Ever wondered how sports psychology impacts a golf game? Our fascinating conversation with Dr. Alison Curdt, a PGA and LPGA Master Professional, will keep you on the edge of your seat. We navigate the intricacies of the Ryder Cup, focusing on the mental aspects of the game and how a deeper understanding of team dynamics and individual mindsets can significantly influence the results. We also take a deep dive into the cultural disparities between European and US teams, speculating on how these could have been leveraged to benefit the US team.
Ready to unlock the secrets of mental preparation for golf tournaments? Listen in as Dr. Curdt provides precious insights into how European teams condition their players from a biopsychosocial perspective, leading us to question whether the USA employs a similar approach. We further delve into the world of mental imagery, discussing how club-level golfers can take advantage of this powerful tool when gearing up for championships. Our discourse goes beyond the links to tackle the brain's "negativity bias", exploring how rewiring our neural pathways can lead to improved performance in golf.
In a surprising twist, we also uncover the intriguing technique of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in sports psychology, discussing its potential in managing performance anxiety and processing traumatic memories. You'll be engrossed as Dr. Curdt shares her firsthand experiences of assisting players handle failure and adversity, underlining the crucial role of resilience in sports. Don't miss this enlightening episode that will redefine your perception of failure as not just a learning tool, but a catalyst for growth in athletes. So tune in, for a journey through the mind of a golfer that's sure to challenge your understanding of the game.
Ever wondered how sports psychology impacts a golf game? Our fascinating conversation with Dr. Alison Curdt, a PGA and LPGA Master Professional, will keep you on the edge of your seat. We navigate the intricacies of the Ryder Cup, focusing on the mental aspects of the game and how a deeper understanding of team dynamics and individual mindsets can significantly influence the results. We also take a deep dive into the cultural disparities between European and US teams, speculating on how these could have been leveraged to benefit the US team.
Ready to unlock the secrets of mental preparation for golf tournaments? Listen in as Dr. Curdt provides precious insights into how European teams condition their players from a biopsychosocial perspective, leading us to question whether the USA employs a similar approach. We further delve into the world of mental imagery, discussing how club-level golfers can take advantage of this powerful tool when gearing up for championships. Our discourse goes beyond the links to tackle the brain's "negativity bias", exploring how rewiring our neural pathways can lead to improved performance in golf.
In a surprising twist, we also uncover the intriguing technique of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in sports psychology, discussing its potential in managing performance anxiety and processing traumatic memories. You'll be engrossed as Dr. Curdt shares her firsthand experiences of assisting players handle failure and adversity, underlining the crucial role of resilience in sports. Don't miss this enlightening episode that will redefine your perception of failure as not just a learning tool, but a catalyst for growth in athletes. So tune in, for a journey through the mind of a golfer that's sure to challenge your understanding of the game.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Making the Turn featuring Double D and the Douch. And we are very excited because, hot off the press with the results of the Ryder Cup, we have somebody who is definitely going to be needed for more than a few Americans out there who definitely suffered some heartbreak when we thought that maybe we were going to run the table and turn that thing around, only to fall short in the waning moment. So we are very, very fortunate to have somebody who is not only an amazing golf coach and golf instructor and an amazing player of the game, but also has went and taken it a step farther and really increased her knowledge on a very particular subject matter which most of us are more than interested in, which would be psychology. So we're very fortunate to have Dr Alison Kurt, who is a doctor of psychology. He's a PGA master professional in instruction and LPGA master professional. I mean when I say that she has got the credential, she's got them Also as a player playing at Florida State University.
Speaker 1:It was a two time academic all-American and also played in seven majors and two tour championships. I actually had to write that down, Dr Kurt. I never do, Normally I can remember what I got to say, but that is quite some list and I think I even forgot that you're on a couple of the golfcom top 100 to watch and potentially something similar with the golf digest one as well, and I forget. I apologize.
Speaker 2:That's right Best in state and best young teacher.
