A psychologist with the yips explains how he learned to understand and live with madness on the golf course
Here’s what I have – the chipping yips. Here’s what I don’t have–“focal dystonia,” a neurological diagnosis offered to yippers like me in the hopes that we might blame ourselves less. Has anyone with the yips ever felt o.k. about their affliction when told it has to do with brain chemistry? Perhaps we should, but we don’t. I use the pronoun, “we,” because I’m part of a large group. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic1 found that 33% to 48% of all serious golfers have experienced the yips. A Dutch study2 found that 50% of adult male golfers were tormented just like me. If these percentages are correct, then this is a problem weighing on the minds of over 25 million golfers.
The sad fact is that yips feel shameful. How else should I regard that bewildering moment when, for some reason I freeze during my downswing and can’t move my body through the chipping swing—instead making desperate spastic compensations with my hands that result in chunks, shanks, whiffs, blades, sculls, or other expressions of failure well known to golfers? The fact that I’m a psychologist who should know and have mastered his own mind only makes me feel worse. There’s an old axiom that goes, “Physician heal thyself.”
Easier said than done when it comes to curing the yips.
Why are the yips so shameful? First of all, they appear to be a form of “choking.” For most people playing sports, especially men raised to value competitive success above all else, being known as a choker is humiliating. If you can’t deliver when the contest is on the line, or if you fail or give up under pressure, your “crime” is not just some technical failure; it’s a moral failure that appears to reflect a special—and highly unattractive– type of mental weakness. A friend and professional colleague called it a “failure of nerve.” Yippers put the accent on failure.
Choking is a special type of failure, most often seen in sports. Like choking over an 18-inch putt, it happens when success should be easy; it’s right there in your grasp, and you blow it. You snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Most sports have a version of the yips. Consider the example of Rick Ankiel3, an all-star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals who started game 1 of the National League divisional playoff series and suddenly choked (yipped) in the 3rd inning, throwing 5 consecutive wild pitches before being removed from the game. Dallas Cowboy kicker Brett Maher recently made football history by missing four extra point kicks (PATs) in a playoff game against Tampa Bay despite having never missed a single one in the 3 seasons he had been in the NFL. Gymnasts call their version of the yips the “twisties,” a sudden loss of an ability to maintain body control during aerial maneuvers, and a disorientation and confusion as to of where the ground is. The greatest gymnast in the world, Simone Biles4, was afflicted with the twisties during the vault competition in the 2021 Olympics. And world-class soccer teams are known to hire psychologists to help the not insignificant number of players who tend to “choke” and miss open penalty shot shots that they have easily made hundreds of times in practice.
Consider the situation in golf that gave rise to the term “yips” (a word originally coined by golf great Tommy Armour). A player has to make a short but important putt, one that is so easy that he makes it 100 out of 100 times in practice. Something goes wrong and he misses it, jerking it left or right, coming up short or blowing it right by the hole. Well known golfer, Doug Sanders, missed a 30-inch putt that would have won the British Open. Many of the greatest golfers in the world have suffered from the yips (e.g. Ernie Els, David Duval, Pádraig Harrington, Bernhard Langer, Ben Hogan, Harry Vardon, Sam Snead, Ian Baker-Finch and Keegan Bradley, to name just a few) and several of them quit the game because of it (Ian Baker Finch, Ben Hogan for a time). The embarrassment and contempt we feel toward a yip is reflected in the nicknames for it, names like “freezing,” “the jerks,” “the staggers,” “the squeals,” “the waggles,” and “whisky fingers”. Over time it was applied to every aspect of the game; every swing, including the small swings used for chipping, could fall apart because of the yips.
Simply put, the suffering at the heart of the yip experience is helplessness. A yip is completely outside the conscious control of the yipper. And helplessness is the most toxic of human emotions. I can stand over a chip, knowing full well that I need to somehow move through the shot to the target—in fact, rehearsing such a perfectly fluid swing several times without the ball– and still, when faced with a ball, halfway into my downswing I suddenly feel an intrusive and unwanted fear that paralyzes my body, leaving only my hands to try to rescue the shot, a solution that invariably results in an almost spastic and weak stabbing at the ball. And, of course, a “spastic stab” can’t possibly bring about a good outcome. But knowing what is going on doesn’t stop me from doing it. Thus, we have helplessness. And I, like most people (and especially most men) find such a state of mind intolerable.
