Reflexive confessions of a female sport psychologist: from REBT to existential counselling with a transnational footballer

Reflexivity is a tool of self-awareness that affords insights on the impact of culture on practice and research. In today’s pluralist, multicultural world, reflexivity is much needed to attend to the needs of increasingly diverse athletic populations. In this paper, I engage with reflexivity to provide a critical interpretation and an evocative representation of data gathered during a two-year ethnographic project at a top-division men’s football team and from 12 one-on-one counselling sessions with a transnational football player, who struggled with injury, parenthood, cultural transition and prospective career termination. Drawing on cultural sport psychology (CSP), cultural praxis as well as relational and narrative understandings of self, I seek to illustrate how reflexivity as a strategy can be deployed to deliver culturally informed psychological support in sport. Using a novel methodological design of narrative case study nested in the genre of confessional tales, I interrogate my privilege and power in the counselling relationship within broader socio-cultural contexts to expose paradigmatic tensions in the researcher-practitioner model and the evolution of my professional philosophy, along with gendered interactional dynamics and moral positionality. In doing so, I hope to offer valuable insights into the process of multicultural counselling viewed from ‘behind-the-scenes’ with practical implications for those working in applied sport.