Speaker 1:I can't ever get to all of them because it's just there's so many. But yeah, she is very, very decorated and we're lucky to have her. So hello, dr Kurt, we're so happy to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's so great to talk with you, michael and Dan. It's going to be great conversation. Looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that Dan's chomping at the bed to get at this, so why don't you go ahead? Because I think Dan is really going to want to spend the most time between us with Dr Kurt, because Dan, even pre-recording this, was talking to Dr Kurt about maybe some traumas that he's suffered on the golf course over the past few years. So I think this is going to be a great conversation, so let her rip double day.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, welcome. Great to have you on, dr Kurt, I mean, alison, you know I've read a lot about athletic trauma, which is something that you've written about and covered extensively and studied. I wrote a story a few years back called that's Tawn it, which is all about my 15 year inability to chip and actually how that came to define me. So I feel like I'm in the presence of somebody who really understands or the pain that I felt. So, to start with, a question about what we've just witnessed with the Ryder Cup and how perhaps you watched that and just thought how could sports psychology have really helped? How would you work with players going into playing Ryder Cup on foreign soil, which, as we all know, is a really tough thing to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think really it starts from the team cohesiveness, and I know that has been brought up a little bit about what happened in the locker room and the reality is none of us really know what happened. Everything is just hearsay unless it comes from a player's mouth. We really don't know what happened. But when we look at some of the foundations of sports psychology, it's not just an individual approach. Sports psychology is also the chemistry between you and your coaches as players and also between teammates, and I think one thing that really separates Europe from the USA is European culture is much more collectivist and growing up way more with match play background and working as a team, as compared to the US culture, which is very individualistic, and golf can be very selfish at times when you're playing as an individual and then all of a sudden you get to maybe a high school team or a college team and now you've got to take that individual perspective and put it to a team cohesiveness. And so when I look at that difference, I think Europe definitely has a leg up when they look at teamwork and team chemistry and putting the selflessness aside and selfishness aside and being selfless and contributing to the country and to the team and so, as looking at the chemistry and the dynamics between the individual players, I think it would have been really great to do some team bonding to get everyone on the same page.
Speaker 2:I think there was a lot of information about some players hadn't played in the competition for four weeks. Some players didn't even show up to some of the scheduled practices and to me that already screams a lot of red flags. And then when I look at the individual performances on the golf course, whether in four balls or in singles, I really saw some different levels of lack of commitment changing game plans, like what a player maybe feels really committed to do, and then a coach coming in and sort of changing the game plan and that player then might be in a state of uncertainty or not really buying into the plan. And I think we can talk about that with the whole switch of driver back to three wood and then three wood goes in the water. But it would have been, I think, really helpful to have perhaps a sports psychologist come in and say to for the USA team in particular. Let's look at how to build some team chemistry, some belief in each other. What's the game plan in terms of your strategy for the golf course? How do you want Zach Johnson to approach you? What kind of coaching does each player need, and how can I best be of service, as well as the other coaches that are on the course as well?
Speaker 2:I think there's going to be a lot of scar tissue from this past event too. The hype and the talking back and forth with each other that builds up some drama, but at the end of the day, I think the USA is going to go home and feel pretty regretful about some of their choices and almost sort of the weight of the country on their shoulders here, and we've got to wait a few more years to see if we can try to get this cut back. There's going to be some psychological scar tissue. I asked one more question.
Speaker 3:Sorry, sorry, just sorry, sorry, but just what you were saying. Were there any visible signs that gave you cause for concerns? Actually watching how the players carried themselves, watching how the players interacted with each other, with their captains or vice captains, or within that team environment? Was there anything that you actually saw, without being obviously in the camp, that gave you cause for concern or thought well, that's a red flag, as you said?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would think that more of the communication and the body language when I would see Zach interact with a player on the tee kind of remind me a little bit of going back to college coaching and seeing a college coach interact with a player. And a player comes up all geared and ready to go with their plan and the next thing you know they're like putting a club away and it's almost less engaged and less fired up about the original plan because somebody interfered. And I think that kind of interferes with a little bit of flow as well. Composure wise, I think you as compose themselves fairly well in terms of behavior.
Speaker 2:I think John Rom is an interesting case.
Speaker 2:He's a fantastic player. Perhaps some of his actions on the golf course would not fit the category of proper etiquette or proper player behavior, but he knows how to process and get out his emotion quickly and then recover from it, whereas other players perhaps are keeping too much emotion inside, letting it boil and then all of a sudden exploding at the wrong moment. So there is some sense of feeling and dealing and getting over it right away, as in a John Rom kind of smashing a sign, but then he comes back and plays fantastic, whereas perhaps maybe a Brooks Kepka looks okay on the outside but he is boiling and steaming on the inside, losing nine and seven, because how is he processing that pent up emotion and could he process it in such a way? We sort of say, anger turned inward can turn into depression or placation. So maybe there's a tipping point for him in particular where you're just down so low and you're not able to process that emotion that there's a sense of not necessarily giving up, but there's the fire that's quickly diminishing.
Speaker 1:The piggyback off of that and I think that's a really good point. And to use that exact example with Brooks, with Scottie Scheffler, when they took the beating that they got, and the camera pretty quickly was showing Scottie after the effects of that and obviously visibly upset, and then tears and sitting on the back of the golf cart and something that really I thought was weird and I wanted to ask you about this Allison. So it's just kind of worked out perfect, but I've had players that have had bad rounds. I've had players that have been injured in warmups and not been able to compete and when the decision gets made that hey, it's done and there's nothing more we can do, it kind of really it lets the emotions out and you'll see a lot of players get very upset and I've always felt like as the coach or as maybe even just the responsible adult. It's always been my job to take that player and immediately get them somewhere quiet and safe and away from everybody and let them get that out and let them actually just dump it in some privacy where they're not going to be somebody's got a phone in their face or something like that to where they're recording them at the worst moment. But just get them somewhere quiet and safe.
