Athlete's Psychosocial Experience Post Concussion with Dr. Jeff Caron
Show Notes:
The physical and cognitive symptoms of sport-related concussions are widely spoken about, but less is known about the psychosocial symptoms that athletes experience post-concussion, which today’s guest believes are equally important. Today, you’ll hear from Dr. Jeff Caron, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences at the University of Montréal. Prior to his appointment, Dr. Caron obtained a Ph.D. in Kinesiology and Physical Education from McGill University in 2016, and he was subsequently a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and Yale University. His research focuses on better understanding the psychosocial aspects of sport-related concussions and seeks to answer two main questions: how can we most effectively share concussion information with members of the sports community? And which psychosocial strategies can assist athletes as they return to sport, school, and daily life?
In this episode, Dr. Caron offers some insight into the psychosocial symptoms of sport-related concussions, including feelings of isolation and fear, and we discuss how best to support athletes in their recovery, whether that means returning to sport or making a career transition. Tune in today to learn more!
Key Points From This Episode:
• What sparked Dr. Caron’s interest in concussions.
• The lesser-known psychosocial symptoms of concussions that athletes experience.
• Why concussed athletes often experience feelings of isolation.
• How teams inform an athlete's social identity, which makes it especially difficult when they’re excluded from that team.
• The importance of setting realistic rehabilitation goals that aren’t based on a strict timeline.
• Dr. Caron shares his perspective on education, athlete retirement, and career transition.
• His belief that the best investment you can make is in yourself; and not just as an athlete!
• The value of social support when it comes to helping athletes return to sport and life.
• The concept of ‘social death’ and how the families of concussed athletes are impacted too.
• Why communication is such a core tenet of social support for concussed athletes.
• Why just asking ‘are you okay?’ can cause athletes enormous frustration.
• Dr. Caron emphasizes the value in sharing experiences.
Learn More About Dr. Jeff Caron’s research here
Schedule a One-On-One with Bella Paige
Post-Concussion life can be extremely difficult to manage. These one-on-one meetings are not only for survivors but their family and loved ones as well!
Get help with navigating post-concussion life, retiring from a sport, finding specialists near you, next steps, and much more!
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRO]
[00:00:05] BP: Hi. I’m your host, Bella Paige. Welcome to the Post Concussion Podcast; all about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
[DISCLAIMER]
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussions and post-concussion syndrome.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:03] BP: Welcome to today’s episode of the Post Concussion Podcast, with myself, Bella Paige, and today’s guest, Dr. Jeff Caron. Dr. Caron is an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences at the University of Montreal. Jeff is also a researcher within the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal, and he is a professional member of the Canadian Sports Psychology Association. Prior to joining University of Montreal, Jeff obtained a Ph.D. in kinesiology and physical education from McGill University, and he completed postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University and Yale University.
Jeff’s research program focuses on better understanding psychosocial aspects of sport-related concussions by attempting to answer the following research questions: how can we most effectively disseminate concussion information to members of the sport community? Which psychosocial strategies can assist athletes’ recovery and return to sport, school, and daily life? Most of Jeff’s research uses qualitative approaches to provide a detailed account of athletes lived experiences with sports-related concussions.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
[00:02:15] JC: Yeah. Thanks very much for having me.
[00:02:16] BP: To start, do you want to tell everyone a little bit about what got you interested in concussions in the first place?
[00:02:24] JC: Yeah. Well, I was a hockey player for a long time. I grew up in New Brunswick and I played, I guess, at the highest competitive levels in New Brunswick and then moved on to junior, then university ice hockey. Unfortunately, this lovely game of ours, it comes with the risk of certain injuries. I was fortunate. I did have a few concussions. But I think my real interest in it was watching what had gone on in the media, but also some of my teammates, who had had pretty serious implications with the injury and with junior hockey. There was a lot more fighting back when I would have played, but that’s kind of slowly being phased out, which is a good thing.
I don’t know, it was just always kind of scary, the thought that you only get one shot with your head, right? Unfortunately, I was learning a little bit at the time, I was playing hockey, but yeah, since then it’s in – I guess fun might be the wrong word, but I’ve learned a lot more about the brain, and how it works and specifically how it doesn’t work when you have something like a concussion.