Yippers are like sinners needing absolution, seeking a cure anywhere we can find one. In lieu of a brain transplant, or at least a pilgrimage to the healing waters of Lourdes, we hire swing doctors, mental coaches, and scour the Internet for “tips” that will help us fix our broken swings, our broken selves. For example, a casual search on YouTube for videos addressing the problem of chipping yips came up with dozens of solutions, hawked by “experts” promising a cure. Like the cures offered by snake oil salesmen in travelling medicine shows in the 19th century, the titles of these YouTube videos are revealing:
Chipping Yips: The Simplest Cure Yet
or
Cure Your Yips With this Simple Short Game Fix,
or
How I Fixed My Short Game Yips,
or—my favorite—
How to Go From Yips to Yipee.
In the world of golf instruction, broken swings can be fixed but players like me see a deeper judgement in these “cures.” Being constantly told that we need to be “fixed” by swing doctors only reinforces our belief that we are “broken” and that our shameful failures are our own damn fault.
So what is a yipper to do? Well, of course he or she should try out the various physical adjustments or corrections that the world of golf instruction offers. With patience and practice, one of them will eventually help. Depending on the person, it might involve changing your grip or ball position. It might involve looking at the target and not the ball when chipping. Some of the tweaks suggested by various experts seem fairly extreme. For example, I am left-handed, but I feel much less “yippy” when I chip from the right side of the ball. A colleague of mine can only chip without yipping if he swings the club with one hand. For some, chipping with an 8-iron using exactly the same movements as putting is helpful. Several pros on the Tour have taken to using a cross-handed grip. These are technical adjustments with which yippers are well advised to experiment.
But I want to emphasize the importance of taking care of one’s internal life throughout this process. And the most important issue in this respect involves self-compassion. At the risk of coming across as some sort of New Age psycho-babbler, I think we have to develop compassion toward the parts of ourselves that are yipping and self-hating. Imagine how you would feel if a dear friend or loved one had a self-destructive habit and felt shame and self-hatred in response to it. You would, hopefully, respond with kindness, curiosity, and support. This is exactly the type of attitude we should strive to have toward ourselves.
In addition, there are other explorations of the yipper’s mind and heart that I have found useful. As a psychologist who is devoted to understanding the emotional sources of a patient’s symptoms, symptoms usually based in fear, I have had to ask myself, “How could making a small chipping swing with a wedge be scary?” What is its source?
My clinical experience has taught me that more often than not, a patient’s symptoms, however troubling they might be, are actually unconscious attempts to solve some other problem, to mitigate some other threat, or to repress some other troubling feeling. The “problem” or symptom, in other words, is actually a solution, but one that often creates more suffering than it is unconsciously intended to resolve. For example, a patient of mine pushed people away because of his arrogance and defensiveness. As a result, his presenting complaint when he came to see me was loneliness. Upon examination, it turned out that his aggression and swagger were actually safety behaviors in that they were his way of not feeling weak and dependent. The patient’s off-putting traits were an unconscious attempt to defend himself against the psychic threats posed by feeling of vulnerability and inadequacy. Once we were able to explore and make more acceptable these underlying feelings, he didn’t need to be so aggressive and defensive and, as result, was able to begin to make some friends. We see this in a dramatic form when someone is so afraid of disappointing others that he or she starts drinking heavily. The patient’s drinking “problem” is obviously an attempt to medicate the real threat—losing the approval of important others. Unfortunately, such drinking makes him or her lose face and incur social disapproval and rejection. Again, the “solution” becomes the problem.
Thus, I considered the relationship between this clinical wisdom and my yips. The yippy inhibition of moving my weight and body through the shot, while creating great distress, must have been an attempt to solve another problem, another threat or danger of some kind. But what could it be? Was I afraid of failing? Of embarrassing myself? Of seeming weak? Of being too strong? The problem was and is that I didn’t and don’t really know. I had to consider that, at the least, at the bottom of it all, was some fear. And so I experimented with various techniques to reduce my fear. I meditated and breathed through the shot. I tried to adopt a more aggressive mentality in the hopes that it would push back against fear. I even tried to psychoanalyze the deeper origins of my fear, confronting memories of my competitive father bullying me or various moments of embarrassment while playing sports. Insight is my business and I value understanding more than anything else, but this self-analysis didn’t really help me work through these mysterious moments of fear and self-loathing.
