Train with some of the best high school, college, pro, and intentional athletes out there who understand how to prepare for a game, break down physical barriers, and stay calm when their last ounce of muscle is gone. They know how to celebrate a win and how to get up after a heartbreaking loss. But there is another element of competition that is quiet and even more insidious, and no amount of cardio, precision tactical training, or diet can help you. Mental resilience training can help you bounce back from your career-ending injury, avoid the devastation of performance anxiety, navigate a rocky team dynamic or an unceremonious coach, and step away from the game altogether. This is where therapists for Athletes step in and make all the difference in peak performance.
Unlike sports psychologists who focus on quick mental tricks, visualizations, and game day hacks, real psychotherapy will dig into your core as a person in order to take you to the next level in your game. Sports psychology will address cognitive hacks and event hacks, while psychotherapy goes much deeper into the reasons for your response. Psychotherapy will also uncover the lens through which you view the world, your childhood stories, and how you interpret your sport, and will facilitate the correction of the love-hate relationship with pain, loss, and success. In person therapists like Adam Boardman MFT understand that authentic growth of athletic excellence requires total personhood-not just a winning record. When clinical mental health services are combined with an athletic lifestyle, you will finally rid yourself of the emotional baggage of perfectionism, grief, injuries, and transitions and be free to win in every arena of life.
Unique Challenges of Competitive Sports
The power of athletic training is tangible and in your face, but far too often it's the pain propelling your body forward that gets swept under the rug. You're trained to get hard, bring the bravado, look like you're walking on water, and keep your emotions under lock and key-an important emotional skill, I should say-until you encounter an obstacle and realize that you've hit a bump in the road; it's hard to look weak when you can't acknowledge the vulnerabilities of mental health. When an athlete gets injured, it's about so much more than the injury-it's a devaluation of your self-esteem, a panic about what all the pieces of your life used to mean.
Across seasons and in life: Underlying anxiety and depression, as well as chronic stress and competitive-sports-driven anxiety, which makes each game a passion-killing bore and adrenaline a bore. The mental health challenges, in the absence of the intimacy of a therapist's space, become even more difficult to work through, without the fear of media or coach interference.
Psychotherapy Vs. Mental Skills Coaching: Going Deeper
Most folks believe that mental skills coaching, strategic routines, and even "sport day mental hacks" are synonymous with psychotherapy-and this is miles from the truth. The latter sort of psychotherapy may reach the four prime motivators of human reaction, emotion and identity, but the these techniques work more to provided you visualizations, mental get into a groove, and tricks to monitor your sport performance that will place you in a better calm. Within all of those techniques, an experienced sports specialist should also attention towards the natural patterning of yours thought habits and life situations of yours, so that you can stay on a truly stable baseline as opposed to gliding in one adrenaline high to the next.
Managing the Transition to Off-Field Life
A lot of athletes experience a loss of identity when their athletic career is finished or just on pause- "I am what I do, so I am nothing if I am not on the podium". Professional athletes and therapists can help you find a new optimal identity outside of performance and refract mental health barriers like athletic perfectionism, disappointment, and body-image challenges.
Escaping the Spiral to Meet Your Objectives
Perseverance and grit might do an athlete good, but if you're bringing these characteristics into your life with friends and in your career, they can ruin you. This sports-specific therapist will evaluate your strength and utilize it to form healthy relationships, settle disputes, and get on with your professional career so that you'll come out of this period of peak performance as a healthy individual.
FAQs
1. What is the difference between a therapist and a sports psychologist?
A sports psychologist will take care of game skills and mind control techniques only, but a therapist will give you profound, lifetime psychotherapy on your whole story as a person.
2. What factors will change as a result of your therapy? How will it help you to be better at your sport?
As we free ourselves to discuss our mental health, emotional trash, injury, and mental blocks, we'll discover that we are making way for our unlimited potential.
3. How can a sports therapist help with my mental health needs?
They will address all levels of athlete concerns, including performance anxiety, competition anxiety, injury, burnout, death of a loved one, trauma, perfectionism, and body image.
4. Can you help me if I am not a professional athlete?
Yes. If you're a serious athlete and you're facing a mental health or emotional health issue, there is a sports-specific clinician that you can reach out to. That includes collegiate athletes, young athletes, competitive middle school and high school athletes, and even thrill-seekers.
5. Can sporting injuries have an impact on me emotionally?
Yes. Working through the pain, anger, frustration, and grief of your injuries, easing fear of the unknown, and working through mental health recovery will significantly aid your recovery from the injury.
6. How many times will I see a therapist?
Although athletes who are spirit-aware tend to gravitate toward weekly or every other weekly visits, many crises-both in life and sport–demand a higher frequency of attendance.
7. Am I required to make a claim through my insurance to visit a sports therapist?
While some athletes opt to be reimbursed for the session in order to maintain the privacy and privacy of the individual sessions with a private-in-network mental health professional - we'll still equip you with a comprehensive superbill in order to get you the insurance coverage you're entitled to.
8. How do I select a sports therapist?
Contact our athletes' therapists to get matched with someone whose skills and experience will be relevant to your particular needs.
9. How do I handle the fact that my career ended?
If your career or season was prematurely terminated, you may experience a journey of losing yourself and an identity crisis, leading to depression and anxiety. Your therapist will take you through a process of transformation to a new strength.
10. Do I need a sports health therapist?
The biggest sign is that you seem to get caught in the hellhole of depression and anxiety, body image concerns, anger and a sense of frustration, relationship struggles, and a sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness.
