Friday, June 15, 2012

Bridging the Gap


Several years ago I took up the game of golf as a hobby. Initially I would go out with minimal expectations and celebrate my successes on the course. As my game improved, I became aware of a growing gap between who I wanted to be as a golfer (my idealized golfer self) and what my skills allowed me to accomplish (my real golf self). This gap became actualized in the expectations I began to put on myself each time I played. If I hit a good shot that supported the internal image of my ideal self I enjoyed the game. When I hit a shot that exposed my real golf self I became frustrated and internally critical. If I was to continue playing this game I had to figure out what I could do to better manage this stress. I had to accept my real golf self’s limitations and then develop a strategy to reduce the gap between my current skill level and how I wanted to perform in the future.

I decided to take lessons from a golf professional. He spent some time looking at my clubs to get the past history of how I had been hitting the ball and then evaluated my current skills by observing my swing. By combining my past history with my current performance he was able to make some recommendations on how I could improve. My swing coach gave me several things to work on during the week and had me practice them while he watched. I could feel and see the difference immediately and felt I was on my way to being a much better player. However, when I played that week I actually performed worse, not better. I was thinking about everything he had taught me, but playing badly. My initial thought was that the lessons were not worth the time and energy. When I saw him the next week he asked how I did with the skills we worked on. I told him I had played poorly and that I was more frustrated because I’d believed I was getting better after our last session. He shared with me that golf is not only a game of making good shots, but also a game of managing bad shots. When you hit a good shot, you get an immediate reward that has a positive effect on you. However, when you make a bad shot, it creates a stressor that you have to be able to manage. You have to objectively assess where you are at, what happened to cause you to be in the situation you are in, and what shot you could hit next  to minimize the impact of the situation.

So golf is not only about swinging a club and hitting the ball, but also about learning how to regulate yourself and mange both the reward and stressors create by the experience on the course. It is a metaphor for life itself. Even though there is no real danger on the golf course, the symbolic meaning we apply to the game generates a physiological stress response that will either allow us to focus on our game or interfere with our capacity to perform. When faced with a challenging situation, the golfer has to tolerate and regulate his stress response, and engage in higher order analytic thought to evaluate the situation and find a creative solution. The golfer must be able to reflect on the past shot, envision the next shot, and then be able to be firmly in the present during the swing.
 
For many of the children who have been exposed to multiple adverse experiences early in life without the presence of an attentive, attuned, nurturing, responsive caregiver to assist them in managing their physiological arousal, stepping back and reflecting on their experience is not an option. Good caregivers assist their infants in learning to tolerate and modulate emotions by first matching the children’s affect state and then remaining regulated themselves. When parents are not available for these repetitive experiences of co-regulation the developing child is at risk for inadequate capacity for self-regulation.

Just as the capacity for self-regulation occurs within a reciprocal interpersonal relationship with a responsive caregiver, so, too, does the capacity for self-reflection. When the infant experiences internal arousal and the caregiver accurately reads the cues and is sensitive to the infant’s experience, it gives meaning to the communication and lays the foundation for the child to begin to experience the capacity to have an impact on his world. This reflective mirroring process facilitates the developing child’s awareness of inner experience and the capacity to express those inner experiences to the self and to others. When a child grows up without the experience of an attentive, attuned adult reading the nonverbal cues and then providing feedback, the child cannot organize his internal experience or make meaning of it. These children develop the feeling that they are unable to effectively make an impact on their world. As they grow, there becomes a widening gap between how they feel inside and what they believe the environment is demanding of them.  Their inability to tolerate and regulate their emotions and their lack of a capacity to self-reflect increases the likelihood that earlier relational experiences will be repeated in future interactions.

When we are facing a potential threatening situation, our body’s survival system is activated. Powerful neurochemicals and hormones are released which are responsible for increasing arousal - our heart rate increases as the body prepares for action. Resources are diverted away from non-essential functions, those not considered essential for managing the immediate threat. Higher order, complex thought is non-essential and only interferes with a person reflexively reacting to danger. These automatic, habitual behavioral and hormonal patterns of reacting are designed to increase our chances of survival. The reflexive action patterns are mediated by lower sub-cortical neural networks that drive us to focus on potential threats and avoid pain, but they inhibit our natural capacity for curiosity. Stressed individuals rely on past negative experiences to interpret their current situation and they have trouble learning, altering rigid beliefs, and envisioning a better future. Their stress response system becomes hyperreactive and they exhibit deficits in their ability to regulate their emotions, modulate their anxiety, and reflect and learn from their experiences. These individuals tend to see new experiences as a repetition of the past rather than an opportunity in the present.

Therapy does not attempt to erase past adversity, but rather strives to provide the client with sensory, relational and cognitive experiences that will facilitate the organization and integration of those past experiences within a safe, attentive, attuned and responsive relational environment. The goal of therapy is to assist clients in developing the capability to tolerate and modulate their internal experience, to learn to identify and express their internal experience, and to develop the skills to organize, strategize and implement effective response.

The therapist and the golf coach have much in common. They both have to understand the current problem within the context of past experience in order to make an effective plan that leads to the perception of a brighter future. In both cases, their clients have to understand that it is not only about having positive experiences, but also managing the negative ones, that allows us to develop a sense of efficacy.

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Your comments and questions are welcome. Please feel free to post below or to contact me directly at jerry.yager@denvercac.org

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