Sports Psychology

NEWSDAY
Tuesday, July 3, 2001
Searching for Way to Whip Yips
EMDR probes nervous system, releasing trauma
by Jamie Talan
Staff Writer

All Philip Gutterman needed was a bogey on the final hole of the 1999 U.S. Amateur qualifying tournament at Woodcrest Country Club in Syosset and he would have been on his way to Pebble Beach for the prestigious U.S. Amateur tournament.

Facing a short par-4 over water on the 18th hole, Gutterman drove his ball straight into the pond. He wound up with a double bogey and without an invitation to Pebble Beach. "It bothered me for months," Gutterman said. Issues developed in his otherwise impressive game. He began having problems with one club in particular, the 3-wood. He couldn't stop himself from topping the ball, an embarrassing blunder for a 2-handicap golfer.

He had the yips.

It's a bizarre sports affliction that turns something natural-a simple throw back to the pitcher or a short putt -into something harrowing. And like a nightmare, it repeats.

Gutterman sought help for his yips and found it with clinical psychologist David Grand.

"He told me he could help me take two shots off my score," Gutterman said. "I said, 'There's no way.' " After the first session, Gutterman said, "I saw immediate results." Recently, he was sitting with Grand, talking about his golf game. While he spoke, Gutterman wore headphones and listened to the hum of gentle ocean sounds designed to dislodge traumatic memories. Grand is an expert in a psychological technique called Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (or EMDR), and he's been using the technique at his Bellmore and Manhattan offices to bring athletes back to top form.

But possessing a cure for the yips, a condition that afflicts athletes such as St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Rick Ankiel, who lost his ability to throw accurately to home plate, or former Gold Glove second baseman Chuck Knoblauch of the Yankees, who has been sent to leftfield because of his erratic throws to first base, is a hard sell. The Yankees' newly acquired reliever, Mark Wohlers, lived two years with the yips while in the midst of a divorce. His yips disappeared following 1999 reconstructive elbow surgery.

"I convinced myself the reason I couldn't pitch straight was because I blew out my elbow, even though deep down I don't know what it was," Wohlers said Sunday. "The mind is a powerful thing." Grand has called Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty about Ankiel, contacted the Yankees about Knoblauch and called other professional athletes who have experienced humiliation when they no longer could consistently do what they used to do well. But the calls are hardly ever returned, probably because everyone has an idea on how to cure the yips.

Grand is best known for his work with Long Island Rail Road engineers who have found speedy relief from traumatic experiences. Many were in the cab when their train ran over a person lying on the tracks or hit a car stuck on the tracks. Accident victims, people carrying disruptive memories of trauma, are common in his practice.

As Gutterman recalls lifting a 3-wood over his head and his hands coming down to take a swing, Grand asks, "How does it feel? Close your eyes, and go through the scene. Where do you feel it?" "In my stomach," he answers. Gutterman thinks the technique-and the therapist-brilliant. "I have gone beyond my goals," he said. "I'm EMDR-ing shots all the time. I think one shot at a time -no thinking back and no thinking ahead." Instead, he's raised his expectations, carving out tight mental targets in his mind on every shot. The result: He's dropped to a zero handicap, which means he usually shoots near par. Last year, he won the New York City Amateur and the Long Island Stroke Play title, and he's looking for a win at the State Open on Bethpage's Black Course July 17-19.

Grand's goals are, well, also grand.

"Give me three days with Ankiel and he'll be back to where he was," he said. "Give me a week, he'll be even better." The yips may sound silly, but "every athlete dreads the term," Grand said.

"It appears to come out of nowhere. It can happen a few times and go away or it may never go away." It generally happens on the easiest putts or the simplest throws. Many golfers, such as Bernhard Langer, have changed the size and shape of their putters, which has helped. Others have tried positive visualization, relaxation or focusing on something else, but these techniques are all in the service of adaptation.

Grand thinks the problem arises when traumatic stressors get in the way of performance. Releasing those memories is a way out of the yips. "People think that when you add 'sport' to 'psychology' the reasons change," he said. Many sports psychologists work on mechanical problems of the swing, throw or stance. Grand thinks there is more beneath the surface.

"People, even top athletes, bring to the plate all of their life experiences...EMDR reaches deep into the nervous system and lets people work on releasing traumatic memories. They begin to make a connection between the memory and what they are experiencing in the present." If a pitcher can no longer get the ball over the plate, the fear, humiliation and even shock that emerges is a trigger for an unresolved memory.

"It gets stuck in the system," Grand said.