[00:03:16] BP: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s always interesting how people get into the concussion world because it is very niche for people to be interested in it. I’m also very glad that the fighting is getting phased out in hockey. I know when I watch it, my family always makes fun of me because I cringe and I can’t watch whenever people start fighting. Actually, a family member of mine is on a college team and go to every game we can. Every time there’s a fight, I’m like, “Call it. Do something.” I’m glad it’s slowly being phased out, not being allowed.
When you mentioned teammates of yours, it’s actually something that comes up a lot. A lot of friends of mine say, “Oh! Well, I had a few concussions and I was okay, but a few of my teammates were never the same. There was always something. Something changed after their head injuries.” Some people tend to notice it, and some people don’t. I think that’s really important to notice, and that’s actually something we’re going to get into today.
Concussed athletes experience a lot of things, but do you want to start with some of the psychological things that they deal with?
[00:04:26] JC: Yeah. I guess whenever you talk about this stuff, it’s always good to start with a little caveat. The collective ‘we’ are still learning a lot about how the brain works under normal conditions. Learning how it doesn’t work or how your brain works when it’s injured is still very much a work in progress, but there has been a ton of work done, not by me, I’m talking about other people who have really tried to figure out what goes on in the brain of concussed individuals when they have a concussion. Of course, they’re the things that we hear about often like headaches and dizziness and sensitivity to light and sound. I won’t list all 22 symptoms.
Some of the psychological symptoms are really interesting. Perhaps your listeners have heard of things like athletes can experience depression or anxiety. Those are some of the symptoms that we hear about a lot. I guess what I would say is, I’m interested in some of the psychosocial symptoms that you may not hear a lot about. What I mean by that is, concussed athletes who experience a concussion may experience things like isolation, may experience things like fear, may experience things like decreases in confidence when they go back to sport. All of these things are more of the psychosocial impacts of the injury that really interests me with my background in sports psychology.
That sort of stuff really fascinates me, and learning not only what athletes experience, which is what I’m doing right now, but in the future, it’s how can we intervene and help athletes who are going through these things to feel more confident or to – I don’t want to say “feel no fear”, because that’s part of sport, but to manage those feelings of fear in a healthy way. You’re not putting yourself at risk, like engaging in a fight, for example, but that you feel like you are back to feeling the way you felt before the injury and that you feel like you can play in your sport or your activity.
I think athletes have to play sports with a certain level of being on the edge and a certain level of intensity and I think that’s a good thing. But going into some type of competition with feelings of being hesitant because of, perhaps fear and having less confidence. I think that puts you at more risk of getting an injury, an injury or a concussion, which is never a good thing.
[00:06:29] BP: I definitely agree. I know for me, being a show-jumper, if you got on a horse with feelings of fear and things like that, it actually could become dangerous for a lot of athletes, because all of a sudden, you’re more stiff, you’re not thinking the way you’re supposed to be. Things tend to go wrong a little faster than they normally would. It’s important for athletes to get through that. It can happen after any injury, but I find if you deal with the post-concussion syndrome, the longer-term effects, that fear tends to grow, because that fear of getting set back again occurs in a lot of athletes.
[00:07:06] JC: Yeah. I can imagine that the population of athletes that I’ve focused on the most with some of my research is athletes who have experienced those prolonged or protracted symptoms. For that reason, it’s a hypothesis from my, I guess it’s kind of a working hypothesis from my point of view, but it’s that athletes who have longer symptoms tend to go through more severe psychosocial symptoms. That’s an assumption that I’ve made. I’ve made the assumption that, knock on wood, the vast majority of people who get a head injury tend to recover quite quickly. We’re talking about mild injury here, mild traumatic brain injury. It’s not mild, but it’s called the mild traumatic brain injury.
Those individuals do seem to go back to work and life relatively quickly, whereas people who experience longer symptoms, they again, hypothesis, but I think that those people are at greater risk of having more severe kind of psychosocial symptoms.