Speaker 1:And I really thought, I don't know, I just didn't think very much of the fact that he was on the back of the golf cart that upset and it was. I honestly didn't see a single team member around him. The only people I saw around him were, I think, his wife, meredith, and that's just. That's, in my opinion, really poor. That for us to be considered a professional organization and sporting men and the best in the world, how we don't have somebody to your point maybe end camp on the team watching players and going, hey, we need to get him out, away from the camera and let him process this, because we're going to need Scotty Schaeffler to go tomorrow out and take on John Rom.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I think that's a really interesting point and this is a separate soapbox. But the Solheim Cup was the week before and I was reading some of the commentary and of course, Europe and USA tied. So is there really a winner? But Europe retains the Cup, and a lot of the commentary was talking about the lack of emotional expression from the women. Yet we've got Scotty Schaeffler in tears.
Speaker 1:And we celebrate it.
Speaker 2:And we celebrate it Like I don't understand that.
Speaker 2:But to your point then we also saw the flip side of Worry McElroy wanting to rip off, owns his face practically in the parking lot and we've got guys trying to pull him into the car. So to have a mental health consultant or I really think a more of a licensed therapist on the team to be able to deal with the upsetness and the pressure and the uncomfortableness that some of these losses feel and helps to repair and recover for the next match, is vitally important. And sometimes sports psychologists aren't actually trained in those mental health components. They're trained in performance components. But to have someone there to say, hey, let's go ahead, let's talk this out, let's grieve and then let's get you fired up for tomorrow. Or, in the case of Worry, you're really upset about what happened on 18 green. Let's get this process so that you don't embarrass yourself and get thrown all over Twitter for the next 24 hours and then be able to treat somebody with kindness and respect and say, look, this was uncool and here's how we can make this better in the future.
Speaker 3:And I think that I was listening to somebody this morning. Obviously the post mortems have started in earnest about the rider cup, particularly from the American side, but also preparing players for what they might experience in a rider cup. And people were talking. These guys were talking about, you know, taking them up to the top of the back of the bleachers to get that view, to sort of ask them how would you feel if you heard this being shouted from the crowd? What are you going to feel? Where are you looking as you walked from the clubhouse to the first tee, all those sorts of things and actually preparing the players for that unique experience?
Speaker 3:Because every player who's played in a modern rider cup has talked about the unique pressure of stepping onto that first tee, hitting that shot, of playing for 11 other players, as well as your country, as well as your captains, your vice captains, your family and all this sort of stuff. I mean, it seems that Luke Donald did a really good job of that in terms of particularly with the short films he made. It was, you know, they were little short, 90 second films, I think with members of family and friends saying you know, we love you, you're so proud of you all this sort of stuff. There was just a lot of attention to getting players and he talks a lot about Luke Donald talks a lot about creating the climate or creating the culture. Rather, and I'm interested in your expert take on how sort of psychology and or even therapy can can play into that really important component to getting players ready for the unique experience of a rider cup.
Speaker 2:I think Luke Donald really just checked a lot of the boxes on what athletes and other sports do all the time, and we don't question what they do. But in golf it's a little bit unique. Let's take football, for example. Anyone who's preparing for a Super Bowl and an NFL player is going to have their coaches and their team put on over all the audio speakers what it sounds like to be at a Super Bowl and they're going to run practices and scrimmages in that exact environment so that when game day happens it's actually a little bit easier. Because practice was that much more difficult.
Speaker 2:And I think what Europe did is they prepared their athletes from all different sensory aspects of what it's going to be like, not just the physical skills. I think when you take care of the athlete first from a biopsychosocial perspective, they're ultimately going to perform these skills that they've been very successful at. And perhaps the USA didn't do that. Perhaps it was more about let's figure out who's going to play with who, let's get everybody here and then let's just use your skills to go hammer on your own. But I don't know if they were quite as prepared mentally and biopsychosocially about what this experience is going to be like, and sports psychology is extremely helpful, particularly in golfers, not just professionals. But let's break it down to amateurs too. You're playing in your club championship or you're playing in an amateur event that is extremely important to you. We look at practice rounds as a way to prepare for our best performances taking notes, planning out things. That's what's going to happen, but then, from a use of mental imagery, being able to imagine what it would be like to step onto the first tee. Imagine the nerves. Imagine hitting a fabulous shot with those nerves and not fighting the anxiety, and not fighting the somatic feelings that you have in your body, but working and being successful with those feelings. The more times that you run and mentally rehearse these scenarios in your head, your nervous system starts to adapt and feel comfortable in that environment. So, in order to prepare, you could play the entire golf course before actually setting foot on that site.
Speaker 2:I'm curious from the mental preparation of the American team. Did they do that? What are their routines in order to prepare for an environment like this? Do they imagine there being tons of people, maybe booing at them because there's no fans on their side? Yet how do you hit a great shot when you feel like everyone is against you.