Some people think EMDR is nothing more than behavioral therapy with added bells and whistles. Francine Shapiro, a psychologist who came up with EMDR in 1987, said it works "like an external pacemaker" to shuttle memories from one part of the brain to another.

EMDR may work on traumatic memories but it's nothing like psychoanalysis. People don't even have to say aloud what's on their mind. They work through the events while listening to music or with the classic EMDR technique of hypnotic hand-waving by the therapist. The theory is that the eye movements or the auditory processing help release the stress in the central nervous system.

Grand said he is the first psychologist to treat the yips with EMDR. He's used the technique with half a dozen professional athletes, including a former Yankee with fielding yips, a Jets player who lost his timing and a former Knicks sharpshooter who could no longer shoot accurately. Losing control is also a physical problem, and Grand usually asks his clients to bring their equipment for a slow-motion workout-to find the kinks and smooth out the hitches.

Ankiel's wildness may have begun in last year's playoffs with one pitch that spawned so many more. The Cardinals brought in sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman to help Ankiel, but it's unclear what they worked on. During spring training, the throws to the backstop continued. Now pitching for the Cardinals' rookie league team in Johnson City, Tenn., Ankiel has walked only three batters and thrown two wild pitches in 16 innings. It is unclear when he will return to the major leagues.

"He was still vulnerable," Grand said. "A gardener can pull out the weeds," but every time Ankiel makes a bad throw, it retraumatizes him. The public openness of the problem, for all professional athletes, makes it much worse. "Unless you deal with the traumas, you're pulling up the weeds without the roots." Grand has his clients work through their movements with headphones on.

Hitches, or jumps in the movement, affect the consistency of the motion. Clients continue with the movement until the flinch, even one that's barely noticeable, is gone.

Grand believes he can help athletes such as Ankiel put the yips behind them, even though many -former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass and former Mets catcher Mackey Sasser, for example-were never able to recover their abilities. Crown is publishing Grand's book, "Emotional Healing at Warp Speed; The Power of EMDR" in August.

About five years ago, Grand read about a railroad engineer who experienced six fatal accidents in a 10-year period. Grand had been perfecting the EMDR technique that emerged in the 1980s as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. He found the engineer, Bob Frank, through the LIRR's employee assistance program and worked with him for one 2 1/2-hour session. Frank had been holding the trauma in his nervous system for a decade. When he walked out of Grand's office that day, he said he was clear of the trauma. Since then, LIRR has sent Grand scores of engineers to treat.

Ankiel may have the trauma of his father's imprisonment weighing on him. Knoblauch is dealing with his father's Alzheimer's disease. The first signs of his yips appeared in 1998 when throwing to first base.

"I have no question that he can go back to second base without the yips and return to his Gold Glove position," Grand said. Over the years, some prominent scientists have embraced EMDR. Boston University's Bessel van der Kolk was trained to give the treatment "and started seeing that people get better faster than anything else I had been doing." He's even conducted brain-scanning studies and found that areas that regulate fear are no longer activated after EMDR.

Still, many sports psychologists would laugh at the idea that an athlete could overcome the yips by processing through decades-old traumas. Deborah Graham, a sports psychologist for SportPsych in Boerne, Texas, said she believes the yips are conditioned responses that must be unlearned. She believes the problem is physiological-breathing quickens, skin temperature increases and fine motor skills are compromised. She relies on biofeedback instruments to help athletes learn how to relax and manage this extra tension.

For most golf yippers, it's the short putt-from 3 to 5 feet-that gets in the way of the game. Sam Snead turned to an unusual putting style, a croquet stance since outlawed in golf, to overcome his yips.

Fran Pirozzolo, a mental skills coach for the Yankees, has a different view of the yips. He thinks the human body is not designed to repeat the same unusual physical action millions of times without taking its toll on the system. Yips, therefore, is an overuse problem.

His treatment is to train the body to use a different motor system. "When a motor behavior in any athlete becomes overlearned, it gets committed to the memory system in an older, more primitive part of the brain," Pirozzolo said. "When someone is learning a new skill, they rely on different parts of the brain. These are movement disorders." To Pirozzolo, the key is an accurate diagnosis and then a break to rest the muscles. Then, change the movement or even the visual orientation that would lead to a change in the motor response.

Although he would not comment on Knoblauch's move to the outfield, Pirozzolo did say there were "times that Chuck successfully battled the yips. The organization felt he'd be better off in leftfield rather than to keep battling with this problem." "Everybody brings their personality to the game," said Dr. Allan Lans, consulting psychiatrist for the Mets. But he also doesn't believe it's rooted in psychological history.