[00:08:00] BP: You mentioned isolation. That was something I experienced when I first had to stop for a year and a bit. I was no longer in that competitive world that I was used to. I used to be up at six in the morning every day with the same people almost every day of the year. All of a sudden, I was at home all the time. What I actually did was, I removed myself off all of social media for a while because, even though I was proud of my friends for competing, and showing, and seeing all their winnings, I had a really hard time watching other people do something that I wish I was doing, because I was in bed, or in the hospital or during therapy.
What actually did help me was kind of taking myself out of it a little bit more, and then entering it in later. Then, I got back into all of it, but it helped me because watching was really hard on me, and it was hard on things like you said, depression and things like that just grew, seeing people continue while I wasn’t able to.
[00:09:05] JC: Interesting, right? Almost a forced isolation, self-induced isolation. Some of the athletes – I guess one of the studies I did was with former National Hockey League players who had career-ending concussions and we talked to them about these feelings of isolation. I guess, I didn’t talk about it, they brought it up.
What I found was really interesting, was at the time that these men had their concussions was like the late – let’s say, the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. Those eras generally speaking, the knowledge and the sensibility to concussion was a little bit lower, and athletes were – they called it the plague or the epidemic that the coaches and teammates didn’t want around in the room. Whenever you have an injury, it’s almost like a superstitious thing. Get this person away from us. We don’t want their bad energy around us.
From a team perspective, I guess maybe you can rationalize with that, right? You just want the people who are competing with you in the room, and who are in the fight so to speak to be there with you, but problematic, I think, is for those individuals that are going through something like a concussion and you say, “Get away. Go away until you’re better, then you can come back.” We’d love to see when you’re back, but when you’re hurt, we don’t really want that around.
[00:10:14] BP: Yeah. I think it depends on the sport. I know I could go, but I know mentally sitting on the sidelines was way harder than not showing up at all. Sitting there watching when you want to be in there. I always explained that competing for me was an addiction. I 100 percent was addicted. There’s no doubt in my mind I didn’t want to do anything else. I was obsessed. I would watch videos all day, training videos. I would – all day and night. It’s what I lived and breathed through. It’s how I ate, it was how I exercised, it was what I thought about 24/7 and I didn’t have any other plans, and it can become an addiction.
When you get forced to have that taken away from you, because of something like a head injury, that also has a lot of other psychological effects, it can be really hard in like you mentioned, the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s. When I talked to people who experienced things then, we didn’t know much. I still don’t think we know much now, but it’s definitely getting better. But it’s amazing how many things you can go through from something that people say, “Oh! It was just a mild head injury,” or “It didn’t seem like that bad of a hit,” or “Oh, you barely hit your head.”
Those types of things can make it seem really difficult to go through because all those people around you don’t understand why you’re still struggling maybe a few months out or a few years out from a hit.
[00:11:38] JC: Yeah. You bring up a really interesting point there about – you’re talking about how it was everything for you. I was obsessed with competing and some of the work we’re doing now is around athletes identity. The way in which they identify not only themselves, but with their different social groups that they’re a part of, I find that really interesting. If a lot of your self-worth, and a lot of your self-esteem is all comprised and wrapped up within this social role of you, which is, in your case, as a horse jumper, right? If you’re doing that, and then it’s taken away from you, and you identify exclusively as in that role and maybe a lot of your social groups are comprised largely because you’re involved in that role. Well, it can be really problematic when that’s taken away from you. That’s the same for any athlete.
If the primary way through which you look at yourself and you look at your other social groups is, I give the example a lot with team sport athletes, is they often have jackets with logos on them, right? They wear it around with them, and that’s kind of their outward manifestation of their social identity. When that’s taken away, well, it can be really challenging for people because maybe you don’t feel like wearing that jacket anymore or maybe you don’t feel like talking to your friends, like you said. You kind of withdrew from those interactions, not because you didn’t like those people, not because you weren’t interested in competing or the sport. It’s just because it was painful for you to look at that and watch others succeeding and enjoying their sport or their competition.
