Psychological Process of Overcoming Movement Disorders by College Student-Athletes

This study developed a process model to explain athletes’ psychological experiences as they overcome movement disorders (MD), with the aim of deepening understanding of these disturbances and informing psychological support for their resolution. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six collegiate athletes who had competed at national or international levels and had successfully overcome MD. The psychological processes through which athletes navigated and ultimately overcame these disturbances were analyzed using the Modified Grounded Theory Approach. The analysis revealed that athletes engaged in repeated dialogue with their own minds and bodies, cycling through phases of progress and regression as they worked toward recovery and ultimately achieved psychological and social expansion. The findings further showed that this process advanced not only through athletes’ conscious efforts but also through factors beyond their conscious control, including encounters with pivotal events. In addition, bodily and psychological states became synchronously organized throughout the recovery process and transformed in tandem. These findings suggest that effective support for athletes experiencing MD requires practitioners to attend not only to athletes’ internal psychological experiences but also to the external events and contexts that shape those experiences, while adopting an integrated perspective that considers bodily and psychological processes as an interconnected whole.