. While some demons can be
controlled by applying well-known mental skills-positive
self-talk and visualization, or maintaining a consistent
pre-game routine-others overwhelm even the most rigorous
attempts at applying mental strategies to rein them in.
For the power of demons lies in their invisible, stealth-like
nature. They infiltrate the psyche without being
recognized; they travel under the radar.
You may wonder
why any athlete, professional or amateur, would fear
winning. It makes no intuitive sense.
Nevertheless, winning can be scary. Winners attract lots
of attention. Winning creates expectations that you will win
again. Winning elevates you above your peers and thereby
distinguishes you from most athletes. Other people may
feel jealous or envious of winners, sometimes even resentful
or inadequate. Winning, then, may arouse anxiety or
guilt about making others feel bad or mad. Simply
anticipating this can be uncomfortable, even
intolerable. In this case envisioning oneself as a
winner may feel a bit like wearing a coat that doesn't
fit.
Ironically, while not winning may
feel safer and less burdensome than winning, playing it safe
by staying in your comfort zone can be worse. For unless
you feel confident you are doing the best you can, you will
not be entirely comfortable staying there. Part of you
knows you can do better, and wants to achieve more, excel, and
make the most of your talent and ability. Knowing you
are not realizing your potential and achieving all you can is
distressing-and may make you feel frustrated, hopeless, or
depressed-not exactly a recipe for inner peace and
joy.
Although in
many people's eyes it is shameful, if not contemptible, to
fear winning, it has more insidious consequences not to
address one's fears. To keep fears underground is to
remain prone to self-sabotage and risk chronic failure to
reach one's potential. Moreover, unexamined fears
readily emerge elsewhere in disguised forms. The
strategy I recommend-identifying and confronting one's
anxiety-seems to contradict the popular wisdom that says one
must focus on the positive and eliminate any negative
thoughts. Staying positive, however, does not mean you
must deny your fears.
Knowing your fears can liberate you
from their crippling effects. Discovering what you are
afraid of-contrary to popular belief-does not mean dwelling on
it and getting stuck in a morass of self-doubt, self-blame, or
self-pity.
How
can an athlete recognize he or she is afraid to excel or win,
if these fears are hidden? It may be useful to think of
times when you did not perform your best under pressure, and
identify the type of mistakes you made, and what you felt and
thought at the time. Then think of times-in any
competitive effort-in which you were successful and received
praise, recognition, or rewards, and ask yourself: How
did you feel and act afterwards? Were you proud,
fulfilled, celebratory, on cloud nine-or did you feel nervous,
self-conscious, embarrassed, undeserving, apathetic, or
deflated? Did you enjoy your success or devalue and
dismiss it as "no big deal"--or perhaps attribute it to
something besides your skill, talent and hard work, such as
luck or others' help?
Questions like these can clarify
whether you really feel entitled to excel or win-and want the
responsibility that comes with it-or are unsure that you
belong in the same company as established winners.
Winners allow themselves to
play their best and vanquish their opponents because they know
that even if they crush an opponent's psyche or spirit,
winning itself is not destructive. They know it is not
their responsibility to protect their competitors from feeling
bad.
When one
feels safe to express one's fears and anxieties - to an
empathetic and knowledgeable listener - this establishes
distance from one's demons and enables one to observe, examine
and speak about them. This can feel like lifting a veil
on a long-held, often shameful secret. Engaging in this
process neutralizes demons, rids them of their insidious
power, and frees one from their debilitating impact.
If overcoming
fear is viewed as a challenge that all winners must face,
sports can become a superb opportunity to master one's
personal demons.
Don Greif,
Ph.D.
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The
Athletic Personality
I am a psychologist and
psychoanalyst who works with a good number of amateur and
professional athletes. I am also a fairly serious, lifelong
athlete myself, engaged on a regular basis in cycling,
distance running, squash and tennis. Over the years, I have
formulated a number of observations about the personality
strengths and weaknesses of athletes when it comes to their
relationships to their minds, bodies, and their emotional
lives in general.
People that I work with in my
practice talk with me about their internal and interpersonal
experience in as much detail as possible, and we explore
emotions, body sensations, relationship experiences, and more.
This "talking cure" gradually frees their life experience of
its defensive rigidity and constriction, and new modes of
receiving and generating experience become possible.
Some patients who enter psychoanalytic treatment,
however, cannot find their way to talk about their feelings as
they sit in my office. Dedicated or professional athletes with
whom I have worked are especially this way because of their
established strategies for how they relate to
themselves. I find that athletes are used to having a
relationship with their bodies that is purposeful and
goal-directed. Many have trouble accessing and expressing
their emotions in ways that are personal rather than
purposeful.