Speaker 2:Through mental preparation, you can already have the skills and the tools ready and easily accessible for you to perform. So, if we even just go down to the club level, mental imagery is being able to imagine yourself with all of your senses. What does it sound like, what does it feel like, what does it smell like, can you feel temperature on your skin? And running these scenarios through your mind so that you better prepare yourself when you're there physically. And there's some beautiful research out there that indicates the same connections that you would use in an imaginary or a mental imagery scenario are the same connections that would be run if we were doing something live and in person. So if I did five reps in my mind of playing a golf course before a KPMG, that would be the equivalent of me playing that golf course five times.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, I mean. I think that's really important too, because you know, something that I always try to get players to do is you know when you're, when you're nervous like I always tell them. Like they say they have a hard time falling asleep the night before or whatever I've heard that frequently right, and it's like, well, you should be playing the golf course as you fall asleep, right In your mind, and it's like you get them doing that. They're like, yeah, but that makes it worse. I'm like it only makes it worse if you're hitting bad shots. But why are you hitting bad shots if you're playing in your own mind? Right? So you know, at the end of the day, I think, just getting them used to thinking that a positive outcome is even possible.
Speaker 1:Right, because a lot of the players that you probably work with, I would imagine, have a lot of things that they bring in with them and a lot of past experiences that they have to deal with.
Speaker 1:So you know, you're always kind of trying to diffuse a lot of things that we don't even know about, it seems like. So I think, where you're able to really step in is super helpful, because I applaud you, because not only, like I in the introduction. Are you a great golf coach? But you're actually able to help people in a meaningful way that maybe most quote unquote swing instructors don't even know the first thing about. And in a lot of cases, you know, I think most people were defeated because they almost go into a self-sabotage mode, like you were kind of alluding to there a bit, and it's like the best technique in the world isn't going to override self-sabotage mode and I think that's great. I really do, and I'm glad that you bring that up and I think that that's what parents if anybody's listening to this as young children playing competitive golf like this is great stuff to be sharing with your children and getting them to get those positive reps, because it's very, very important in the whole process.
Speaker 3:But the self-sabotage. I just wanted to jump in there because I have a lot of scar tissue, a lot of scar tissue from. You know, I always joke with friends of mine that on any golf course the trouble on any golf hole accounts for about 1% of probably the real estate of that golf hole. So why am I unerringly able to find that 1%? You know, it's almost like I can find the worst possible outcome for every shot and I think that the scar tissue then sort of lares upon scar tissue and you need the positive outcome, you need the evidence of being able to do something well in order to be able to chip away at that.
Speaker 3:And you know, I have managed to come out of the worst depths of my chronic chipitis. But it was something that really forced me to step away from the game at times because it was like trying to park a car with only two wheels. You know, I could drive the ball, I could hit decent iron shots, I could putt okay, but as soon as the ball was around the green I couldn't chip and it was the full-on, full-blown chipping yips. And I'm sure that I know that you've worked with players who've been afflicted by the yips. How do you even start that process of working them out of that self-sabotaging, totally catastrophic mindset, that mindset that I'm all too familiar with?
Speaker 2:A few different ways. I think understanding a little bit about the brain and its biases is extremely helpful. So you may have heard that the brain has a negativity bias, so it is constantly on the lookout for things in your environment that could hurt you, things that you should remember to protect you and keep you safe. And that's that primitive brain where we tap into our limbic system, which is the fight, flight or freeze response. So, if we go back to the way, early stages of human existence, we needed that part of our brain to keep us safe, to make sure we didn't eat berries that were poisonous, to stay away from saber-toothed tigers, and so we're in this hypervigilant state in order to survive. Well now, as we have evolved over thousands upon thousands of years, that primitive brain doesn't just go away, it's still inactive. It's the thing that reminds you not to touch fire because it's going to burn you, or a hot stove. It's the thing that reminds you to put your seatbelt on in case you've been in a car accident before. It helps save you. And so the brain has a negativity bias, almost like a stickiness, if you will, where when bad things happen, we actually remember them with greater intensity and clarity than we do with pleasant things or neutral things that happen. A second part of that is when a negative thing happens to you, it tends to be more emotionally charged. There's greater nervous system response, there's greater imagery, there's greater memory. So what I'll say as an example is if you shoot 80 and you had four yips through your round, you will tend to remember those four yips rather than those 76 other successful golf shots. And then when we all come back in after 18 holes and have lunch, everyone starts talking about all the negative shots that they hit. And that's the brain negativity bias coming into play. Now it doesn't have to stay that way. We can actually rewire the brain and so, through different habits and different patterns and mindfulness, we can. Actually the brain is what we say neuroplastic. We can make new connections and we can train our nervous system and train our brain to not instantly look out for the 1% on the whole. That's going to hurt us, but we can start to train it to look at the 99%. That is opportunity for us.
