Defeat, mistakes and shame: how athletes process failure

“Don’t open your phone. Not until tomorrow, at least.”

A teammate says this to her in the changing room, fifteen minutes after a match they lost by a single goal. That goal was her fault — or at least that is how it looks in the clip already circulating online. She does not open her phone. But she does not need to: she can already hear the comments she will read tomorrow. Loudest of all is the one nobody else will write but her: you’re useless.

In this post I want to write about what goes on inside an athlete after a defeat or a big mistake — not on the pitch, but inside them. About why shame and guilt are not the same thing, and why the difference matters more than it seems. About public criticism and social media. About self-compassion, which athletes often reject because they are afraid it will make them soft. And about how to analyse a mistake without beating yourself up over it.

I am writing from the perspective of psychotherapy, not sport psychology. I am not a sport psychologist, and I will not write about technique, tactics or mental preparation for competition. What interests me is the person who is left alone with themselves after the match.

A defeat everyone sees

Most people experience failure fairly privately. A project at work falls through, an exam goes badly, a relationship ends — a few people know, perhaps a few more. An athlete, however, fails in front of an audience, cameras and statistics. Their mistake has a time stamp down to the minute, footage from three angles and a rating in the paper the next day. In a small country like Slovenia, where we often know athletes by name and where a string of comments quickly grows under every news story about a defeat, that exposure is even more personal.

Then there is the body. A defeat in sport is not just a thought but a physical event: fatigue, adrenaline slowly ebbing away, pain, sometimes injury. The body that a few minutes earlier was the instrument of success is now “to blame”. Many athletes describe being unable to look at themselves in the mirror after a bad match — not figuratively, but literally.

It is no wonder that the mental health of elite athletes has become the subject of serious research in recent years. A meta-analysis published in 2019 by Vincent Gouttebarge and colleagues found that roughly a third of current elite athletes (34 per cent) report symptoms of anxiety or depression. This does not mean a third of athletes have depression — these are symptoms, not diagnoses. But it does mean that the image of the athlete nothing can break does not hold. And that a defeat everyone sees is, for many, a burden they carry alone.

Shame and guilt are not the same

When athletes feel bad after a defeat, they often simply call it “guilt”. But psychology distinguishes between two very different emotions that look similar from the outside.

June Tangney, who devoted much of her research to the difference between shame and guilt, describes them like this: guilt is about an action — “I did something bad”. Shame is about the person — “I am bad”. Guilt says: I missed that shot. Shame says: I am the one who misses.

The difference matters because the two lead to different actions. Guilt that is not excessive points a person towards repair: what can I do differently, whom do I need to call, what do I need to practise. Shame points them towards hiding: withdrawal, avoiding people’s eyes, denial, sometimes anger turned outwards — at the referee, a teammate, the coach. Tangney’s research has repeatedly shown that a tendency towards shame is linked with more anger, defensiveness and mental health difficulties, while a tendency towards guilt — when it is not mixed with shame — is linked with more empathy and responsibility. I have written more about this difference in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters, and you will also find a short explanation in the knowledge base under shame.

Most athletes feel both after a defeat. A mistake has its weight, and it is right that it should. The problem arises when “I made a mistake” very quickly, almost automatically, turns into “I am a mistake”. At that point analysis is no longer possible, because nobody can calmly examine something that keeps accusing them.

When the whole country comments

Public criticism has always been part of sport. Journalists, pundits, fans in the stands. Social media, however, has changed two things: criticism has become direct and endless. Direct, because it no longer comes via a newspaper but straight into your private inbox, with your name and sometimes a photo of your child. Endless, because it does not stop when you switch off the television — there is always another comment, another clip, another edited photo.

Shame feeds on exactly this: the sense of being watched by someone who judges you. When there are thousands of those eyes, it is very hard to hold on to the knowledge that most people think about your defeat for a few minutes while you think about it for weeks. And once shame catches fire, it very often goes looking for precisely the comments that confirm it. You know you should not read them — and you read them anyway, because at least then you feel you know what others think.

I have written about what constant measuring against others does to the brain in Comparing yourself on social media. For athletes there is an additional trap: part of the public response is not just comparison but hostility. The right answer to that is not “don’t take it to heart”. The right answer is protection: someone else running the accounts in the days after an important match; clear rules about when the phone gets opened; a team or club that reports threats instead of leaving the athlete to read them alone. Threats and hate speech are not part of sport, and they can be reported to the police.

