You Are More Than Your Sport: The Inner Game You Were Never Coached For

For the athlete who is still in it, winding down, or figuring out what's next.

Malia Reynolds, LMFT #163164 | Somatic Therapist | Specializing in Family Estrangement and Athletes

Whether you’re currently active in your sport or retired and figuring out what’s next — once an athlete, always an athlete. If this is you, you know the drive, the commitment, and the willingness it takes to show up under pressure.

You’re wired to learn, to adapt, to be better than the version of yourself from last practice, last game, last season. That hunger doesn’t just live on the field, it shapes how you move through the world and is part of what makes you remarkable.

Somewhere in that same nervous system that drives you toward the finish line, something else lives too. A belief that slowing down means falling behind, or that rest is weakness. That if you’re not first, you’re somehow less. You probably didn’t choose these beliefs, they were formed through years of training, coaching, and competition. By now they don’t just live in your mind, I guarantee they live in your body.

Here’s a truth: Life will disappoint you. You will lose. You will fall short. There will be seasons where you don’t win, roles where you struggle, relationships that don’t work out. The invitation here isn’t to push harder in those moments, it’s to get honest about what those moments actually mean to you, and what they say about how you see yourself. Where did that meaning come from? What might be possible if you got genuinely curious about it? What else could be true for you?

In my experience, athletes who are willing to go there find that it shifts how they see themselves in sports and in life.

THE WHOLE PERSON WALKS IN

You might not even realize how much you’re carrying, because you’ve been trained to push through, not to pause and feel. You probably haven’t learned to pause yet, and when you do, it probably feels boring or scary.

And here’s the thing: athletes are pretty remarkable at compartmentalization, and in the right context it genuinely serves you. It keeps you focused, helps you meet a deadline, hold it together under pressure, and show up. It’s a real-life skill.

At the same time, there are moments in life that simply need your presence, not your performance. A relationship that’s asking for your full attention. A difficult conversation that requires you to actually feel something, not manage it. A quiet moment with yourself that keeps getting postponed because being still is harder than being busy. In those moments, the armor that protected you on the field becomes the thing standing between you and yourself.

The things you’ve pushed through don’t just disappear, they live in your nervous system and they accumulate. 

Your body is intuitive, it will eventually find a way to get your attention, whether you’re ready or not.

Beneath the athlete, there is a whole person. And that person deserves somewhere safe to land.

YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM UNDER PRESSURE

Your body already knows how to respond to threat, competition, and high stakes. At this point it’s automatic. 

Here’s the questions I keep coming back to with the athletes I work with: what happens when those same responses get activated off the field? What happens when your nervous system reads a difficult conversation, a moment of uncertainty, or someone’s disappointment the same way it reads a defender coming at you full speed?

This is where things can get a little complicated.

When the nervous system doesn’t get to fully process what’s happening, things get confusing fast. Your body might shut down or shift into overdrive, sometimes both at once, with no clear way to track what’s going on. In a vey primal sense, this is your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do: keep you alive.

The problem is, survival mode was designed for the moment — not for the rest of your life. And a lot of the athletes I work with are running in survival mode across most, if not all, aspects of their lives. 

So here’s what we do together: we track those patterns. We build a bigger capacity to steady yourself — not to suppress what you feel, but to hold more of it without getting swept away. We create more space between the trigger and the reaction, so that you get to choose your response instead of just survive through it.

Your nervous system didn’t end up here by accident. It was shaped by years of demands, pressure, and pushing through. It has a story, and in this work together, we learn to listen to it. We get curious, we experiment, we try things a different way and see what happens.

Over time, this kind of exploration actually creates new neural pathways. Your nervous system finds a more range than it’s been allowed to use. 

EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE BEYOND WINS AND LOSSES

I’d like to try an exercise with you here.

Either close your eyes or let your gaze soften toward the ground in front of you.

Go ahead and take three or four slow, easy breaths: in through your nose, out through your mouth. And when you’re settled, bring to mind a competition that was a tough one. A game you really wanted to win.

Picture the morning of it: What did you do to prepare? What did you eat? How did your body feel? What did you wear? What were the sounds and smells? Bring it all in and just let yourself be there for a moment.

Now picture yourself on the field and it’s game time. You’re doing everything you can, but something is off. Maybe your headspace isn’t quite right. Maybe your body feels heavy or anxious. Your team wasn’t quite connecting the way you’d practiced or hoped they would. And by the final buzzer, the game didn’t go your way.

