Healing Trauma for Peak Performance

I am Dr. Paige Roberts, a sports psychology consultant who was an endurance athlete in high school and college. I was a distance runner who ran 5ks, two- and one-mile races. As an endurance athlete I was used to disconnecting from the lactate threshold pain to push beyond my physical limits to finish a race strong. That disconnect led to injuries. I had to learn about healing trauma for peak performance which may be helpful to you.

The Impact of Disassociation in Sports

What I didn’t know was that by pushing my physical limits I was teaching my brain to disassociate from the pain signal. As time went on, I started to feel flat and would begin to lose focus when I was racing. It wasn’t until I developed severe stress fractures throughout my tibias and fibulas because of not feeling the pain signal when I ran. The fractures on my right leg were so bad I had to have a cast to heal.

This led me to see a sports psychology consultant to deal with the grief of having to stop running until I healed. What I had not realized was over-time not only could I disassociate from physical pain I learned to disassociate from mental pain as well. Which for me began to look like the inability to experience emotions whether they were good or bad. It was through the sports trauma reprocessing work I learned how unhealthy disassociating was for my nervous system.

Understanding Sports Trauma and the Nervous System

When we disassociate, we are training our nervous system to stay in the” freeze” or frozen state. This is where the nervous system “trauma” responses of fight, flight, freeze or fawn live. By staying within a trauma response, we are more sympathetic nervous system dominate. This can cause us to produce cortisol or have more inflammation. We can also go into sympathetic nervous system dominance. This can result in a lower range of motion caused by the tightening of the dural mater sheath around our brain and spine. This sympathetic nervous system dominance is why you might get a chiropractic treatment and the adjustment might not take or you go right back to misalignment.

These factors can create a greater risk of enduring injuries as well as inhibiting our ability to recover from hard training or heal from current injuries. For me aside from working through the past physical stressors-traumas I had put myself through I had past life adversities-stressors-traumas to work through as well. Our nervous system cannot tell the difference between a mental or physical adversity-stress-trauma. Our nervous system reacts the same way to both by resetting our homeostasis to a more sympathetic nervous system dominant as a survival mechanism. We become on guard or hypervigilant to react to the same or similar interaction if it occurs. Think of a shock reaction as both trigger cortisol to be released and an increase in heart rate.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Connection Between Mental and Physical Pain

This is why both mental and physical stressors-adversities-traumas need to be reprocessed to effectively reset our homeostasis. This reset allows us to be more within the parasympathetic nervous system state of rest and recovery. There are other symptoms associated with being in the trauma responses. These include being quick to get triggered or anger, feeling depressed all the time, inability to focus or insomnia. It can also cause us to become apathetic to training or competing.

The Benefits of Reprocessing Trauma

Once we reset our nervous system, we will be less likely to lose focus. That may be while we race or in training. We will also be less likely to push through irreversible damaging pain signals and restore our healthy range of emotions.  Our physical range of motion will be regained which will allow our body to work more effectively. Most importantly by resetting the nervous system we can stay in flow state when the pressure is on to compete.

Tune in on to the Fireside Chat podcast on August 27, 2024 where I will be a guest. I’ll be discussing how you can perform better by reprocessing your mental and physical adversities-stressors-traumas. The conversation will center on healing trauma for peak performance so don’t miss out.

ADVERTISEMENT