athlete supportCopingFeelingsinjury recoveryMindset
Is Your Teen Avoiding Her Sports Injury? Here's Why That Might Be Okay
When your teen isn’t ready to talk about her sports injury.
It’s heartbreaking to watch your daughter suffer, at any age.
If you’re noticing that ever since her sports injury, she’s been throwing herself into endless video doomscrolling or is full on avoiding any conversation about her sport she was so passionate about just a short time ago, this is for you.
She might say, “I’m okay”, I mean what else is she supposed to do with her limited mobility.
As the days creep into weeks, It’s natural to wonder whether all this distraction is interfering with her well-being. Her calm statements that she’s not even sure she wants to return to her sport anyways, have you feeling the urge to encourage her to “face her feelings” so she can move forward in a healthy way.
Distraction as protection
For injured teen girl athletes, an injury is far more than pain and missing practices. It can feel like their entire world has shifted overnight. Their teammates and sometimes closest friends are still training without them, routines have changed drastically, and their confidence feels shaken.
The activity that once helped them manage stress is suddenly unavailable. Meanwhile, underneath the surface are all the thoughts that keep bubbling up.
“Will I ever go back or even be the same?”
“What if people move on without me?”
“Have I disappointed others?”
Looking directly at those thoughts and emotions can feel overwhelming. Distraction becomes a way for the nervous system to catch its breath.
Entertaining the idea that avoidance has a place, can help parents and supporters view it as an attempt to cope with something that currently feels too big. Now that doesn’t mean staying in a state of distraction is the goal. It’s important to move through the feelings and experience, even though it’s uncomfortable. Otherwise you risk lugging around that traumatic stress far longer than you need to.
Healing isn't all-or-nothing
Imagine spending every waking moment thinking about your injury. All the aches, missed opportunities, fears. That’s a ride nobody wants to get on.
Now imagine never acknowledging it at all, pushing every feeling away and keeping yourself perpetually busy every second of the day. Eventually those emotions find another way to get our attention whether it’s outbursts, exhaustion, zapped motivation, withdrawing from the things we love, or creating other physical problems in the body.
Neither extreme is particularly helpful.
Healing often looks more like moving back and forth between the two.
This term can be described as oscillation, a shifting between taking a break from difficult emotions and turning toward them. Both are a crucial part of recovery.
The goal isn’t to eliminate distraction. It’s to build moments where your daughter feels safe enough to connect with what she’s experiencing and begin to move through it in a supportive way.
Three ways parents can encourage bite-sized processing
So what do you do when your teen isn’t ready to talk about her sports injury
Unlike the adult brain, the teenage brain processes experiences in doses. Operating from a place where emotions lead much of the time and interpretations of judgement can be heightened, encouraging bite-sized moments of processing will likely feel much more tolerable and safer.
- Replace pressure with curiosity.
Small questions often feel much safer than asking for the whole emotional story. Maybe it’s asking things like:
“What was one challenging part of today?”
“What did you think about what the coach said in that meeting?”
- Keep emotional conversations with a short option.
Even a few minutes of honest connection while making dinner together, walking the dog, or watching a favourite show can be enough. Sometimes less creates more safety by opening a window of opportunity for more.
- Follow her pace.
There is no prescribed pace for healing. Taking her lead with some curious questions along the way shows support for her experience. If she gives you one sentence today that she wouldn’t have last week, that counts.
Celebrate the small moments of openness over the big breakthrough idea.
If you're a teen reading this...
If distraction is helping you survive right now, you’re not doing recovery wrong. Your brain may simply be trying to protect you from feeling too much all at once.
If you’re willing to notice one small piece at a time, it can be a far less intimidating journey to healing. And if you’re not sure where to start besides distraction, here are three possible places to start.
Notice instead of solving.
Once a day, pause for thirty seconds and simply ask yourself, “What’s on my mind right now? What am I noticing in my body right now?” You don’t have to fix anything. Just notice it.
Name one feeling.
You don’t even need the exact words. Bringing a label of sorts to what you’re feeling can make it more concrete, easier to deal with. Whether it’s saying to yourself, “I’m so frustrated right now,” “I’m disappointed,” or “I don’t even know what I’m feeling,” counts.
Naming emotions often makes them feel a little less overwhelming.
Take tiny doses.
Think of emotional processing like the physical recovery process. You wouldn’t expect to be rehabbing an injured ankle every moment of the day right? And you probably wouldn’t expect to be healed and running top speed the very next day.
Our emotions deserve that same courtesy. Take your time to go back and forth between tuning in to what you’re thinking (and feeling) and taking your mind off it entirely for a period of time. You might spend a few minutes journalling, talking with someone you trust about what you’re feeling, or simply naming a feeling you notice before returning to something else. That is enough. Recovery isn’t about choosing between distraction and processing. It’s learning to listen and carve time out for both.
Sometimes healing looks like laughing with friends, crying in the car after physiotherapy, and doing both on the very same day.
That back and forth, is the flow of healing for real.
Let’s Keep Walking Together
If this message resonated with you, you’re already part of the community.
I appreciate you!
I’d love to invite you into our email community, a caring online space where we share 2–3 thoughtful notes each week with resources, tools, and real-life encouragement for raising (and being) resilient teen girls.
No pressure. No perfection. Just support, insight, and a lot of “oh wow, that makes sense.”
Let’s walk this path together with presence, courage, and a little more ease.
Join here and receive your free download:
No More Walking on Eggshells: A Guide to Courageous Conversations with Your Teen
With gratitude,
Chantal
