How Trauma-Based Therapy Helps Athletes Overcome the Yips

What Are the Yips, Really?

For many of the athletes I work with, the yips feel like a mysterious and humiliating breakdown—a sudden inability to perform a skill they've practiced thousands of times. Whether it's a pitcher who can't release the ball or a golfer who can't sink a putt, the yips are often chalked up to mental blocks or performance anxiety.

But what if the problem isn't just mental?

In my years of trauma therapy, I’ve found that the root cause of the yips often lies deeper—in the nervous system’s response to fear. It’s not that the athlete has forgotten how to throw, swing, or perform; it’s that their nervous system is reacting as if they’re under threat. Their body, quite literally, hijacks their muscle memory.

The Nervous System's Role in Performance Failure

The human nervous system is designed to keep us safe. When it senses a threat—whether real or perceived—it activates the sympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight response. For high performers, this response can be triggered not by a life-threatening event, but by the fear of failure, rejection, or not being good enough.

This is where trauma and performance anxiety intersect.

At the end of that trail is anxiety, is fear of failure, is the fear of not being good enough... that’s always gonna end up at the same finish line—sympathetic nervous system hacking my biology and my muscle memory.

What makes the yips so frustrating is that the logical brain often knows there's no danger—but that doesn't stop the body from reacting. That split-second panic bypasses conscious thought and activates physical responses like hesitation, tension, or freezing.

How Trauma Therapy Creates New Neural Pathways

In trauma therapy, one of our goals is to change how the brain processes those perceived threats. Traditional talk therapy works well for some issues, but it often doesn’t reach the deep-seated neurological patterns that drive the yips.

That’s where therapies like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) come in. These therapies use bilateral stimulation and structured memory reprocessing to create entirely new neural networks.

We are wanting to physically change the synapses and how they fire… to create a new neural network that doesn’t activate our sympathetic nervous system.

I often use the metaphor of a forest trail: if you've walked the same path to anxiety or fear a thousand times, that trail is deeply worn. In therapy, we help you take a different path—one that's overgrown at first, but eventually becomes the new route your brain and body follow.

The more we walk down this new trail of therapy... the less often I take the old trail... Eventually, I wouldn't even know where that old trail was because all I see is the new trail.

This process allows you to respond to performance situations with calm, clarity, and flow instead of panic.

Real-World Success Stories

Let me give you two real examples from my practice:

• A college softball pitcher who had seen eight different pitching coaches finally overcame the yips after just four trauma therapy sessions. Once her nervous system was no longer interpreting the point of release as a threat, her natural muscle memory returned.

• A football player who feared another concussion would end his career found himself freezing at the moment of contact. We addressed the underlying fear response in therapy, and he was able to tackle confidently again without that split-second hesitation that actually increased his risk.

In both cases, the issue wasn’t mechanical—it was biological. And once we treated it as such, performance returned.

Your battle and your performance… it was fear that created that. And maybe, maybe just maybe, there's a different way than what we've been doing so far to overcome that fear.

A New Frontier for Sports Psychology

The yips aren’t just in your head—and they’re not something you can simply “push through” with grit or repetition. They’re a symptom of a nervous system that’s been conditioned to expect failure, and to panic in the moments that matter most.

Trauma-based therapy offers an entirely new framework for helping high performers—athletes, executives, traders—reclaim their edge. It's not about being tougher. It's about becoming more regulated. More responsive. More free.

If you're stuck in a cycle of performance anxiety that no amount of practice seems to fix, I want you to know there’s another way. And it works.

Interested in learning more? Visit chrisbruton.com or email me at info@chrisbruton.com to connect. Just because you've tried everything else doesn't mean there's no path forward. There might be another way. Let’s find out together.