Speaker 2:And so with a player who has a psychological yip because there's a couple of different types of yips, actually one's biological too with the psychological lip we look at where did it start? What's the first moment in time when you remember having a disruption in a learned motor pattern? So for the listeners out there, let's say you've chipped really fluidly and with great flow for 15, 20 years and all of a sudden there's this moment in time where you felt a jolt in your muscles, in your hands and forearms, and that resulted into maybe laying sod over the ball or hitting the ground first and ricocheting into the ball. Everyone will be able to narrow down like that first moment in time of when something bad started to happen and then we start to build a narrative and a story around it. But that first moment in time might have been so embarrassing or shameful or we're very self-critical about that poor shot that we hold on to it. And it's so overwhelming for our body to process that we don't just forget it and move on the next day. But our brains like gosh. I'm really not sure what to do with this, so I'm just gonna hold on to it.
Speaker 2:And the difficulty is when you get into another chipping scenario, your brain doesn't go back to the thousands of chips that you've hit beautifully over your life. It goes back to that one sticky, awful, really emotionally charged and says oh, this is the way that we typically respond. Boom, now all of a sudden the cycle happens again and then it continues to happen and our brain just goes down that path and now it's really hard for us to pull ourselves out of it. You can't just forget about it or think positive or read a golf psych book and all of a sudden cure yourself. It is really from a deep psychological perspective that we have a disruption in a motor pattern and we also have the brain trying to respond in its fight, flight or freeze response, so very tricky to get through. So that's typically where I start, with a player who hasn't identified yet says we start with the first moment in time and then from there we've got a variety of treatments that we can work with.
Speaker 1:So, piggybacking off of that, and I agree with you you alluded to the Solheim Cup earlier and I think one that there was a huge miss opportunity to have the two together. I think that would have been unreal good and I think that the women deserve to have the same spotlight that the men do, because they play equally as good of golf, if not better, at times. So that was a shame. But then to maybe ask the more sensitive question, I don't necessarily agree with the strategy of having Lexi in the spot. She was in, but would you say that that was a yep or would you say that was a bad lie?
Speaker 2:I'm going to go with, from my perspective and my opinion, that psychological scar tissue that's athletic trauma rearing its head. Michael, you've had the luxury of seeing a video that I played. That is a collection of really bad shots over time and at one point that video has been edited as well Several times. At one point I had three or four examples of Lexi missing a two to three footer one in fact, at the Mibusco Dinosaur at Mission Hills. When those continue to show up on a national stage at that level and it's not treated, there is no doubt in my mind that it will continue to show up and perpetuate in that athlete's life.
Speaker 1:I feel sorry for her, though, because this is not and I hear what you're saying and I'm not trying to pile on she is an unbelievable player and nobody can ever take anything away from Lexi. She is incredible. The amount of class that she has is incredible. I'm not trying to just lay it on, but it is frustrating because I think she is a phenomenal American talent and I think that she really could do a lot for American women's golf. But the issue is that it seems like nobody just and I'm not saying it's somebody's job to step in, but nobody has seemed to help Lexi and walked up to her and said hey, lexi, this has happened a few times now. You want to talk about this and let's move on, man, because there are ways we don't have to. I hate listening to Paul Azing or talk about all the scar tissue and how it just is stuck and you can't get. That's not true. Golfers can get better and you're living proof of that right and the work that you're performing with your players.
Speaker 2:Well, when you look at how many putter changes, how many putter grip styles, posture changes she has gone through, the evidence really just keeps mounting. If I'm a coach and I look at all the great Solheim players across time, there's one person that I'm putting in the last group to make the putt, and that person I'm going to put in that group is Christy Kerr. If she was qualifying for a Solheim cut, Whatever has changed a putter in the last 20 years makes everything from 10 feet and in. If there's one player that I'm not putting my money on to make a putt, a clutch putt it's Lexi, and it's just. The evidence keeps mounting. But the good news is it doesn't mean that it lacks skill. It means that she needs help in that area and the psychological scar tissue can be healed, and one of the ways that I help players overcome that is through use of EMDR.
Speaker 1:Which is amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, Alisson. You've just released a paper earlier this year about EMDR. Can you explain a little bit about what EMDR is and then maybe tell us a bit about the paper that you've written, which works with two women tour professionals?
Speaker 1:No, no no, no, no, no, no, no great. I just wanted to piggyback off that too, because this is what we definitely wanted to talk to Dr Kurt about today. I kind of wanted to jump in here before we got into the EMDR because I wanted very quickly just to let our listeners know my wife is an actual therapist I know Dr Kurt knows that, and my wife also does EMDR with a lot of her clients as well, and I don't want to get into trying to define it because I'm certainly not the person on this podcast to do that. But what I would like to add is that this is something that isn't golf specific and isn't something that is a kind of fringe idea.
