ABSTRACT
We occasionally come across athletes who excel through their injuries but it’s far more common to hear about the ones who don’t. Contemporary media coverage is full of stories about athletes whose struggles with injury have impacted their performance, their ongoing health, or their mental wellbeing. Though not all athletes end up in significant distress, most have to ride the ups and downs of the rehabilitation process and manage cognitive appraisals, emotional reactions, and situational factors as they change from day to day. This chapter addresses how athletes’ typical responses fluctuate from the point of injury through the transition back into sport. It introduces additional psychological skills that can be practiced through prolonged recovery periods and provides applied examples for practitioners. It also considers what happens when rehabilitation goes poorly, discussing topics like catastrophizing and malingering, with evidence from the literature to support strategies for working with athletes in distress.