Since understanding the source of my fear wasn’t helping me get rid of it, I decided to change my approach. I tried to use some of the insights of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy5–or ACT–that I have found useful in my consulting room. Using this approach, we assume that some degree of discomfort or distress is an inevitable part of life and that, rather than pursue an impossible state of perfect happiness, we can instead make psychic room for some of this suffering, tolerate it without exaggerating its validity, and then act in the world according to our values. ACT defines values as our most treasured principles, expressing the person we want to be, what we stand for, our best selves. So, as a simple example, a patient of mine valued her health. The problem was that she loathed and resisted the effort it took for her to exercise. By reminding herself of the great value she placed on physical health, she was able to overcome her resistances. A man I treated complained about being victimized and manipulated in his marriage because his wife was such a hypochondriac. Using the ACT model, he realized that, in his best version of himself, he valued being a good caretaking husband and, as a result, was able to stop feeling like a victim.
In my case, rather than try to purse the impossible and almost magical goal of eliminating my fear in chipping, I endeavored to accept that I was afraid and then decided to act according to my values. I worked to accept that my yippy symptom was just going to rent some space in my golfing life – at least for now—and turned my attention, instead, to the ways that golf expressed and reflected my core values. I tried to focus my attention on the values of companionship and camaraderie, of physical mastery, of my love of nature, and of learning. I love and value the sense of physical mastery that I feel when I hit a shot perfectly. I love and value the camaraderie that I experience in my regular foursome. I love and value the beauty I see around me when I walk down a fairway. And I love and value my commitment to practicing, to the process of learning to play golf better.
The net effect of this paradigm shift was NOT the elimination of the yips. I’m still experimenting with different physical “solutions.” But it did permit me to recapture some of the joy that my shame and self-hatred had eroded.
I think perhaps that living with the yips is similar to how Anne Lamott describes dealing with grief and loss. She said, “it’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.6
References
1 Strickland, Carter (1/18/2004). Beware of the Yips Dreaded Golf Affliction Has No Known Cure. The Oklahoman.
2 Van Wensen, E, van der Zaag-Loonen HJ, & van der Warrenburg BP (2021) The Dutch Yips Study: Results of a Survey Among Golfers. Tremor Other Hyperkinet Mov. 11(1): 27.
3 Kelly, Matt (10/14/20). These players famously battled the ‘yips: Baseball’s dreaded mental hang-up can appear From out of nowhere.
4 Funk, Anna (8/2/21) Twisties and the Yips: Simone Biles Reveals a Powerful Mind-Body Connection.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/olympic-science-simone-biles-twisties
5 Hayes, Steven (2005). Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. New Harbinger Publications.
6 Lamott, Anne. Goodreads.com
Dr. Bader is right, of course. Failing to do something hard, like hitting a golf ball two football fields away and landing it accurately on a small circle of short grass is frustrating but not humiliating. Failing to make a short putt or execute a simple chip, particularly when the shot means something, causes a surge of psychic pain and self-loathing that must certainly leave a scar. He’s right again that some measure of self-compassion is warranted if we can somehow put aside our grandiose illusions and recall that we are, in fact, human, and inclined to an occasional error. Of course, there might be, as we psychoanalysts say, “more to it.” Our failed chip may in fact be the fallout of factors, conflicts, outside of our awareness. I’m not sure I agree, and it’s probably not what Dr. Bader meant, that understanding “doesn’t help”. It’s just elusive and awareness of our motives typically falls outside our awareness. We can round up the usual suspects—fears of failure, competitive rivalries, past trauma, guilt and the like—but the actual culprit that insidiously intrudes on our focus and interrupts the smooth swing of the club, that’s a tricky one to put our finger on. And mental coaches are not about to investigate the unconscious motives for failure. They are likely to provide the best strategies they can come up with to minimize the intrusions and keep our eyes on the ball. Sadly, despite their best efforts, sometimes the unconscious wins, and we are left with Dr. Bader’s other strategy to think about the good bits and learn to dance with a limp—which works if the impairment is confined to a limp. I was once warming up hitting some chips beside a small pond. I was six months into a bout of chip shanks at the time and should have known better. I proceeded to hit a chip at a ninety-degree angle to my target line, directly into the pond. The ball, now gone, had been a new Pro-V that I had looked forward to playing during the round. I recall showing no visible reaction to my error. I put down another, new, ball and once again shanked it into the pond. And another. And another. And another. I believed I was facing my difficulty with perfect equanimity, but a friend who recognized the signs of psychic dissolution suggested, with compassion, that I move away from the pond. I did, after losing one more ball. I’m just saying: it’s not always a limp. Sometimes it is an utter collapse, a molecular catastrophe that leaves a primal ooze in the place the golfer once stood. If Ben Hogan really did leave the game for a stretch because of yips, he did so to remind us that the yips are not for the faint of heart. The yips are for anyone—man or woman—who knows the stakes of facing that two-foot putt.