Speaker 1:This is something that is actually changing therapy across the board, because and I'm going to try really hard to sound smart for Dr Kurt, but basically what it does is allows people to deal with things that might be nonverbal for them, and for a guy like me who doesn't really like to talk about my feelings very often, it's actually a great tool that I've been able to use myself to deal with some things that have happened in my past. So, with that being said, I mean it's really a cool thing. So, if you are still listening to this podcast at this point, get out your notebook, because this is worth its weight in gold right here.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, that was a great, great intro into the concept. It's different treatments within psychological therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or emotionally focused therapy. Emdr is one of those types of treatments and it was developed in 1989 by Francine Shapiro, where it was dealt more for trauma, so post-traumatic stress syndrome, individuals who experienced big traumas such as assaults or hurricanes or terrorist attacks, so even veterans coming back from serving. So when we think of PTSD we think of these really awful big traumas and EMDR is one of the primary treatments to help those individuals overcome that. Well, over the course of 30, 40 years we are now seeing some derivatives and some alternative uses for EMDR and we're also seeing that not all trauma has to be something really big and violent and nasty. That trauma can come in the looks of divorce, getting fired from a job, having a really embarrassing moment in a peer group playing in an athletic competition and then failing, and so trauma is almost now looked at in terms of specific to the individual. I can deem missing a putt to lose a soul hind cup as traumatic for me, or a club golfer can deem hitting two balls into the water on the last hole in a horse race and having everybody at the club watch them as being traumatic for them. So EMDR stands for eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and basically what it allows the brain to do is take these traumatic events that has been stored and it reprocesses them. And so, in a very Cliff Notes version, if something bad happens to you on the golf course because from here moving forward we'll talk about EMDR in the context of golf performance If something bad happens to you on the golf course and it really activates your nervous system, your brain may not know how to process it.
Speaker 2:It can't just file it away and store it and say, okay, this was a really tough time, we'll get over it. Perhaps for you as a unique individual, you hold on to it very, very tightly and it's really hard for you to get over because there's a lot of nervous system activation. So when you go to sleep at night and the brain is processing through the day's information, it comes to that memory and it says, ooh, I don't know what to do with it. It's really hard for me to learn from it and it's really hard for me to discard it. So let's just kind of keep it lingering here.
Speaker 2:The problem is when those memories keep lingering, when you get into a like or similar environment, your body is now gonna respond the exact same way as it what it did in that traumatic moment.
Speaker 2:So, for an example, if we take a war veteran and they're in actually on the ground in war, hearing lots of gunshots and bombs and all that, now they come back to the US, they're trying to live their life in a car backfires, they may have a startle response that is just like the startle response that they had while in combat.
Speaker 2:Well, in the case of Dan's case, he gets up to a chip and his body is going to respond with the same tension, tightness, worry and doubt and fear that it did two weeks ago when he got into that same environment. So EMDR uses the visual field and the eye movements to help desensitize or take away the intensity of that memory so that in a comfortable, calm state, the human being can then process through the emotional components, the visual components and the cognitive or belief components about that memory and now process it and store it and use adaptive information from other experiences to make sense of what happened. It doesn't erase your memory by any means. It just allows you the ability to recharge and process through the memory so that it no longer triggers you moving forward.
Speaker 3:So that feeling you describe is so familiar. Literally I'll leave myself a chip. I've had a good drive, a half decent second shot and I know in the 160 yards I'm walking from that second shot to the chip and I feel myself falling down a mine shaft. My thinking gets fast, my pulse rate goes up, my sort of mental state becomes scrambled and that tension you talk about it's all there and it's become this. I'm over the worst of it, touch wood, but it's taken me a very long time. But those feelings are very, very familiar and I'm sure they'll be familiar to lots of club golfers. Everybody's got a weakness and sometimes that weakness becomes chronic. Can you talk a little bit, alison, about the work you've done with, particularly looking at EMDR with the two female professional golfers, the two players that appear in your paper that was published earlier this year?
Speaker 2:Definitely so. In that study I looked at two elite professionals from two different levels one on the LPGA tour and one on the Epson tour and looked at how we could decrease anxiety while also increasing confidence if we were to pick one traumatic memory from their memory bank that they deemed as a moment in time that was holding them back from playing their best golf. And so, in the case of the LPGA player, what was really unique is her moment in time that was sort of holding her back from playing her best happened in her youth so this is 50 years earlier for her and being in an environment of sort of like a junior writer cup team, if you will, going through some competitions within the teammates, being on the putting green, hearing girls talk negatively about her so there's a little bit of some shaming and feeling like I don't belong, missing a couple of putts while all of this is going in this game format. This particular player deemed that that moment in time was so embarrassing and shameful and belittling to her that she then had this belief of I don't belong, and part of that can be I don't belong in the LPGA tour, I don't belong in that, in my peer groups, I don't belong with a partner and it can interfere with a variety of different areas of a player's life. So once we did the EMDR treatment for her, we started to notice that anxiety was certainly decreasing and then confidence increased after the treatment.