The inner critic in the changing room

The loudest commentator, though, is hardly ever online. It is in your head. Many athletes describe an inner voice harsher than any journalist: “How can you be so stupid? Everyone saw. You’ll never be good enough.” In the knowledge base we call this voice the inner critic.

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we are interested in where this voice comes from. It was almost always an outer voice once. It is the voice of a childhood coach who shouted after every mistake. It is a father’s silence in the car on the way home from a match. It is a mother’s remark: “You know you can do better.” A child who knew their parents loved them most when they won learned that love depends on results. That lesson does not vanish in adulthood. It is simply internalised and starts speaking in the child’s own voice.

Many athletes defend this voice. “Without it I wouldn’t be where I am.” There may be some truth in that — high standards can be a driving force. But research on self-criticism in athletes suggests that harsh self-criticism is more closely linked with fear of failure, rumination and burnout than with better performance. A voice that constantly threatens does not help you play better. It helps you fear more. And an athlete who is afraid of making a mistake often plays cautiously, tensely, without taking risks — which is sometimes exactly what costs them the win.

When thoughts about a defeat go round in circles for hours and days, we call it rumination. It is not the same as analysis. Analysis reaches a conclusion and stops. Rumination does not stop, because it is not looking for a conclusion but for punishment.

Self-compassion is not softness

When a conversation with an athlete turns to self-compassion, the same reaction often appears: mistrust. Self-compassion sounds like something for people who are not winners. “If I’m kind to myself, I’ll get lazy.”

Kristin Neff describes self-compassion as having three components: kindness towards yourself instead of judgement; an awareness of common humanity — that everyone makes mistakes and that they do not set you apart from others; and mindfulness, which means noticing pain without either identifying with it or suppressing it. None of this means lowering your standards. It means not hitting yourself over the head with them.

A Canadian research group that included Leah Ferguson, Kent Kowalski and Amber Mosewich studied self-compassion in women athletes across several studies. They found that in young women athletes self-compassion was associated with less shame and less fear of failure, and with more of what psychologists call eudaimonic well-being — a sense of meaning, growth and autonomy. In an intervention study in which athletes spent a few days learning to respond self-compassionately to difficult sporting situations, self-criticism and rumination decreased. Conversations with the athletes also revealed a familiar worry: the fear that being kind to themselves would make them complacent. The data from these studies do not support that worry — self-compassion was not a sign of lower commitment.

If you are interested in the wider background, I have written about it in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows. For an athlete the essential point is this: self-compassion is not an excuse for the mistake. It is the condition that allows you to look at the mistake without looking away.

(composite, not a real person)
Athlete: “If I tell myself it’s fine, I’ll get it wrong again next time.”
Me: “What do you say to yourself now, when you miss?”
Athlete: “That I’m an idiot. That even a junior wouldn’t miss that.”
Me: “And when you say that to yourself — do you make fewer mistakes next time?”
Athlete: (a long silence) “I don’t know. I think next time I’m more afraid.”
Me: “What would you say to a younger teammate who missed the same shot?”
Athlete: “That it happens. That we’ll look at the footage. That you move on.”
Me: “Why is he allowed to hear that, and you aren’t?”

Analysis without self-flagellation

A defeat needs to be looked at. An athlete who avoids the footage of their mistake learns nothing from it — and very often stays stuck in shame precisely because they never check it against the facts. But analysis and self-flagellation are two different activities, even when they watch the same clip.

Analysis asks: what happened, what did I know at that moment, what can I practise. Self-flagellation asks: what is wrong with me. The first question has an answer you can use. The second has no bottom.

It helps if analysis has its own time, place and end. Not at two in the morning in bed with your phone in your hand, but the next day, with the coach or on your own, with notes and a clear goal: to find one or two things you can change. Once they are found, the analysis is over. Whatever follows is no longer analysis.

A simple test that I use on myself and offer to others: would you talk like this to a teammate you care about? If not, you are probably not analysing but punishing yourself. In the knowledge base you will also find the exercise two columns for the inner critic, which helps you separate what in a criticism is useful information and what is simply an attack.

