Young athletes, but especially young male athletes, often use their sports to supplement their lack of self-esteem.
Athletes, especially young males, often externalize their struggles with deep issues of self-worth.
This externalizing doesn’t look like classic symptoms of a person laying on a couch with Freud discussing their childhood and why they won’t get out of bed in the morning.
It usually looks more like, what therapist Terry Real, who specializes in male depression and issues of self-worth, would call covert depression.
Instead of classical overt depressions a la Freud, men tend to double or triple down on what he called “self - esteem supplements” like work, sports, money, objects or relationship obsession. All of which involve deriving one’s worth from something outside of themselves.
Real goes on:
Self-esteem is your capacity to recognize your worth and value, despite your human flaws and weaknesses. Your value as a person isn't earned; it isn't conditional; it can't be added to or subtracted from. Your essential worth is neither greater nor lesser than that of any other human being. It can't be. Self-esteem is about being, not doing. You have worth simply because you're alive.
In coaching athletes for over a decade, and having been in sports my whole life, I can see a pattern: the players who never needed their sport to feel great about themselves always excelled above sometimes more talented players whose whole identity was their performance.
I also struggled mightily as a high school and college football kicker. My whole sense of self depended on how I kicked that day. If I had a bad kick, I was a bad and worthless Brendan. If I had a great kick, suddenly I was a great and worthy Brendan. None of my coaches imposed this view on me, I imposed internally against myself, conflating my performance for my worth. It took me until my last year or two of college football to manage this.
But, I wasted a lot of time I could have been enjoying football with this internal self-flagellation. I wonder how many other athletes struggle with this. My hunch is that there is a good amount.
I think we need a long and new discussion with athletes and their families in 2024 on what it means for an athlete to be successful and, more importantly, what it looks like to develop a healthy self-esteem in an environment that seems to only reward outward performance.
Brendan