It’s time to listen to the athletes’ experiences and take them seriously.
This post is part five in a series on the struggles of recovering athletes.
I’ve been listening for some months in philosophical counseling sessions to recovering athletes’ stories about the challenges of growing up under authoritarian coaches who used fear-based methods to dominate and control their teams, who consistently valued scores and records above human beings, and who pursued winning at all costs. Because athletes in such training environments are not allowed to speak about their experience, express their needs, or question the coach’s methods, athletes’ voices about the negative effects of authoritarian coaching methods are rarely heard.
In the few cases in which (famous) voices reach a public audience and have the opportunity to spark critical thinking about coaching practices, their perspectives are often dismissed by the loyalists of authoritarian sports culture. In the end, coaches rarely have to face accountability, or even knowledge, about the effects they’ve had on athletes.
There’s a common belief in mainstream sports culture that authoritarian approaches to coaching — in which the coach has absolute control and may use any means available to win —are necessary for “success.” This includes threats, insults, manipulation, intimidation, punishments, overtraining to the point of injury, and restrictions on food, water, rest, and medical care, among other things. The mainstream belief, in other words, is that the ends justify the means, and coaches can and should do whatever it takes to “get results.” Being brutal is popularly considered the most efficient and effective way to create champions.
For every great “result” that coaches (and parents and fans) may believe that brutality achieves, one can find a long trail of damage — athletes who are injured, burnt out, depressed, anxious, traumatized, suicidal, dissociating, struggling with eating disorders, and ultimately feel forced to quit in spite of their talent, discipline, and their love of the sport. But these are just the presenting symptoms. There’s a deeper damage done. Even those few athletes that coaches believe are their shining examples and “proof” that negative coaching works often end up later in their retirement years telling stories of how “broken” they felt, even as they played in the World Cup or made it onto the Olympic team.
In this post, I want to try to get to the bottom of this “broken” experience of which so many athletes speak and understand the fundamental damage done.
Though I don’t expect to catch the ear of the “die hard” authoritarians out there, who will likely dismiss criticism in advance, perhaps there are younger coaches who have gotten caught up in the authoritarian, fear-based model of coaching because they are under pressure to do so, or it was what they had undergone as athletes, and they’ve never had a chance to examine its effects or consider doing things in a different way. Perhaps there are also some parents who feel they should not resist this model of coaching because they assume it’s the way things have to be for their kids to improve, and they haven’t considered the negative effects. These coaches and parents might just not realize the damage done to so many young people who endure toxic training environments. In that case, I’d like to take the opportunity to educate them, based on the experiences of those who suffered through it and continue to struggle with its effects, even long into their retirements.
Broken Relationships and the Dissolution of Trust
First of all, recovering athletes often feel “broken” in their capacity for functional relationships due to a lost ability to trust. The fear-based coaching methods of intimidation, threats, coercion, and punishments have a destructive effect on their prime relationship with their coach (remember that young athletes in intense training programs often spend more time with their coach than their parents), which carries over into other relationships, disrupting the formation of the foundational bonds in which they might develop a sense of stability, connection, and self-worth.
From the athlete’s perspective, a coach who was perhaps inviting and eager to know them during an early recruiting process but then “turns toxic” — angry, mean, hyper-controlling, and demeaning — is no longer someone who cares about their well-being. Such a coach is no longer someone the athlete can count on to help them, support them, teach them, or work through difficulties with them. Instead, such a coach is capable of punishing them and their teammates for every vulnerability (for pain, fear, exhaustion, or any mistake or imperfection); they’re capable of dismissing injuries and forcing them to train when hurt; they’re capable of shaming them for the way they look, they refuse to listen and are not safe to talk to. When the athlete tries to tell the truth about their struggles, fears, or injuries to this kind of coach, they are ignored or (as many athletes remarked) taken to be lying, making excuses, lazy, or insubordinate. The lack of understanding, recognition, and care shown by the authoritarian coach is often experienced by the athlete as a betrayal.
The dissolution of trust goes hand in hand with the dissolution of respect. The coach who tries to intimidate, threaten, insult, and punish, and who shows little interest for the “person” inside the athlete, is no longer a leader that the athlete feels is worth following of the their own free will. Such a coach is not a leader who has earned the athlete’s respect with their wisdom, integrity, and guidance. They are simply a tyrant: a tyrant the athlete feels forced to follow. The loss of trust and respect makes a functional coach-athlete relationship impossible; Without confidence in the coach’s goodwill and moral sense, there is no safe space for the athlete to ask for help, to make mistakes, to learn, to collaborate, or to problem-solve together.
