PhD, Associate Professor E.A. Polyakov
Dr.Sc.Psych., Associate Professor P.A. Kislyakov
PhD, Associate Professor L.V. Senkevich
L.A. Bychkova
Russian State Social University, Moscow

Keywords: athletes, stress, trauma, motivation, thinking and acting culture, consulting services.

Background. The available study data demonstrate that different competitive situations may be of constructive or destructive effects on the mental balances of athletes depending on how the situations are addressed and emotionally coloured, on the correlations of the dominating mental and emotional effects and relevant fast/ delayed interpretations [2]. In this context, due priority is to be given to psychological consulting and safety of professional sport community on the whole and professional athletes in particular [2, 5]. Every initiative to improve competitive success rates and secure persistent competitive progress implies due psychological service being provided to the athletes facing a variety of sport-specific and life problems. Modern productive coping strategies with due emphasis on the initiatives to build up stamina (or hardiness as it referred to by S. Maddi) and emotional balancing skills; develop good motivations and willpower required for competitive success; cultivate productive, positive and philosophical attitudes to competitive failures; help find ways out of the situations that could otherwise be critical for an athlete; maintain good mental health; and facilitate the individual resource being fully mobilised for success. Sport psychologists always contribute to the above qualities building process in the training systems that should be designed both to build physical abilities and facilitate the personality self-improvement efforts. Psychological services to athletes are dominated by training tools including corrective training exercises geared to develop professionally important qualities including willpower, self-control and anxiety control skills; plus stress tolerance and mental balance improvement trainings, etc. The training sessions offer individual skill building trajectories based on duly individualised training systems [1, 3, 4, 6, 12].

The individualised approaches with an emphasis on the problems that may destroy a professional career at most or undermine the competitive performance at least, unless duly addressed, are the mission of a psychological consulting service. Psychological consulting covers a wide range of potential and actual problems triggered by failures, injuries and frustrations. Modern competitive activities with their high demands to physical and mental powers and high mental stresses in pre-season and regular season are inevitably associated with many stressors. No less harmful are the critical life situations that may come up beyond the frame of professional athletic career. Therefore, a psychological consulting service will be designed with due consideration for the critical situation, individual typology of the subject athlete and age-specific responses to the situation [10].

Objective of the study was to find and theoretically substantiate the most efficient psychological consulting service procedures for the athletes facing difficult life/ sport situations.

Methods and structure of the study. In practical services to the athletes facing difficult life/ sport situations, it is always beneficial to combine a few approaches offered by different schools and fields of the modern psychological service system. As demonstrated by our practical consulting experience, most effective for athletes are the following four methods.

Number one is the Occasional Fellow Traveller method based on the S. Marshal’s Historical Debriefing practice adapted by the author. The historical debriefing practice gives a top priority to the efforts to reconstruct past events rather than interpret them i.e. gives the means to address the reasons for the past events rather than their effects (including thoughts and emotions) [8]. This practice may be used to revise the whole career of an athlete starting from his/ her first days in the sport group; with due consideration for the progress stages and the progress appreciation by the close surrounding since the childhood. The practice is applied to correct suppressed emotions, release the educational/ training stresses and cope with sport professionalization challenges.

Case service: Psychological consulting service to a 21-year-old tennis player who decided to retire from the sport. The Occasional Fellow Traveller practice helped find that his sport career was initiated by his grandpa who gave a top priority to the future prize money that could be won by the grandson. The internal disapproval of the imposed sport career has resulted in many competitive failures and injuries. The situation was further aggravated by punishments for failures in competitions and everyday negative comparisons with more successful senior trainees of the same Children and Youth Sport School. The mounting frustration and offences had driven the athlete to the idea of retirement from the sport. The athlete was subject to the following services: insults and hostility removing service (including six 2-hour sessions) followed by a historical debriefing of the education and training period starting from the preschool and early school days (5 sessions). Upon completion of the service course, both the athlete and his coach reported his increased willingness to train and feeling happy during sport practices.

Method number two is the Structured Confession procedure applicable in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In addition to the common sport-specific situations (including competitive failures, non-qualifications for top-ranking evens, early retirements etc.), no athlete is immune from a variety of life situations causing mental traumas that may result in a PTSD condition. The modern PTSD correction service is generally dominated by the strategies geared to purposefully come back and analyse the traumatic event to explore every detail of the traumatising process; and to confess the role of the traumatic event [11]. We applied the Structured Confession procedure in form of a short-term therapeutic model universally applicable to the traumatic situations retained in actual reminiscences and emotions [9]. The model is designed to explore the subject trauma as an element of an integrated developmental trauma in the chain of traumatising experience. Such an approach normally helps mitigate or remove the emotional, cognitive and behavioural effects of a trauma.

