REBT with an elite archer: Wood 2017 case study

This is a single case: Zara, a pseudonym, a 44-year-old archer with a national ranking who shot for her county, at that level for four years and training four days a week. Before and during competitions anxiety made her performance collapse, especially indoors, the format she saw as easier and in which she therefore expected more of herself. A trainee sport psychologist worked with her for three months in seven one-to-one sessions of about an hour, based on rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), an approach that targets rigid beliefs such as "I absolutely must shoot well, otherwise it's awful".

According to the questionnaires she completed, rigid beliefs fell and flexible ones rose during the programme, and stayed at that level at three and six months. Her confidence in her own ability and sense of control, rated from 1 to 100 on ten aspects of the shot (accuracy, focus, shot timing, composure and others), also rose on all ten. In competition her average, expressed as a percentage of the maximum score, went from 75.64% over nine competitions before the intervention to 84.88% over nine competitions afterwards.

The work had three phases. In the first, Zara learned the basic model of the approach: it is not the event itself, an arrow out of the group for instance, that produces anxiety, but the belief through which it is read. In the second, over three sessions, the psychologist questioned her main belief ("in an easy competition I must shoot well, otherwise it's awful and I can't stand it"), asking what evidence supported it, whether it was logical and whether it helped her, until Zara replaced it with a strong preference: I really want to shoot well, but I don't have to, and if I don't I will feel bad but I can accept it. A badness scale from 0 to 100% was used to put a mistake in competition into proportion. In the third phase she did written exercises between sessions, deliberately entered the indoor competitions she feared and, at the end, played the psychologist while he played the athlete.

The measures were a beliefs questionnaire (SGABS) at the start, midway, at the end and at three and six months; the 1 to 100 ratings of confidence and control at each session and at six months; competition scores, converted to a percentage of the maximum so that different rounds could be combined; and a final interview. The type of bow and the rounds shot are not stated.

With a single archer and no stable baseline period to compare against, it cannot be said that the improvement was due to the intervention: training, equipment, choice of competitions or fitness could all have changed over those months. The authors themselves say that single-case designs with a baseline are needed and describe their conclusions as tentative. The competitions before and after are not described, and working out a percentage of the maximum can lump together different distances and formats; the difference reported as a 9.24% increase is in fact 9.24 percentage points.

Almost every measure was reported by the archer herself to the people working with her, and the quotations chosen for the paper come from her own account. The psychologist was a supervised trainee, and the results were assessed by the same team that delivered the intervention. The questionnaire values appear only in the charts, with no figures in the text.

For an archer who freezes in competition precisely when expecting to do well, the case gives a concrete picture of one way to work on it: spotting the hidden demand in "I must", turning it into a strong wish, and deliberately seeking out the situations that are feared. Zara's worry that without the "must" she would lose her motivation is a common one; in her case it did not happen, and she says she enjoys competing more.

The study does not show, though, that this approach earns points: it shows that one archer's scores rose over the months in which she followed the programme. It is structured psychological work, delivered here by a trainee sport psychologist accredited in REBT and working under supervision, and a case report helps in understanding how it unfolds more than in knowing how well it works.