A coach’s impact on athletes’ development is immense. The loss of trust in the coach-athlete relationship often carries over into other future relationships, as athletes struggle to open up to others (even long into their retirement) after having their basic needs dismissed by the very adults they depended on most for their safety, security, and support. Without early experiences of safety, trust, and respect, future relationships (at school, at work, with friends, and with romantic partners) can be difficult to forge. New relationships often require the significant work of unlearning default patterns of domination and submission and healing from years of living without understanding and encouragement. Bonds of mutual recognition, goodwill, care, and collaboration can feel so alien to the athlete that they don’t know how to respond to those attempting to forge them.
On a personal note, when I met the coaching team that took over after one of my old coaches was fired (some years after I had retired) the new assistant coach told me that the team of athletes they inherited actually “winced” when the new coaches talked to them. He described them as behaving much like beaten dogs, staring at the floor and afraid to engage. The athletes could not trust that the new coaches cared about what they thought, felt, or had to say, or that the new coaches wanted to get to know them as people, work together, and help them be the best versions of themselves they could be. The athletes were afraid that anything they said would be used against them as grounds for punishment, restriction from competition, or removal of their scholarships. It took a lot of extra work for the new coaches to open up a space of trust that would allow for dialogue, teamwork, and basic enjoyment in the sport again.
Broken Self-Esteem and Sense of Self
Another way that athletes often feel “broken” after enduring “rule by fear” coaching methods is with regard to their self-esteem and their sense of self. Under the authoritarian power structure, athletes often begin to feel at a rather young age that they are not worthy of care or respect. They learn that their basic physical and emotional needs, their general well-being, and their sense of who they are as a person don’t matter, as they are regularly dismissed and sacrificed on the altar of the coach’s power and record of wins.
Interestingly, coaches often complain about athletes who don’t “believe in themselves” enough and lack the kind of confidence that they want to see. But they rarely realize that they have created a situation in which the athlete feels beaten into submission, silenced, small, and never good enough. Coaches often want an athlete who simultaneously feels “not worthy” to work with such an important coach, yet has a strong and assertive energy. They don’t realize they’ve made the latter impossible by consistently diminishing and disempowering them. In this situation, athletes lose their sense of value as people – as thinking, feeling, evaluating, and choosing beings — and feel merely like a tool or resource to be used by others. Because the athlete’s basic dignity as a human being is not recognized or respected under authoritarian power structures, they lose sight of their value beyond being of service in physical competition.
The destruction of self-esteem, as you might suspect, is closely connected with a stunted development of self. It might sound like I’m putting the cart before the horse when I talk about lost self-esteem before the existence of a full-blown sense of “self.” But in my experience talking with athletes, a sense of personal value actually does precede the development of a full-blown personal identity. That sense that “I am worth something” (which the (healthy) primary adults in our lives typically try to cultivate) is one of the nurturing conditions for the growth and assertion of individual identity in adolescence.
Many athletes who endured the fear-based approach to coaching did so at an age when they were just beginning to develop a sense of who they are and what makes them unique. But in excessively controlling environments of “command and obey” — which do not allow basic freedoms of thought, speech, emotional expression, creativity, exploration, problem-solving, or choice — the process of individuation and the development of all the personal beliefs, values, tastes, character traits, and aspirations that self-hood entails are cut short and given no nurturing space to grow.
Long into their retirement, some athletes declare that they still don’t really know who they are. They always just did what was expected of them. Some clients confided in me that they get extremely anxious when they are asked by peers (even casually during a get-together) what they want to do, where they want to go, or even what they like. They have a sense of paralysis and embarrassment and find themselves saying “Can you choose?” Or, “I’ll do whatever you want to do.” Others talk about needing to be prompted with assignments by others to carry out projects, unable to generate big-picture goals on their own. Some retired athletes tend to get involved with others — in friendships, work, and romantic relations — who like to “run the show,” while they act as the people-pleasing assistant.
Some retired athletes are aware that this puts them in a dependent state in which they are vulnerable to being taken advantage of and used. Some realize that it means they have never discovered their own authentic personality or personal version of fulfillment. They feel unsatisfied with the situation but don’t know how to change things. Others are not aware of the power dynamic of their relationships because they have never been exposed to anything different. They may feel lost or stuck, but have never considered that they do not just exist for others but also for themselves, and that there are kind, caring, people out there who will support them as they find their own path.
Broken Autonomy and the Dissolution of Boundaries
As is probably becoming clear in this discussion, an authoritarian power structure restricts the opportunity for athletes to grow into autonomous adults who can think and speak for themselves, evaluate for themselves, set goals for themselves, make choices for themselves, defend themselves, advocate for themselves, and govern their own lives. Such a possibility is neither encouraged nor valued because it runs contrary to the authoritarian’s desire for total control and their requirement of obedience without question.
