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.

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

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.

About Our Authors

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.

Editorial Board

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.