Pause there for a moment. 

What do you notice in your body right now, just sitting with that memory? Maybe there’s sadness, or a familiar tightness in your chest. Maybe the frustration from that day comes back in a wave. See if you can just be with it for a few breaths without trying to fix it or move past it. 

Then, on your last exhale, if your eyes are closed, open them and look around the room. Notice where you are and come back to the present. Take a moment to move around a little — roll your shoulders, stretch, let your body settle.

That’s a glimpse of the kind of work we do together. We slow things down enough to get a bigger picture of what’s happening beneath the surface to help us understand how much your body has been holding, and how much it might be ready to release.

Part of my job is to create enough safety to begin exploring the story your body holds, and to build more capacity to be with what’s there one session at a time.

RELATING TO YOUR BODY WITH AWARENESS

Your body has been trained, fueled, pushed, and measured for a long time. In a lot of ways, it’s been treated as an instrument, always in service of more. In a performance environment, that makes a lot of sense.

When performance isn’t the goal, sometimes you can feel disconnected from what your body is trying to express to you.

In this work, we ask different questions: What’s tense? What’s numb? What’s been braced for so long it forgot it was bracing? What hasn’t been felt yet, because there was never space?

We slow down and we listen, without rushing to fix what we find or push past it. This can feel strange and unfamiliar at first, or even wasteful for someone wired to always be moving toward something. This is exactly why having an experienced guide alongside you matters.

Here’s what I’ve seen over and over with the athletes I work with: you begin to trust — and learn — that your emotions and sensations will not destroy you. With patience and practice, this is something we build together, over time.

WHO YOU ARE OFF THE FIELD

Who are you when nobody’s keeping score? When the season ends, when injury sidelines you, when your career shifts or stops entirely?

For athletes who have spent years building a self around performance, these transitions can be among the most disorienting experiences you go through.

Here’s the thing: if your worth has been measured in results for most of your life, nobody ever taught you who you are without them. This is where some of the richest work we do together lives. 

How do you experience joy and pleasure? What feels safe to you? How would you like to be to the people who love you? What kind of life can you imagine building when performance is not at the center?

We don't want to disregard your sport or leave it behind, we want to expand your sense of who you are beyond performance, and get curious about what's possible in your next chapter.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE

I tell my clients this from the start: you are not a problem to solve, and this is not a playbook.

We move at your pace, and I will challenge the stories you’ve been telling yourself. I’ll honor your resistance rather than steamroll it. You are the expert on your own experience. I’m here to witness it, reflect it back, and help you find what’s true for you beyond your performance.

In our work together, that means we slow down and pay attention to the sensations that move through your body when a memory surfaces, when fear enters, and when something that matters shows up. We get genuinely curious about what’s underneath the surface. 

We engage with the parts of you that are pulling in different directions…the part that wants to push through, the part that’s desperate for rest, the part that’s terrified of what slowing down might reveal. We process your injuries, whether physical, emotional, or both. 

We sit with the feelings that sport culture doesn’t always make room for: shame, perfectionism, the fear of being ordinary, the grief of a career that looked different than you imagined or ended before you were ready. We slowly bring them into the light, and we work with them, because that’s the only way through.

WHO THIS IS FOR

This work is for the athlete who feels disconnected from their body, their emotions, and their own sense of direction. The athlete who has built an entire identity around their sport and wonders: who am I without it? This is for the athlete carrying trauma, injury, and burnout — sometimes all three. For the athlete in transition who doesn’t recognize themselves outside of competition. And for the athlete who is still very much in it, but senses that something beneath the surface is asking for attention.

Active, retired, or somewhere in between, if you’re ready to go beneath the surface, you’re in the right place.

WORKING WITH MALIA

Part of the work I do is walking alongside athletes navigating the emotional and somatic dimensions of sport, identity, and transition. That might mean working through performance anxiety or burnout, processing the grief of an injury or career shift, or learning to relate to your body with more curiosity and less pressure.

Wherever you are in your athletic journey, there is room here for all of it.

If you’re ready to explore what support could look like, I’d love to connect. I offer therapy to clients throughout California, in person in Pasadena and virtually.

→ Reach out to schedule a consultation at maliareynoldstherapy@gmail.com