Speaker 2:In the case of the other player, this happens quite a bit on many tours you have to fit within a certain quantity at the end of the year in order to get your full card to play on the LPGA tour. So at one point it was the top 10. If you didn't make enough money in that top 10, you then had conditional status or you had to go to qualifying school. And this player was right on that cut line. And in the very last player, in the very last tournament of the season, she ended up not being in that top 10, finishing in 11th and not being able to transition into the LPGA tour. So there's this feeling, this sense of dread, this sense of being like I'm not good enough, I'm never gonna make it.
Speaker 2:And so we looked at anxiety before treatment, anxiety during treatment, anxiety at the end of treatment and then confidence at those three stages as well.
Speaker 2:And for her treatment, at the end of that, confidence increased and anxiety decreased. So what I'll say in my presentations, when I am trying to relay this in a very simplified version to golf professionals, is, at the end of the day, these players have identified something that is traumatic to them. We introduced the treatment of EMDR, allowed them to reprocess that thing that happened to them, no matter how far ago it was or how recent it was, and they ultimately felt more confident and less anxious at the end of that treatment. And I think that that is something that can be expanded to all golfers and in my private practice that I run and operate now, most of the golfers that I see we end up doing that kind of treatment, because everybody will have a moment in time that they're like wow, my present day issue of not being able to keep a ball in the fairway off the tee or not being able to chip, or missing every three footer that I look at, we'll link back to some moment in time when it began.
Speaker 3:Alison, could you, just for the uninitiated, describe the eye movement aspect of this treatment? Is it the way that again, apologies for my lack of knowledge on this, but is it the way that your eyes sort of move as you move into that situation? Or is it actually part of the treatment itself? Because I'm triggered here almost by thinking about chipping and the sort of familiar sensation of being inside the mine shaft as I descend down it. Can you just talk to me a little bit about how it works and how the eyes are connected with the actual treatment of these conditions?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, the eye movement is a part of the treatment specifically, and so when you look at the stages of sleep and you enter in stage four, which is REM sleep rapid eye movement that stage of sleep is actually very short and it gets a little bit longer as you go through all four stages and all cycles as you sleep. Well, that particular stage, stage four, is really important because it is your brain's moment of processing and chunking through the day's worth of information and filing that in long term memory or discarding it. So if the brain finds that you should remember that eating cashews creates an allergic reaction, you're now going to store that in long term memory so that you don't eat cashews again. But if you ate an apple that day and you had not necessarily like major pleasure from it and no negative reaction from it, your brain is going to say you don't really need to remember this, so let's discard it. So certain things that are sort of non arousing throughout your day will get discarded during that stage four sleep and certain things that are really important to you and you need to learn to survive. They are going to be stored in that stage four sleep While your brain is processing the information. In stage four, you can see someone in a sleeping state with their eyes moving back and forth behind their eyelids as they're closed. So you watch a little baby sleep, or you watch your spouse sleep or your child sleep. You will see when that REM stage is actually occurring. And so that is the eyes connecting the right and left hemisphere of the brain digesting the information and determining what's valuable and what's not.
Speaker 2:In a waking state, if I'm working with a client, I'm going to have them recall the memory of the worst thing that happened as we talk about, and they're going to identify like the worst image from that memory. So maybe it was the moment that they saw the club hit the ball or the moment that the sod laid over the ball. So they pick an image out of the entire narrative. What's the worst part? They tap that into their body and they identify where in their body is the emotion coming up. So, dan, as I'm triggering you right now, you may feel it in your stomach, you may feel it in your jaw, you may feel it in your hands.
Speaker 3:I'm feeding it everywhere.
Speaker 2:Everywhere.
Speaker 2:And then, lastly, we're going to tie in what belief do you have about yourself now when you think about that failed performance?
Speaker 2:And it's going to come up in an eye statement like I'm a failure, I'm not good enough, I'm never going to overcome this, for example. So, as the individual in a conscious waking state is holding those three components of the memory in mind, I then direct them to move their eyes right and left across a horrible horizontal field as they're thinking about those three pieces. And because I've moved my practice to virtual space, so on their computer screen a little red ball is going to pop up and it's going to move right and left laterally and they're going to track that ball with their eyes as they're thinking about those three things. And they will start to notice. After each what's called bilateral stimulation set, they'll start to notice some things change. They'll notice that the charge starts to decrease, the story might evolve and hopefully by the end of treatment they start to come to a place of wow, this thing like happened. But I'm okay from it and I can learn from it adaptively and I'm ready to recover.
Speaker 1:That's really good, isn't it? That's so good Like Double D's got the biggest smile on his face because now he doesn't feel so hopeless. This is worth its weight in gold.
