Emotion focused therapy with injured athletes: Conceptualizing injury challenges and working with emotions

Abstract

Athletes’ emotional responses to injuries may include feeling sad, angry, anxious, frustrated, helpless, irritated, and confused about their identity as athletes. Emotions are central in athletes’ sport injury experiences, yet most therapeutic approaches described in the sport psychology literature are grounded in cognitive-behavioural traditions and strategies may tend to emphasize controlling or suppressing emotions. Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is a robust, empirically-supported therapeutic approach grounded in experiential therapy and emotion theory that can be used to help athletes deal with injury-related difficulties. This position paper presents a rationale for using EFT in working with injured athletes. We review foundational principles of EFT and the conceptualization of emotions, emotion regulation, and dysregulation from an EFT perspective. Drawing on EFT theory, we present a conceptualization of five challenges and conflicts that arise within athletes’ injury experiences: (a) attending to the body and listening to the body; (b) tending to the pain versus pushing through pain; (c) interpersonal challenges and conflicts with others; (d) injuries as a challenge to athlete identity; and (e) concerns about time left in career and falling behind. Examples of ‘in vivo’ interactions between therapists and athletes are also presented to bring to life the use of EFT strategies and techniques, and we conclude with directions for future research and suggestions for practitioners to advance the use of EFT within the field of sport psychology.

Lay summary: Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is a process-experiential, person-centered therapeutic approach that holds promise for clinicians and therapists working with injured athletes. EFT could be used to evoke and experience emotions in therapeutic sessions in order to develop greater acceptance, awareness, and understanding about one’s emotions to facilitate healing and support athletes’ ongoing performance and sport careers.

Notes

1 Data were collected through 37 narrative life-history interviews with 13 competitive athletes. Ethical approval for this research was obtained and athletes provided informed consent to participate in the research. The data are available upon request from the corresponding author.

2 Chair work is therapeutic technique derived from Gestalt therapies (Perls, 1969) used for resolving affective-cognitive problems (see Lafrance Robinson et al., 2014); chair work is also used in other therapeutic approaches such as compassion-focused therapy, internal family systems, and cognitive behavioural therapy (Pugh et al., 2021).