Emotion focused therapy with injured athletes: Conceptualizing injury challenges and working with emotions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Athletes’ emotional responses to injuries may include feeling sad, angry, anxious, frustrated, helpless, irritated, and confused about their identity as athletes. Emotions are central in athletes’ sport injury experiences, yet most therapeutic approaches described in the sport psychology literature are grounded in cognitive-behavioural traditions and strategies may tend to emphasize controlling or suppressing emotions. Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is a robust, empirically-supported therapeutic approach grounded in experiential therapy and emotion theory that can be used to help athletes deal with injury-related difficulties. This position paper presents a rationale for using EFT in working with injured athletes. We review foundational principles of EFT and the conceptualization of emotions, emotion regulation, and dysregulation from an EFT perspective. Drawing on EFT theory, we present a conceptualization of five challenges and conflicts that arise within athletes’ injury experiences: (a) attending to the body and listening to the body; (b) tending to the pain versus pushing through pain; (c) interpersonal challenges and conflicts with others; (d) injuries as a challenge to athlete identity; and (e) concerns about time left in career and falling behind. Examples of ‘in vivo’ interactions between therapists and athletes are also presented to bring to life the use of EFT strategies and techniques, and we conclude with directions for future research and suggestions for practitioners to advance the use of EFT within the field of sport psychology.Lay summary: Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is a process-experiential, person-centered therapeutic approach that holds promise for clinicians and therapists working with injured athletes. EFT could be used to evoke and experience emotions in therapeutic sessions in order to develop greater acceptance, awareness, and understanding about one’s emotions to facilitate healing and support athletes’ ongoing performance and sport careers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".