Athletes may be entrenched in purposeful
relationships with their bodies and have trouble gaining
access to, and expressing, their emotions. They may
compartmentalize their thoughts and feelings, guard against
emotional vulnerability by intellectualizing their feelings,
or manipulate their bodies into being goal-directed, driven
instruments of participation in sports - more like equipment
in some ways than a living person.
Dedication to
athletic achievement or competition turns emotional experience
into something to be managed, controlled, or optimized.
Their ability to "play" creatively, freely and expressively
with their own thoughts and feelings-the kind of activity
encouraged in the therapeutic process-is quite limited when
they begin therapy because playing has had a very different,
purposeful meaning for them.
For serious
athletes, the act of becoming consciously aware of the nuances
of emotional experience is an underdeveloped capacity at best,
a dreaded threat at worst. These men and women can be
very thoughtful as well as being physically gifted. Yet
they can be skittish in the extent to which they avoid
considering their feelings and talking about them,
particularly when those feelings are associated in any way
(which they usually are) with being vulnerable. The state of
emotional vulnerability is often equated with being weak, the
opposite of athletic supremacy, and is avoided with
unconscious dread.
This fear of emotional
vulnerability often leads to frustrating limitations of
connection and intimacy throughout their lives. Worse, the
pent-up frustrations can sometimes lead to unwise risk taking
or acting out of emotional needs in potentially
self-destructive ways, as these athletes try to overcome the
emotional emptiness left behind by the suppression of feelings
and vulnerability. They may wind up desperately needing to
restore a depth and immediacy of experience and will seek
substitutes for the vitality that their self-protective
"impenetrability" has blocked - in some cases opening the door
to drug use or other addictions, possibly including addiction
to sport itself. In order to have satisfying intimacy,
athletes must develop a capacity to unblock emotional
expression, and they must learn to identify subtle emotions
and share feelings in personal ways. Without this
capacity, athletes' lives may have plenty of emotional
"drama." but there may be too much action, not enough
tenderness.
For many elite athletes, bodily experience
occupies center stage. By virtue of physical giftedness
these athletes live their lives supremely tuned into (or, at
least, focused on) what their bodies can be willed to do, and
feel threatened by any exploration that involves a challenge
to the directly purposeful monitoring and use of the body. In
extreme cases, some athletes have kept away from any
exploration of their inner emotional lives prior to their
experience of a profound sense of emotional breakdown, often
brought on by a bodily or athletic failure. It is a new and
valuable discovery to find a different kind of relationship to
their bodies that leads to deeper personal feelings, emotions
and social experiences. Athletically trained individuals have
not learned to attend to or articulate their emotions; as this
learning takes place in treatment, new forms of relating start
to open up.
The athlete's preoccupation with the body
can represent a source of resistance to psychological
curiosity. But it can also be used as a point of
departure for a different kind of inward focus, for new
personal strategies that can provide the missing satisfactions
of more intimate, tender, feelingful relations to oneself and
important others.
I have found that emotional
exploration becomes less threatening if I respect the
athlete's sense of danger in being emotionally vulnerable, and
put this into words so that he can understand what might be
going on. The athlete can then use his or her often-formidable
personality skills of focus, will power, or dedication, to
look inwards, through a different lens. Athletes starting out
in therapy might not consciously be experiencing fear, but
anxiety about vulnerability may be the driving force behind
resistance to developing a sense of trust in the process of
gradually coming to know themselves. The athlete comes
to see that an open mind and a capable body might fruitfully
coexist.
Anton H. Hart, Ph.D
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A Meaningful Effort?
I ran into an old
teammate recently. It had been many years since he moved
away, but a rush of emotion came over me. We had been
close training buddies and intense rivals. One race we
ran together has stood out for me as an important life
event. I had replayed and relived it countless times,
and wanted to know whether it was as meaningful to him as it
was to me. Somewhat hesitantly, I asked, 'do you
remember', he cut me off with a knowing smile, 'you mean the
30k? of course'.
In many ways, this race has
come to define both of us. This is partly the
result of the intense effort we put into it, but what makes
effort intensely meaningful instead of pointless?
'Results', in whatever way they are defined externally, are
woefully inadequate to account for the meaning we experience.
The meaningfulness of 'results' must be derived from their
personal relevance, not the other way around. This race
offered my buddy Dana and me an opportunity to discover
something about ourselves by pushing each other to our limits,
not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as
well. The experience engaged us in a complete way,
including the conflicted parts of ourselves.
We had both
recovered from minor illnesses and injuries that kept us out
of the traditional fall marathon, so we were both quite fit
(for our level). 'Friendly' trash talking had been an
essential part of the pre-race preparations. Partly a
way to express, hide, and relieve anxiety, a way to try to
outsmart each other, to have fun, to confirm the bond and
community amongst each other, these exchanges highlighted how
competition brings together so many important
functions.
