SHRINKING YOUR GOLF SCORE

You wouldn't think the 'talking-cure' (psychotherapy) could shave a few points off your golf score. I wouldn't have thought so either, but one of my former patients was an excellent golfer, but after a few years of psychoanalysis, he became a superb golfer. His improvement went along with a surge in self-confidence and self-esteem and success in many areas of his life. How did this happen?

He played golf ever since he was a kid; his father 'taught' him and they golfed almost daily. The father was a stern task-master, which is putting it generously. Actually, when the father missed a shot, he would curse and sometimes throw his club into the water or air, or bend it over his knee or around a tree. When my patient, as a boy, would err, his father would shout what he thought he did wrong. For example, if the putt died one inch before the cup, the father would yell that he should have hit it harder, lecturing that if it weren't hit hard enough, it would never get there, stating the obvious, after the fact. Adding insult to injury.

My patient had to learn to control his feelings, otherwise he would suffer the consequences of his father's feelings, and more than once the club would come down on his back. It is a wonder he is in one piece! The father's credo was, (and we've all heard this before) "do as I say, not as I do!"

When the son, as a teenager, got to the point of beating his father at golf, the father was NOT a good sport. He would blame anyone and anything for his own lack of success, trying to rattle the young golfer with obnoxious rejoinders. The father is long dead, but his spirit is immortalized in my patient's memory and unconscious. As a result, the stern taskmaster lives on, taking the form of upsetting our golfer over every untoward shot, so that the next shot is governed by anger and frustration, instead of a cool, calculating head.

In psychotherapy, the patient says everything that comes to mind, and these include golf stories. In this case, a pattern became clear, that his getting a few birdies in a row leads to anxiety and bogeying the next few shots. Therefore, he is always struggling to come from behind after getting ahead. This is yet another version of 'fear of success". Subconsciously, father would get upset when the boy was ahead. Father did not want the son to win. The father, evidently, had deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, and couldn't stand for his son to beat him. This psychology is present to a greater or lesser extent in many father-son relationships.

In psychotherapy, the idea is achieving insight, and after a while my patient realized that after he missed a shot it was almost like he could hear his father's voice berating and ridiculing him, and so he be‡came able to clear his head and cool off and calculate his next shot, rather than blow his next shot in anger. How many of us have simply whacked at the ball, trying to murder it, rather than place it? Now he is back to the real art and science of the game, figuring how to get the ball from point A to point B with the utmost of skill and control.

After a while he entered more important tournaments, hitting regularly below par. He found that the better he played, the more he enjoyed the game, which is what it is all about. An unexpected but valued benefit of his improved game was that more people wanted to play with him, some of whom became friends and business clients. Important deals sometimes culminated after a round of golf, which more than covered the cost of his psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis turned out to be a good investment.

And for those golf afficionados who know that golf is a microcosm of Life, itself, the better you are at golf, the better you are at Life.