“The important is to participate” is a phrase that most likely has never been said by a winner. Nobody competes for the simple fact of participating, but to gain or at least, for the pleasure of compete. What sense would sport have if it were not like that? Although clearly victory is what we intend to achieve, many times it does not come, and therefore, it is essential to learn to digest the defeats.
“Negative emotions must be allowed. “They are part of life and sport,” he says. José García Donate, CEO and founder of donatealdeporte and director of the sports psychology unit at the Centta Institute, in Madrid. “Now, if this frustration or anger ends up exceeding a certain threshold and causes anxious or depressive symptoms, something must be done,” says the expert.
You don’t have to be a professional athlete to have felt that discomfort that defeat causes. Perhaps it was the hope of finishing the first 10km race for which he had trained so much, or wanting to win that paddle tennis match scheduled weeks ago with his co-workers, or perhaps it was simply to dance at the recital with perfectly square movements. in that choreography that had been practiced so much in dance class, but defeat and failure, for whatever reason, usually trigger an unpleasant feeling.
A grieving process
The problem comes when that negativity It is not digested because it can end up becoming frustration or causing blockages, especially in people who have “a very deep-rooted sporting identity” and who live very intensely his sporting life, as Donate explains. “It is logical that if you train and prepare for something and it doesn’t go as you expect, you get frustrated. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. They are expected and adaptive emotions,” says the sports psychologist. The problem comes when these emotions control us and grow, generating a small “trauma” that will mark sports performance in subsequent confrontations.
“In defeats you have to do a process of duel. The logical thing is that we go through a series of negative feelings and emotions because something has happened that we did not expect or for which we were not prepared, but that, far from creating a trauma, should become gasoline to do better in the next matches,” explains the psychologist.
“Blocks appear when the event turns out to be traumatic for the athlete. That is, if in the competition there is something that goes disastrously wrong that causes us very emotions, intense y unpleasant, our body stores that information and relates it to the competition,” says Donate. It is especially in those cases when the expert recommends working with Professional Help to prevent the feeling from becoming entrenched and getting worse.
Help a frustrated athlete
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It is easy to identify people who suffer after a defeat and it is normal to worry about them. Many times the affection we feel towards these athletes can lead us to want to help them, it is something normal and positive, but it must always be done with respect. “To help someone who is having a hard time due to a defeat, the first thing is to ask them If you would like to talk about it because without realizing it and with all the good intentions in the world, it is possible that if we pressure him to speak we will cause an retraumatization”says Donate. “Every time that athlete has to explain again what the defeat was like or how he feels, he has to relive it mentally and that means that the feelings cannot evolve and the athlete cannot turn the page,” he says. Something very similar happens with injuries. Constantly wondering how it went or how long you have left to recover ends up creating fatigue that can trigger unpleasant responses and demoralization.
Sometimes these feelings of frustration are triggered by pressure. “In some young athletes, for example, many times that pressure comes from the parents. Even if they do not do it maliciously, they often generate in their children expectations “that cause the athlete to fear rejection if they fail,” explains Donate, who assures that this also sometimes happens with coaches who are very involved. “The fear of disappointing them, the need to give them back all the effort “What they put in us or the fear that they will stop being by our side if we fail are some of the causes of this anguish,” he adds. Under this pressure, on many occasions there is a reduction in sports performance and in case of losing, the guilty feeling. “We must not lose focus on sport, which is what really matters and in case it does not go well, we must learn to express our feelings and normalize them,” Donate says.
2023-11-12 06:00:23
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