Many athletes are perfectionists, and perfectionism has two sides. One is high standards that drive progress. The other is fear of making mistakes, which makes a person freeze up. I have written about how perfectionism intertwines with endless overthinking in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear.

One more thing matters: a defeat does not belong to the athlete alone. At home there is a partner who watched the match, parents who sat in the stands, children who do not understand why dad has gone quiet. Shame likes to spread into relationships — after a defeat the athlete withdraws, feeling they have let their loved ones down too. I write about how a defeat enters a couple’s relationship in Athletes and relationships. And more broadly about rebuilding self-trust after failure in Confidence after failure: how to get back up when things go wrong.

Exercise: the first 24 hours after a defeat

This exercise is not a substitute for professional help. It is a structure that helps keep the first day after a defeat or a big mistake from turning into a day of self-punishment. You can do it after your next match — or today, if an old one still stings.

1. Name what you feel and separate shame from guilt. Write two sentences on a sheet of paper. The first starts with “I did …” (guilt), the second with “I am …” (shame). Keep the first for the analysis. Next to the second, write: “This is shame. It is not a fact.”
2. Set a time limit on screens. Decide when you will open social media and the comments — ideally not until the next day, and not alone. If you can, ask someone to check for you whether there is anything you really need to see.
3. Come back into your body. Shame lives in the body: in hunched shoulders, shallow breathing, eyes on the floor. Take a shower, breathe slowly for a few minutes with a longer out-breath, eat something warm. It is not a reward; it is care.
4. Postpone the analysis to the next day and give it an end. When you watch the footage, write down no more than two things you can change in training. Once they are written down, close the footage.
5. Tell one person how you feel — not just what happened. A partner, a teammate, a friend. “I’m ashamed” is a sentence almost nobody says, but when someone does, the shame usually eases a little. Shame grows in hiding and shrinks when someone accepts it.

Where this does not apply — and when to see someone else

For performance and mental preparation, the right person is a sport psychologist. If after a defeat you cannot shake the fear of repeating the mistake in competition, if your body “locks up” at key moments, or if you need routines for coming back after a bad match, that is the field of a sport psychologist. Psychotherapy comes in when a defeat gets tangled up with something older than the match — with family relationships, with self-image, with love that depended on results. It often makes sense to do both, each at its own time.

Some guilt is justified. This post does not say that every bad feeling after a mistake should be got rid of. If your actions hurt someone — a teammate, an opponent, the team — guilt is a healthy sign that you care, and the right path is an apology and making amends, not self-compassion in place of responsibility.

When shame does not pass, it can be a sign of something more serious. If weeks after a defeat you still cannot pick yourself up, if you are not sleeping, not eating or eating much more, if you lose interest in everything and not just in sport, or if you start thinking it would be better if you were not here, the right first port of call is a doctor or psychiatrist. At that point it is no longer about the defeat but about your health. Help is also available right away: the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day), the Crisis Line in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (between 7 pm and 7 am), and in an emergency 112.

A humiliating coach is not your mistake to process. If a coach insults you after a defeat, humiliates you in front of the team or threatens you, that is not a part of sport you have to “put up with”. It triggers shame too, but the answer is not only inner work; it is also safety and a conversation with the club, the federation or someone you trust.

What therapy can offer

In psychotherapy, a defeat is rarely treated as a sporting event. We are more interested in what the defeat has awakened in the person: whose voice speaks up when they miss, which old experiences of shame open up, how mistakes were handled in their family. It often turns out that the athlete is not afraid of the defeat itself but of what a defeat once meant — that they would be loved less.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. If a defeat or a mistake seems to be staying with you longer than it should, or the voice in your head is harsher than all the comments put together, that may be a good reason to talk.

What to remember

• Guilt says “I made a mistake”, shame says “I am a mistake” — the first leads to repair, the second to hiding.
• Public criticism and social media feed shame; it makes sense to protect yourself from them rather than endure them alone.
• The inner critic was often an outer voice once — and it does not improve performance, only fear.
• Research with women athletes shows that self-compassion is linked with less shame and less self-criticism, not with less commitment.
• Analysis has a beginning, an end and one or two conclusions; self-flagellation has no bottom.