Case service: Psychological consulting service to a 28-year-old ballroom dance coach who eye-witnessed a ruthless murder of his own coach who had been raising him since five years of age. For three weeks since the traumatising event he could not even come close to the gym and talk about the event suffering from an affective condition. We applied a traumatic stress mitigation procedure and PTSD-based relive therapy acting on the assumption that the trauma was an element of a larger traumatising experience. Two sessions were designed to explore his father and grandfather’s deaths when he was 4 and 5 years of age. Following the first session, the subject’s mental condition was improved; and the second sessions contributed to the progress so that he was able to come to the cemetery. The coach’s death was touched upon by the end of the third session only, with the therapy being completed on that; and the subject was able to come back to his coaching duties.

Method number three is the Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy by A. Ellis. It is commonly believed that mental problems are connected with a system of irrational setting; with certain cognitive structures provoking neurotic anxiety. The consulting psychologist/ psychotherapist may help the client get rid of the irrational notions of him/herself and the world and come to a rational mindset. The psychotherapist explains the situation and convinces the subject treated as a student [7]. This kind of therapy may be applied to motivational problems. Athletes are normally diagnosed with the following motivational disorders: hyper-motivation and external motivation driven rather by the expectations and aspirations of the close surrounding (family, coach) than their own needs. When applying the tools of the Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy by A. Ellis, we tend to consider both the excessive and external motivations as hard irrational beliefs and apply an active debating procedure to correct them. The debating procedure is geared to rebuild the irrational beliefs and create a rational desire in the subject.

Case service: Psychological consulting service to a 26-year-old tennis player diagnosed with high competitive anxiety that peaked prior to and during the competitions and resulted in unforced errors and defeats despite the stable high fitness rates in the training process. The Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy helped identify the athlete’s irrational beliefs “I must win!” and “I will prove I am the best” as the hyper-motivations triggering excessive anxiety that suppressed (according to the Yerkes-Dodson law) the competitive performance. A few sessions enabled the athlete to give up his irrational beliefs and attain more realistic peak of motivations. Since then the athlete was able to concentrate on the performance techniques rather that the flow of emotions in the competitive process, and showed good progress in the competitive accomplishments.

Method number three is the Life Skills Developing consulting service. Generally the service is based on the following assumptions. Most of the problems that need to be solved with assistance from a consulting psychologist refer to the client’s history of education. Clients tend to leave the problems unsolved for a long time mostly due to the intrapersonal factors dominated by the poor thinking and acting culture. The psychologist provides necessary training service to the clients to improve their thinking and acting abilities, otherwise the service may be ineffective. The life skills developing service provides necessary self-assistance skills to the subjects. Having mastered these skills, the clients may keep up and excel their thinking and acting culture on their own both to cope with the current problems and prevent similar problems in the future. The psychologist rates the training progress of the skills mastering program and advances the deficient skills [7].

Case service: Psychological consulting service to a 22-year-old female basketball player contemplating a suicide. The Occasional Fellow Traveller practice was used in the first session to reveal a set of stressors that included parting with the old friend, new coach, and frictions with the family and teammates. The Life Skills Developing service was applied (eight 2-hour sessions) to improve the thinking skills. The young woman became calm and sober-minded as a result of the service.

Conclusion. Modern sports may be ranked among the extreme activities that claim individual biological and mental resources to the maximum and, since the biological resources available for competitive success have been mostly exhausted, it is only the personality resource that may be exploited for further success. Psychological consulting service plays an important role in the initiatives to mobilise the remaining resource and remove the barriers (like accumulated stress, past failures and traumas, external/ hyper-motivations etc.). The psychological consulting service tools reported herein were proven to help efficiently solve a variety of mental problems faced by athletes in their professional sport careers and life.

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Corresponding author: PolyakovEA@rgsu.net

Abstract

Every initiative to improve competitive success rates and secure persistent progress implies due psychological consulting service being provided to the athletes facing a variety of sport-specific and life problems. The study was designed to find the psychological consulting service methods most efficient in application to athletes. It gives descriptions of four efficient psychological consulting service methods applicable to athletes exposed to stresses due to professionalization challenges in sports (by Occasional Fellow Traveller method), or post-traumatic stresses (by Structured Confession method), or facing sport-motivation related problems (by Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy), or problems due to inadequate thinking and acting culture (by Life Skills Developing service). The article gives a few cases of practical consulting services, with a special emphasis on the benefits of the reported consulting tools in application to young athletes and coaches (under 30 years of age) facing some life problems; with the service benefits being verified by the psychological/ psychosomatic state improvements; increased sport motivations; due understanding of the origins of the difficulties; and successful solutions of the problems faced in the sport-specific domain and other life situations. The practical methodologies outlined in the article may be helpful for the sport psychologists seeking, in cooperation with the coaches, to improve the competitive success rates and secure persistent progress of young athletes.