I think identity is something we don’t talk enough about. I don’t mean gender identity in this perspective. I mean more your social identity and how you feel you belong to a group or –
[00:13:17] BP: When we talk about competitive athletes, the more competitive you get, and the older you get, the more time you spend in that sport. That can mean, kids that are in school. For me, I was pulled out of school to compete. It can be in the morning, at night, practices. It can be on the weekends while you’re going on hockey tournaments or soccer tournaments.
A lot of your time is spent with those people, so you don’t spend a lot of time with your other friends that you may have, because all of your time and energy goes into that. When it does get taken away, like you said, it can be very tough. I know for me, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be what, was I supposed to do next, because it was always showjumping. The next five to 10 years were all planned out with coaches, and so trying to make a new plan seemed impossible, especially when you’re healing.
It wasn’t like I was not competing and then I was just carrying on a normal life like anyone else would be. I was in therapy every day. I was struggling to get out of bed kind of thing. It’s a lot that goes on at once. It kind of seems like, okay, now I’m not competing. But it’s not like you just have a broken foot where, okay, in a few weeks, I should be better. You can kind of put a timeline on it. I find not having a timeline with concussion recovery can make it very difficult for athletes, because you want a goal, you’ve been built, and driven, and taught how to have goals and putting timelines on things on how to reach things. All of a sudden, you can’t do that with a concussion.
I try to get people out of putting too many timelines on recovery. Don’t say I’m going to do this by June. Maybe say I’m going to do it by summer, because if it doesn’t happen in June, then that can cause a lot of setbacks mentally if you don’t reach that goal.
[00:15:06] JC: Yeah. I fully agree with you on the difference between – although concussion is a type of injury, I think it’s a really unique type of injury for what you just mentioned. When going through rehabilitation from other types of injuries, I’m not saying that it isn’t painful, or I’m not saying it isn’t challenging for athletes going through that. What I mean is, apart from the physical pain, most injuries after a short-ish period of time, you can rationalize like yourself, you can think like yourself. With a brain injury, it’s different. You don’t feel like yourself for long stretches.
I think another thing you mentioned too, about goal-setting. In sports psychology, we talk about goals an awful lot. Focusing on kind of results-oriented goals, and what I mean by that is, like you said, “By June, I will be doing this.” Unfortunately, some of that stuff is out of your control. So, focusing on shorter-term goals that are within your control. In sports psychology, we talk often about controlling the controllable aspects of what you can do.
Maybe it’s setting rehabilitation goals that are really within your control. That would be working with your physical or occupational therapist or whoever’s in charge of your rehabilitation and asking them to set some really, really goals that you can fully control that are under your power, so to speak, to manipulate. That can give athletes a lot of confidence too in their rehabilitation. So, yeah, you mentioned some really interesting things there.
[00:16:29] BP: Yeah, it really can help. Effort goals are something we like to set like, “I will do this much a week for these many months or for a month.” Things like that can really help you because even if you haven’t recovered in a way, you’ve been proactively working towards recovery and that’s what matters. But we’ve talked about a lot so far, and with that, we’re going to take a quick break.
[BREAK]
[00:16:58] BP: If you follow us on social media, you may have seen a few posts about Concussion Connect, a place for everyone related to the concussion and brain injury community. We understand the need for a safe place to go separate from your regular social world, less overwhelming and more personal. Join Concussion Connect to have a place to share and get support along your survivor journey. Get access to our weekly support groups, and keep connected with members through a personalized and secure chat. Though a place for survivors, we also welcome all loved ones and professionals who are out to learn more about this invisible injury. Go to concussionconnect.com or find the link in our episode description today. I can’t wait to connect with you all.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]
[00:17:52] BP: Welcome back to the Post Concussion Podcast, with myself, Bella Paige, and today’s guest, Jeff Caron. Something I wanted to talk about a little bit was athlete retirement. It can be really tough to be a retired athlete. I know for myself, I never had anyone tell me I couldn’t do it. That was really tough for me, I know. There was always the odd person that was like, “You really shouldn’t be doing this.” But then there was always half the doctors that said, “Oh, you can keep going if you feel like you can.”