Speaker 3:Well, I always thought, you know, that if I was to write a golfing self-help book, it would probably be called that's Tawn it and it would be the power of negative thinking. I always thought that I was with my sort of talent for negativity. I always thought that I could probably put somebody like Bob Roteller out of business. But hearing you talk, allison, I mean it's fascinating that you had success with those two female tour pros. They both emerged from that process much better equipped to deal with longstanding issues, from what I read, I mean one, you know, that manifested itself in an inability to hold short putts at crucial times, and the other one felt, if I'm right in saying that she was just not really achieving her potential. She wasn't getting to where she thought she could. And actually you've helped both through that process, which is incredible.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think the one thing that I really want to get to before we run out of time is, you know, for those that are listening, that are trying to play their best golf, but most importantly for those of you with young athletes out there playing golf.
Speaker 1:You know, I think what we're talking about here, dr Kerr, is you know, the ability to process failure, and I think that a lot of young people are put out there into sport without any real training into how to deal with the emotions that come up from sport, as we saw witnessed at the Ryder Cup. And when people don't have the tools necessary to process those failures, you know it really affects them long term and not just in golf, correct? Like I can speak from personal experience here, my shortcomings as a golfer made me believe I had shortcomings in the rest of my life for a very long time until I learned how to separate the two. So it's just very interesting how you're able to kind of almost hit a reset button and allow for these players to deal with what they're currently going through. But more importantly, then we can give them the tools to hopefully not let it build up so bad and move forward without having to go back and continue to do the EMDR.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, and the EMDR is not like an ongoing treatment. It's actually a very quick and effective and short term treatment. Once the athlete has processed through the memory completely, then essentially that memory is no longer going to trigger the human anymore. But we want to keep in mind that memories are stored and they look like, essentially, a spider web. So you may have a moment in time where you're like this is the first time that I yipped, but from that your brain is going to store like and similar experiences from that called associations.
Speaker 2:So it may not be other yips, but it may actually be a time in your life, in work, where you feel like you dropped a ball and you kind of whiffed at work on a story or working with a student or you name it. And so by healing the root core memory you can oftentimes help heal a lot of additional memories. But it's also interesting some of the clients that I work with in order to help improve their golf performance, we actually might be processing a memory that is non-golf related. It could have been a comment that a dad made to a son in regard to schoolwork that then was extrapolated and applied to golf performance. So it's very unique and I have just found so much joy in being able to help other people overcome adversity and overcome some of these things that have happened in their life, that are what they deem traumatic, so that they don't have to suffer from it for impurpatuity, I mean.
Speaker 3:I think golf is a sport unlike almost sorry Deitch, almost like any other, in the sense that you have to deal with adversity. I mean you are trying to advance a very small ball around a very large space of you know, a large property with inclement weather conditions and ground conditions that are designed to make it difficult. I mean it's inherently a very difficult game, so it has to you know anything that can breed resilience and give you that strength to cope with adversity, because adversity is a one constant, isn't it really in golf?
Speaker 2:It's a hard game In life too, though right, I mean, is there light, like if we go back to a Buddhist mentality? Life is suffering, so we know that life is going to present us with opportunities to suffer. Now we don't have to sit in suffering. We can have tools to help us overcome, and I think there's a lot of fascinating research in grit and looking at how to recover from adversity and how strong you are when a failure or an obstacle gets put into your way. Do you bounce back from it? We look at that in terms of growth mindset and fixed mindset, but I really say that failure is success, because if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.
Speaker 2:And some of my business, learning moments in life and in golf and competition has come from my failures, not from my successes, and my successes were only a result of, for me, failing many times before.
Speaker 3:And that's something that Victor Hovland, coming back full circle to the Ryder Cup, has been very articulate about of late. You know, using the setbacks he's had. People have talked about his bad chipping I mean obviously not on the same level as mine, but also coming close in majors and things like that. He's had that growth mindset and really talked about it, about being able to use those setbacks to grow and to learn. And look where he's at now.
Speaker 1:Absolutely amazing. I mean I really, you know, I've been following Victor since his time in Oklahoma and obviously his newfound understanding of you know, dynamic loft with his work with Joe Mayo has been pretty sensational. And Victor is obviously a bright kid and now that he's got some good data, look what he's doing. So I've got a whole bunch of stuff I could say about chipping yips that we can solve with ground reaction forces, but we didn't even get to that today Because, like I said, we had the wonderful Dr Alison Kurt and unfortunately we have run out of time with her because she is very much in demand, because there's a lot of people like Dan out there in the world that have had enough of the suffering and it's time to figure out how to pick it up and move on.
Speaker 1:So we want to definitely thank Dr Kurt for joining us on this podcast and I want to make sure if you found her half as interesting as we did, which is a whole, a whole lot. So if you're interested, you can find her at AlisonKurtGolfcom, and the reason I'm giving you the web address is she has done an amazing job. She's got all of her links right there and I don't have to try to remember all those when I sign off here. So just go ahead and head over to AlisonKurtGolfcom. You can find her there, as well as all of our links, and we definitely recommend giving her a follow, and you certainly can find the research that Dan mentioned earlier. It's widely available. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss another one of our amazing guests, and until next time, keep grinding.