The
gun goes off. For all the 'friendly' aspects of the
trash talking, I knew he thought he was stronger than me, and
I was determined to teach him a lesson. While I was
expecting him to start out faster than me because of differing
strategies and strengths, I did not expect him to go out that
much faster. Given how tall he is and how distinctive
his stride is, I could see him slowly disappear into the
distance in the early miles, along with my friendly
feelings. They were replaced by aggressive
fantasies. Perhaps he will step in a pothole and twist
his ankle, perhaps another runner will clip him and so
forth. In the words of Tim Krabbe's (cyclist and
novelist), 'there is nothing more satisfying than the hiss of
an opponent's puncture'.
With each passing mile the anger
turned to rage and despair, at myself for devoting so much of
my life to such an absurd and meaningless activity. 'I
should quit right now and walk off the course. Well, why
aren't you stopping, you moron?' are examples of my internal
dialogue during those dark miles. So, even more
absurdly, I stick with it, only to find out that I am running
one of my fastest races, which in turn only increases my
frustration. How much damn faster is he running? A
faint hope: perhaps he totally misjudged his effort and will
crash-hard so I can catch up.
With a few miles to go, he reappears
in the distance in a group of five runners, and he is not
crashing. But this reenergizes me even more, and I am
able to lift my effort and pace. With a mile to go, a
mutual friend and teammate who is spectating warns him that I
am closing (Dana later admitted that he thought it was a joke
at the time because he thought he had 'buried' me, so he
didn't bother looking back).
With a quarter mile to go I make it
up to his group, and rather than attack him at that moment, I
decide to try to remain stealthily behind him in order to
surprise him at the last second, but he hears a different
stride in the group and looks back. The shock and
surprise on his face are just priceless. So, the better
part of a two hour effort comes down to not much more than a
minute. We hesitate to see who will initiate the final
sprint, we ramp it up very quickly, side by side, all out,
right to the finish. We left it all out on the road, as
the saying goes (I never admitted to him that I almost
literally left it out on the road by throwing up in that final
effort). After winning one of his Tours de France, a
newscaster shoved a microphone into Greg Lemond's face during
the immediate post race mayhem and asked him if he felt he had
become a representative of the health movement in
America. In this unrehearsed moment, Lemond replied
emphatically, 'no, this is not healthy, this has nothing to do
with health..' stunning the newscaster into uncharacteristic
silence. If health is moderation, this is the contrary,
this is about pushing, and discovering (painfully), the limits
of oneself, of one's body and mind.
And so it came down to three tenths
of a second! The high was incredible. A fellow
athlete describes the intensity and richness of the experience
like a drug. You want it again and again. We both
succeeded, and we felt truly bonded to each other. The
totality of the experience integrates anxiety, hatred,
physicality, and love, what one would consider a central human
task.
And what was
the result? That son of a bitch beat me. Instead
of hesitating, I should have buried him at the first
opportunity.
Pascal Sauvayre,
Ph.D.
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Don Greif, Ph.D. is a graduate of
the William Alanson White Institute and is on the Editorial
Board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has a private
clinical and forensic practice in New York City, and works at
Columbia University Medical Center. He has consulted with the
Yale women's golf team, individual amateur athletes, and
performers in the arts. He is a former college lacrosse
player and avid golfer - and has mastered many, if not
all, his demons.
Anton Hart, Ph.D., is a Fellow,
Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White
Institute. He is in private practice in New York City and
Poughkeepsie, NY. He has a concentration in psychoanalytic
work with professional and amateur athletes from a variety of
sports including basketball, football, distance running,
squash and tennis.
Pascal Sauvayre, Ph.D.came from club
soccer to long distance running and ran over twenty marathons
over the years (and discovered many ways to 'hit the wall')
before devoting himself to climbing the amateur ranks of
competitive cycling more recently. This helps him balance his
professional work. He completed his postgraduate studies in
psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute where he
currently teaches and supervises, and he is the co-director of
the child and adolescent program at the National Institute for
the Psychotherapies. He works and writes from a personalized
mix of existential and interpersonal
approaches.
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Susan Parlow, Ph.D., Editor in Chief
Roanne
Barnett, Ph.D., Don Greif, Ph.D., Maureen O"Reilly-Landry,
Ph.D., Nicholas Samstag, Ph.D., Janet Tintner, Ph.D., Editorial
Board
NYSPA, Division
of Psychoanalysis
With special
thanks to the Psychoanalytic Society of the Post Doctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at NYU, for
initial
funding.
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