It was actually myself that pulled myself out. I finally said, “Okay, I can’t do this.” What a lot of my guests know is, I went back. I went full into training. I was on multiple horses a day, six days a week, working out, fitness schedule, everything again for about a month. Then, I was over a bucket puking. I decided that I couldn’t go backwards in my recovery. It wasn’t worth the risk anymore, like it was in the past.
It can be a really tough road to retire and it can be a really tough road to decide to retire for yourself. Do you want give some advice and thoughts on athlete retirement?
[00:19:02] JC: Yeah. Well, some of the athletes I’ve spoken with over the years who have had a medical or health professional tell them explicitly, “You are done.” The conversations I’ve had with those athletes, they were really grateful that somebody else made that decision for them. Because the athletes would say, “I would keep going. I would keep going until –” Some of them said, “I’ll keep going until I killed myself, because I would keep going under any conditions. I was really grateful to have somebody say, ‘Look, you cannot go anymore.’” In a way, it wasn’t them giving up. It was somebody taking it away from them, which is interesting, right?
At least when you talk about athletes, a lot of athletes want to go out on their own terms, but in this case, some of the people I’ve spoken with were grateful to not have to make that decision and feel like a quitter even though they wouldn’t be. We know they wouldn’t be.
[00:19:53] BP: Something I actually say on the show a lot is, we call it retirement, not quitting, because you didn’t quit. Technically, you retired because you’re no longer able. It’s not like you just gave up and walked away from the game.
[00:20:05] JC: Exactly. That’s well said. I do think that athletes retire at such – and I know we spoke before in your sports specifically, I think athletes can compete a bit longer than normal. But the vast majority of sports, the vast majority of athletes, if they are able to play competitively until they’re 30 years of age, that’s really impressive. Problem with that is, you still have 60 years of life to live after that. I mean, that’s a lot of time. When we talked about identity earlier, when you’re very consumed in your athlete role, and what that means for you socially, psychologically, all of it, it can be really challenging, because you have to find a way to do something else in your years after sport.
I know we were speaking in the break, and I’ll just mention it now. But some of the earliest models of kind of career transition are from the former Soviet Union, now, Russia. What they did was, they would take athletes who are in their later years of their career, and they would get them into things like physical education, or coaching, or learning about the biomechanics or the motor control of different sports. This was a way to ease the transition into your post-athletic career. That’s something that I think is obviously a really good idea. We still do that to this day, or we should be doing it better. We don’t do a great job at it, but that’s something that is really interesting in getting athletes.
I know coaches, they don’t want to hear this, but talking to your athletes at an early point in their lives and saying, “You’re not going to do this forever.” One of the easiest ways to invest in yourself is through education, in our western society at least. Invest in your education. A lot of sports you can play while studying, which is really good. So, you can get your education while you’re still playing sport. That is a better career transition or athletic career transition than individuals who don’t invest in any type of post-career planning. That can be problematic.
[00:21:59] BP: I think it’s really important to realize, like you said, if you retire at 30, life after sport is a long time. There isn’t 10 years left, there isn’t five years left. You have a whole life after. If you retire even earlier, that’s even longer. It’s important to realize that that exists. I know I was grateful for my parents making me go to college because they said you still need a backup plan. Even though at that point, I was still planning on recovering, and showjumping for the rest of my life. Because certain sports, lots of them are, you could play college-level football, all these types of things. Then, you get to get an education while in a sport, a lot of the time get a scholarship, especially here in North America, which is amazing. But for myself, showjumping, certain sports aren’t in college.
For me, I could have just not gone and just competed. It was not an option with them. You had to get an education, you had to have something to fall back on. Because they realize that even if I was okay, you still might need a career after this, you still might want to do something else with your life. It’s important to remember that your sport might feel like your life, but there’s still a lot more to it than just being an athlete. I know “just being an athlete” kind of seems a hard way to put it, but it really is the truth once you step out of the sport world.
When you’re in it, it doesn’t feel that way. But since I’ve taken a step out of it, I realized that there was a lot more to my life that I wasn’t paying attention to because of my sport.
[00:23:34] JC: Yeah. At the risk of this becoming a career counselling session during your podcast, just thinking about yourself and all the transition that you’ve had to go through, you are doing a podcast right now. For somebody in your type of situation. I’m not saying you, but I’m saying, you could learn about journalism, you could learn about doing podcasting, interviewing, that sort of thing. That’s a cool thing you can learn at school.