The authoritarian power structure is, simply, not compatible with the freedoms of fully developed human beings. It is, quite literally, dehumanizing as it attempts to shut down or break off the development of a person’s own reason, values, and choice. In fact, it acts to destroy or dissolve anything that might be the athlete’s “own.”
For instance, I have noticed throughout my conversations with athletes that when the development of autonomy is broken off or cut short, there is also often a dissolution of personal boundaries. Boundaries are an essential part of autonomy. The autonomous individual — who has a sense that there exists a person that is “their own” who is “for them” to govern according to their own wits, creativity, and determination — is able to draw lines necessary to defend the integrity of their own personhood, their principles, and their choices, and resist another’s attempt to use, abuse, or overpower them. But when subjected to environments of intimidation and control 20+ hours a week for years of one’s young life, athletes’ personal boundaries dissolve.
This is how it works: In such an environment, athletes learn to silence and disregard every inner protective signal. So, for example, any signals of danger, fear, pain, skepticism, or injustice that might serve as an alarm bell to preserve and protect the integrity of one’s self, they learn to ignore or deny. These are the signals that normally make a person aware of where the self-protective boundary lines exist or should be drawn.
One client said it clearly: “I have been trained my whole life that if I ever feel pain, hunger, exhaustion, fear, or doubt – to deny, deny, deny. I’ve been trained to actively push down all my feelings, to actively ignore any sense of danger, and to push past any kind of resistance… or else.”
In this process of denying all self-protective signals, personal protective boundary lines become ambiguous, smeared, and blurred until they are erased.
Even long after retirement, athletes often find they cannot hear clearly their own body’s warnings that injury is near or already underway, their own voice of suspicion that the person they are with poses a danger, or their own inner sense that they are being disrespected. In their effort to please others and avoid any anger or punishment from them, they do what is “expected” of them. They get to a point where they can’t recognize that their personal boundaries are about to be violated because they can’t recognize their own personal boundaries at all. There is no longer a body, a mind, an emotional life that is “their own” that others are not entitled to as they wish. In such a situation, the notion of “violation” ceases to exist.
If it wasn’t already obvious, this is the very power dynamic that lays the groundwork for sexual abuse in sports environments. The athletes’ own modes of resistance, their own sense of what belongs to them, and their own sense of boundaries have dissolved so completely (via dehumanizing emotional abuse) that they are now extremely vulnerable to being taken advantage of in a myriad of other ways. It is extremely difficult to assert one’s own needs, stand up for oneself, and say “no” to sexual advances when one has learned (and been ordered) to silence the physical and emotional impulses that sound the self-protective alarm, and when one is operating within a learned belief system that those alarms are signs of weakness or insubordination, that resisting an authority figure means you’re a “bad” girl or boy, and that he or she who claims authority is rightfully entitled to whatever access they want.
It Should Be No Surprise That Performance Suffers Too
Along with all this fundamental damage done to the core of the human being, their basic sense of self, self-esteem, boundaries, and autonomy, it should be no surprise that athletic performance suffers too. This is important to point out to all the coaches and parents who still believe that all this damage done is worth it to extract physical excellence in competition.
The body that tries to endure the authoritarian power structure typically undergoes too many overuse injuries, is denied medical treatment, rest, and recovery for too long, and is frequently involved in disordered eating – which removes essential nutrition, weakens bones, and leads to more injuries. The mind, living in a perpetual state of fight or flight, becomes more and more difficult to sync with the body, which is needed to execute the complex skills of the sport. The athlete’s sense that nothing they do is right and that they are never good enough breaks down morale, which can quickly turn into depression. The intrinsic positive motivation born of joy and big dreams that was once present easily falls apart, as it becomes overtaken by the single-minded attempt to avoid criticism and punishment. Fear and avoidance take over the athlete’s emotional and behavioral world.
While performance, morale, and motivation all decline, the athlete often feels guilty that they are the ones to blame. They feel helpless and trapped. At this point, many athletes inevitably leave the sport, often while going through surgeries and/or entering mental health programs. Few athletes return to articulate to their coaches what really happened. It can take years for athletes to begin to digest it. Many athletes try to get as far away from the sport as they can, trying to find ways to heal and move on. And all the authoritarian coaches can see is – they’re “quitters.” They take quitting as proof of an athlete’s weakness and tell themselves it’s because they “couldn’t cut it.” They treat their lost athletes as exiles and turn to reproducing the cycle with the next batch of kids with big dreams. My hope is that finally telling their stories will, at the least, throw a wrench in the cycle.
