Mental Moment-Injury
An injury is always a surprise. We don’t know that we are going to get injured and we don’t expect it to happen. Unfortunately sometimes it still does. It’s important to deal with the emotions around an in joy.
Getting injured
As I said, an injury is never expected. When something happens in your life that isn’t expected what comes with it? People go through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Kübler-Ross noted that these stages are not meant to be a complete list of all possible emotions that could be felt, and, they can occur in any order. Her hypothesis holds that not everyone who experiences a life-threatening/-altering event feels all five of the responses, as reactions to personal losses of any kind are as unique as the person experiencing them.
You must feel and move through these emotions in order to effectively deal with an injury. Why? Think about what it means to get stuck in any of these emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. I have had many elite performers come to me because they get stuck in denial or anger and are not be able to find their way out.
The denial and anger phases make it difficult for an elite performer to get help with their injury. Initially many elite performers disregard the pain and ignore that a problem exists. It’s not usually until an elite performers can no longer perform at all that they stop.
Taking care of an injury
The sooner you realize you have an injury the sooner you can get it taken care of. 🙂 Easier said than done.
Once realized, the injury causes a performer to feel a sense of guilt that they have not done something they were supposed to do and caused the injury to happen.
- A performer will experience a huge amount of anxiety. This anxiety stems from not being able to perform, letting other people and teammates down and fear of the unknown.
- A performer will experience stress. What will the performer do? Many performers are uni-dimensional and don’t have other passions or interests because they’ve put all their energy into performing. How will the performer make money? How will the performer pay for surgeries, physical therapy and a performance consultant?
These are mixed in with Kubler-Ross’s stages of grieving but also above and beyond them.
Recovering from your injury
Do you want to be as strong if not stronger after the injury? If yes you need to ride the injury train till the bitter yet sweet end. You need to recover. Half or three-quarters recovery is not going to get you to where you ultimately want to be. Full recovery will.
This is the perfect time to focus on keeping yourself motivated by doing what you can do in preparation for coming back and keeping yourself motivated. It’s also a great time to try something new; pick up a hobby.
Some performers stay in the denial phase through the processes of getting and taking care of the injury. It’s not until they are recovery that they begin to go through anger, bargaining and depression. It is laden with heavy emotions.
Coming back
Caution: if you are not mentally and physically cleared for performance don’t do it.
The better your injury feels the better you’ll feel. This doesn’t mean that you are psychologically prepared to rerun. The better the injury feels the more anxious you’ll get about jumping back in. Whatever you do please follow your doctors instructions and that should include coming back slowly.There are also many emotions around coming back. Some performers deal with PTSD, lack of confidence as well as many others.
Here are some things to keep in mind to help stave off injury:
- Replace shoes and gear frequently.
- Have your equipment checked by someone else on a regular basis.
- If for whatever reason you don’t feel ‘right’ on any given day, take the day off. When you don’t feel right everything is off. This leads to frustrating and lack of focus.
- If you start experiencing signs of burnout, stop, regroup.
- Once a day check in with your mind and body to see how things are feeling. Be honest with yourself.
You can’t get to complete recovery and back to performance without acceptance and you can’t get to acceptance without all of the other emotions.
Happy Tuesday!
Dr. Michelle
Photo credit: crockettclan.org
