Two athletes show up to your sport. One of them trains. One of them competes. They share a body, a name, a uniform. They are not the same person, and pretending they are is the reason this keeps happening.
The athlete on game day was trained by something older than your sport.
Somewhere in your developmental history, performance got entangled with watching, eyes on you, stakes on you, an outcome that meant something to someone whose approval mattered. That entanglement got stored. It didn't get coached out by drills, because drills happen in practice, where the watching part doesn't activate. Game day calls it forward.
More reps don't reach this. More reps train the athlete who already shows up in practice.
You are not choking. A younger part of you is doing exactly what it learned to do when someone important was watching.
All Parts at the Table, for athletes.
Developmental parts mapping locates the part that takes over under the lights. Not to fix it. To meet it. To understand what it's protecting against, what age it formed at, and what it needs to step back. Athletes describe the shift the same way: 'The voice was still there. It just wasn't driving anymore.'
- A reframe of game-day collapse: it's not weakness, it's a younger protective pattern.
- Language to separate the practice-athlete from the competition-athlete.
- A starting point that's about meeting the part, not overriding it.
- Performance under observation activates state-dependent learning laid down in early developmental contexts.
- Parts work meets that material in the layer where it actually lives instead of layering willpower on top.
- Memory reconsolidation can update the protective pattern once it's met in a regulated state.
- State-dependent retrieval is a well-described memory effect: patterns tend to surface most readily in the state that encoded them.[1][2][3][4]
- IFS-informed parts work (Schwartz, Anderson) provides a clinical map for protective parts and the systems they guard.[1][2][3][4]
Numbers jump to the cited source ↓
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Peer-reviewed papers and field-defining books that underpin the methodology referenced above.
- Schwartz, R. C. & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Anderson, F. G., Sweezy, M., & Schwartz, R. C. (2017). Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual. PESI Publishing.
- Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. Routledge.
- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.