I know we talked during the break, but you can go coaching, you can go get coaching certifications, you can go learn how to do different aspects of coaching, you can do research like me on coaching. That’s all things that athletes – and I’m not saying you, but athletes in general. When they look at what they want to do in their post-athletic career. You may not know exactly beforehand what you want to do, but when you do start doing something, say, “Wow! I really like this.” Well, it’s okay if you want to go back and get upskill and learn more things.
The best investment you can make is in yourself. I think that’s something that athletes maybe don’t think of when they’re playing because everything is sports, and everything is what they’re going to do and what they’re going to accomplish, which is part of what makes athletes and competitors great. That’s why it helps to have good people in your corner, people who are looking out for not just you the athlete, but you the person. Making people, even if at that time they don’t see the relevance of going to college and –
[00:24:54] BP: Yeah. I was like 17. I was like, “Why am I doing this?”
[00:24:58] JC: Yeah. Now it’s time to give your parents a hug and say thank you very much, when it’s all said and done.
[00:25:04] BP: Yeah, for sure. Something you mentioned previously was wanting to get into what may help athletes now and in the future. Do you have any ideas where that might go?
[00:25:17] JC: I’d be guessing at this stage, I think right now where I’m at with things, for sure. It’s just figuring out what athletes do go through in terms of psychosocial aspects of concussions. Career transition, retirement is one of them. We talked about identity. We can talk about a whole bunch of things, social support, fear, confidence, all these things.
What does it mean at the end of the day? I think it’d be too early for me to say something specific, but what I would say is that, you have to keep in mind that, like we’re just talking about. Yeah, you want them to go back to sport, but you also want them to go back to sport and life, and you want them to be in a position where, if you can compete and do your thing safely and it adds value to your life, great. But know, if you keep running it back, and it’s like, we’re at concussion number, whatever, seven, eight, nine. Well, why don’t we look at something else?
Why are you trying to return to sport so much? Saving athletes from their self, kind of like that example I gave you earlier. Helping athletes come to the conclusion maybe themselves and with their healthcare team. Maybe you shouldn’t be trying to do this at this point?
[00:26:22] BP: Yeah. I know what that’s like.
[00:26:25] JC: Not easy advice to take, I’m sure.
[00:26:27] BP: No, it’s not. I remember, I used to go into –my parents had me seeing insane amount of people. I went into a therapist appointment once and my mom came in with me. I think I was 16 at the time. We walk out and the first thing she says is, “You’re never going to go back in there, are you?” I was like, “No. Why?” She was like, “Because they said the wrong thing the wrong way.” I was like, “Maybe.” The first thing they said was, “Maybe we should consider not ever riding horses again.” That would just instantly shut my brain down. I was really stubborn at the time. I wasn’t thinking about anything else. And I just was like, “I’m done. I’m out.” I would just walk away. It’s interesting how your mindset can change.
Something you mentioned was that support network, and that’s something I talk about a lot, is how my family and things were affected when my retirement was accepted and things like that. I know, we had a retired NHL player on the show. The first thing he said was his family had a tough time. We had another football player on the show, and first thing they said was, their family had a tough time because going to the games was a family activity. It was the common thing that was talked about at dinner and that can be a tough transition as well.
[00:27:43] JC: Yeah. In the literature, they talk about social death. This idea where whether we’re talking about career transition, it’s not just the athlete, it’s the whole team. I think about you, Bella. It’s not just you. It was your entire family that was invested in this. Maybe they wouldn’t be there physically, but they’d probably be watching online or following online in some capacity, always talking about it at family dinners, things like that. Then, although it’s the athlete that is no longer competing, well, it’s experienced by everyone in the family.
The athlete that you mentioned who was talking about their families were affected. Well, of course, because if their families are going to the games, are there at least – I think about the spouses of a lot of athletes, or the partners who maybe have to take on a larger childcare role, or just preparing meals or doing extra errands, because the person competing doesn’t have time to do it. Well, that’s weird, right? When it’s all over, that’s hard for them too. Well, now, I guess your home, you could do that, but this is always something that I’ve done. Now, I guess you can do it. Now, what do I do with my free time? I think it’s not just an adjustment on the athlete’s behalf, but everyone.