"It all comes down to an anxiety response," Lans said. "In baseball, people talk about someone getting wild. Then everyone comes rushing to the rescue to fix it and they just make the problem worse.

" 'Just throw the damn ball,' I tell them. Stop thinking too much."

Word Play

Definition of "yips", which first appeared in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary in 1962: yips, noun, plural [origin unknown]: a state of nervous tension affecting an athlete (as a golfer) in the performance of a crucial action.

What is EMDR?

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a treatment method discovered in California in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro, a clinical psychologist. It has revolutionized the treatment of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (resulting from traumas such as accidents, muggings, natural disasters and combat experiences) which now can be successfully resolved by application of EMDR in days instead of months or years. It has also been discovered that EMDR is a powerful and expeditious tool in enhancing performance for athletes, performers and those in the business world. Although the application of EMDR is widespread and generally accepted on the West Coast, it is for the most part unheard of in the eastern U.S.

What is our background in EMDR?

We have been directly trained by Dr. Francine Shapiro as advanced practitioners and facilitators (training instructors) in EMDR. We have successfully treated hundreds of clients with PTSD and optimized the performance of many athletes, performing artists and corporate executives with the utilization of this technique.

What are athletes' performance issues that can be enhanced by EMDR?

An athlete is drafted by an organization and integrated into the teams developmental process with the ultimate goal of performing proficiently and to their maximum potential at the major league level. They have already demonstrated eye-catching talent and skill on their high school or college team where they usually were the star player. The developing amateur athlete then is faced with the challenge of coping with the demands and stresses of transitioning to the professional level and competing with many equally talented peers. Only with the passage of time can their ability to adapt and the concomitant emergence or inhibition of the athlete's potential be determined. This entails the capacity to cope with scrutiny, situational anxiety and the experience of repeated failure with resilience and without significant loss of confidence. A negative performance experience (NPE) such as one or a series of bad days at the plate, in the field or on the mound can initiate a slump or protracted performance inhibition (PPI) where the vulnerable athlete struggles with high levels of performance anxiety and distorted perspectives of their skills.

What are the psychological and neurophysiological effects on the athlete of a negative performance experience (NPE)?

During and after the NPE the athletes brain secretes progressively increasing levels of a chemical called norepinephrine, a stimulant neurotransmitter associated with trauma. Norepinephrine leads to a state of hyperalertness and intense anxiety as well as contributing to a looped replaying of the distressing event(s). If this state of mind is maintained or increases, then the brains level of norepinephrine secretion continues to surge. The athlete experiences agitation and confusion and his concentration and focus on tasks decreases. When he goes to sleep the phasic timing of the electrical firing of the nerves in the left and right hemispheres of the brain becomes unsynchronized. Delta sleep, also known as the REM state, is disrupted as is the mechanism by which disturbing events from the previous day(s) are reprocessed in dream sleep. Accordingly, the athlete continues to be plagued by distorted beliefs about his ability ("I can't do it" or "I'm not good enough") and gets caught in self-perpetuating negative spiral. This can lead to an extended, at times intractable slump or PPI (protracted performance inhibition).

How does EMDR address these issues?

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is induced with eye movements, left/right tactile or auditory stimulation. These applications results in alternating stimulation of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This facilitates the resynchronization of the phasic firing of the two hemispheres and aids in restoring the brain wave activity and chemical secretion to a normal state. During this bilateral stimulation the athlete focuses cognitively on his distorted beliefs about his abilities which stem from the negative events. Complete reprocessing of the memories occurs. The distortions are corrected accompanied by the installation and reinforcement of positive, accurate beliefs ("I just had a bad day" or "I am a good athlete"). Another way to conceptualize this is to picture the cognitive abilities residing in left hemisphere and the emotional content residing in the right. When synchronization of the hemispheres is disturbed, thoughts are significantly less integrated with feelings. The athlete becomes a victim of his emotions, without the appropriate balancing cognitions. EMDR physiologically accomplishes a rebalancing, restores the previous level of performance and fosters enhanced performance in the future.

How do we service teams and individual athletes?

Each team and athlete has distinct, individual performance enhancement requirements. We conduct an extensive needs analysis with the appropriate parties and derive a plan to optimally address the situation. The plan is not only formulated in terms of the type of service but also the most advantageous venue and schedule for the delivery of the service. It is our primary philosophy that only an experience of complete satisfaction by our clients with our service (win/win) is acceptable to us.