Counseling for Athletes
You love your sport. You hate your sport.
It’s your passion and it’s your prison.
Who are you within it — and who would you possibly be without it?
Athletics is a unique crucible full of contradictions.
You want your coach’s understanding and approval and you want to stay true to yourself.
You need chemistry and connection with your teammates and you don’t genuinely like all of them.
You love your best friend and you still want to beat her.
You feel exhausted, discouraged, or burnt out and you know you still have to show up and perform.
You experience immense disappointment or failure and you have to regroup quickly and try again (often in front of an audience).
People celebrate your achievements and they poke fun at your intensity.
Your sport gives you confidence and slowly erodes it at the same time.
You crave rest and you feel guilty when you take it.
You desperately want the scholarship, the starting spot, the recognition… and you miss when the sport used to just be fun.
Underneath all of this is the question of identity. For many athletes, their sport becomes more than something they do — “athlete” becomes who they are. Performance, discipline, achievement, body image, social status, relationships, and self-worth can all become deeply tangled together. So when things get hard — injury, burnout, mistakes, conflict, transitions, or even the thought of life after sports — it can feel existential, not just confusing or disappointing.
Because it’s never only just about the game.
If you’re an athlete, one thing is certain: the experience is going to shape you.
You may not realize it yet, but you have agency in how.
Let’s make meaning of this experience together.
My Counseling Approach
When Viktor Frankl entered a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, nearly every part of his former life was taken from him — his freedom, his work, his family, and the future he had imagined for himself. Amid profound suffering and loss, he became deeply curious about a question that would later shape his work:
Why do some people maintain a sense of hope and meaning in unbearable circumstances, while others lose their footing entirely?
What Frankl noticed was that even when people cannot control what happens to them, they can still retain some agency in how they relate to it, understand it, and carry it forward. Out of his question and observations, Frankl developed a therapeutic approach centered around meaning-making.
Logotherapy was born.
To be clear, I am not comparing athletics to the horrors of the Holocaust. But I do believe that Frankl tapped into something deeply human in his work:
The stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter.
The meaning we make out of our experiences influences the quality of our lives.
Therapy is not just about reducing symptoms.
It’s also about helping people notice the narratives they’ve inherited, absorbed, or unconsciously built over time — and asking whether those stories are actually true, helpful, or complete.
This can be particularly powerful for athletes because sports are full of storytelling.
Somewhere along the way, many athletes begin absorbing messages like:
“My worth depends on my performance.”
“Rest is weakness.”
“If I disappoint people, I lose value.”
“I have to earn belonging.”
Over time, those beliefs can become so deeply ingrained that they stop feeling like stories and start feeling like facts.
Narrative work helps create a little distance between you and the story you’ve been carrying. It allows us to ask questions like:
Who taught you that?
When did you start believing it?
Did that belief help you survive something?
Is it helping you now?
What happens if the story is incomplete?
If the story could be anything, what would you want it to be?
Because the goal is not to erase your ambition, intensity, competitiveness, or drive. The goal is to help you build a relationship with yourself that is bigger, steadier, and more compassionate than performance alone.