[00:28:57] BP: Yeah, there’s a lot of different role changes that tend to occur. I know, for my family, they just kind of – they would talk about it, but they didn’t know how to bring it up sometimes, because it was all I was supposed to do. They weren’t really used to having me home either. That was a transition. I hadn’t been home for a long time.
We’ve talked about a lot, and touched on a lot of different aspects of being an athlete and retiring as an athlete. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we end today’s episode?
[00:29:28] JC: Maybe just on that last point about the significant others, or the social support network, or whatever you want to call them. I know that the vast majority of people who have a loved one who’s involved in sport or competing at some level, and they have something like a brain injury, a concussion, and they want to help, they want to support. We did a study where, unfortunately, we looked at the role of the support network and what they do to try and provide support. Unfortunately, things that are said by the support network aren’t always interpreted positively by the athlete. What I mean by that is, we did a study where athletes said, “I felt like I was being drowned in ‘are you okay’s.”
[00:30:07] BP: Yes.
[00:30:08] JC: How are you? How are you doing? When do you think you’ll get back? Kind of this idea of feeling like you’re drowning in ‘are you okays’. Again, that comes from a genuine place of concern and love and empathy for the person going through the concussion. But from the athlete or the competitor’s point of view, it’s almost like, can you stop asking me this question because I’m not okay. I don’t feel good. I don’t want to talk about it.
Again, there’s sometimes this tension between what an athlete wants and what a support network thinks the athlete wants. Really, it boils down to communication, like any relationship we have. Figuring out how to communicate effectively with people is such a core tenet of proper social support.
[00:30:55] BP: For sure. It’s really tough to communicate when you are the athlete or even just a concussed individual in general. I know, actually, my mom said it a few weeks ago, she’s like, “I actually thought you hated me for a few years.” I was kind of shocked. I said, “Well, I never hated you.” But then, I’ve talked about it on the show a lot, I took everything out on her because she was the one – she was always around. She was at all my doctor’s appointments. She was always on my hospital bed. She was always the one asking in the morning, “Are you okay? Would you like something to eat? Are we getting up today?” Always the one asking.
I actually – we talked about it almost a year ago now, let’s say on this show. Talking about asking it differently than just saying, “Are you okay?” Maybe asking if there’s something they want to do today? Because that ‘are you okay’ seems to be the easiest thing to ask, but it’s definitely the hardest thing to hear. Because like you said, you’re not okay and you know that. When people ask, it’s drowning. Definitely, I can understand that feeling.
It can take a lot to readjust. I know I was terrible at communicating. I had a lot of anger and I lashed out a lot, especially not being able to compete. I was really angry at the world. I took that out on my family, probably too much. But I’ve definitely apologized since and we’ve talked about it a lot. But at the time, like my mom said, she thought I hated her. I definitely didn’t realize that at the time. But now when I look back, I can see how she felt that way.
I do want to thank you so much for all of your time today and all of the research you’ve been doing on post-concussion athletes.
[00:32:34] JC: Yeah. Thanks very much for having me. Keep this conversation going. I think you talked about feeling alone or feeling isolated. There’s a lot of value in sharing experience. Any listeners who feel like something resonated with them today, if it can give you a little bit of a positive boost, maybe if that’s a positive step in your recovery or if you’re listening in because somebody you know has a concussion.
If anything can help, that’s all you can ask for, right? Because in a world with so much information, sometimes it’s hard to know where to turn and what to do. Anyways, keep up the great work and be in touch if ever you think. Yeah, I can help you out or if there’s anything I can put you in touch with somebody. Happy to do it.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:33:22] BP: Support the podcast. If you truly love the podcast, please consider supporting us through our tip jar. Find the ‘support the podcast’ link in our episode description. All tips are greatly appreciated.
Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to the Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussions by giving us a share. To learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
OTHER CONTENT YOU MAY LIKE
