Reflexive confessions of a female sport psychologist: from REBT to existential counselling with a transnational footballer

ABSTRACT

Reflexivity is a tool of self-awareness that affords insights on the impact of culture on practice and research. In today’s pluralist, multicultural world, reflexivity is much needed to attend to the needs of increasingly diverse athletic populations. In this paper, I engage with reflexivity to provide a critical interpretation and an evocative representation of data gathered during a two-year ethnographic project at a top-division men’s football team and from 12 one-on-one counselling sessions with a transnational football player, who struggled with injury, parenthood, cultural transition and prospective career termination. Drawing on cultural sport psychology (CSP), cultural praxis as well as relational and narrative understandings of self, I seek to illustrate how reflexivity as a strategy can be deployed to deliver culturally informed psychological support in sport. Using a novel methodological design of narrative case study nested in the genre of confessional tales, I interrogate my privilege and power in the counselling relationship within broader socio-cultural contexts to expose paradigmatic tensions in the researcher-practitioner model and the evolution of my professional philosophy, along with gendered interactional dynamics and moral positionality. In doing so, I hope to offer valuable insights into the process of multicultural counselling viewed from ‘behind-the-scenes’ with practical implications for those working in applied sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• cultural praxis
• professional philosophy
• multicultural teams
• narrative inquiry
• applied sport psychology

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all the players, coaches and club representatives for their continuous support and understanding throughout the ethnographic data collection process. I am especially grateful to David for his relentless trust in the counselling process and in me as his counsellor. I would also like to extend my special thanks to my counselling supervisor for her creative encouragement throughout and to Robert Book, who acted as a critical friend and offered invaluable suggestions. Thank you to anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments recommendations, which greatly helped strengthen the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 1995, the European Court of Justice issued a ruling, which banned restrictions on foreign EU players within national leagues and allowed players in the EU to move to another club at the end of a contract without a transfer fee being paid. This effectively deregulated the EU transfer market on ‘freedom of movement’ premises.

2. For the purposes of this paper ‘transnational’ players are those, who construct their lives and careers across borders while being embedded in multiple cultural sites and social networks, thus maintaining multiple belongings (Ryba et al. 2013, 2015, 2017).

3. The cultural interview is a diagnostic, research and recruitment tool used by practitioners to evaluate self-adjustment by examining clients’ degree of adaptation/acculturation to new environments, the acculturation strategies and the mechanisms used to cope with acculturative stress (Chodynicka and Więckowska 2005).

4. Culturagrams are tools that aid cultural journey analysis by way of mapping the cultural and migratory trajectory of clients to illuminate significant transitions in the personal (e.g., becoming a parent) and professional (e.g., migration, transitions, injuries, career termination) domains.

5. Professional philosophy is defined as ‘a consultant’s beliefs and values concerning the nature of sport reality, the place of sport in human life, the basic nature of humanity, the nature of human behaviour change, and a practitioner’s role in, and the theoretical and practical means of, influencing their clients towards mutually set intervention goals ‘ (Poczwardowski, Sherman, and Ravizza 2004; p. 449).

6. Chinese for ‘listening’ using all senses. In Western terms the closest equivalent is empathetic or active listening.

7. The area bounded by the goal lines and sidelines (or touchline) is known as the ‘field of play’.

8. The irrational Performance Beliefs Inventory (iPBI; Turner et al. 2018) is one example.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donka Darpatova-Hruzewicz

Donka Darpatova-Hruzewicz is a doctoral student at SWPS University for Social Sciences and Humanities. As part of her doctoral research she studies the functioning of multicultural teams in men’s elite football. She is particularly interested in the acculturation of migrant players, team culture and team processes in relation to integration and socialisation as well as the impact of cultural factors on styles of play in football. In addition to her doctoral research work, she also teaches undergraduate psychology students (subjects: Acculturation, Cultural Determinants of Behaviour, Bilingualism) and practices as a sport psychologist in a top-division men’s football club, where she provides psychological support to players and is involved in the deployment of interventions at team and club level.