Former athletes can struggle when choosing a therapist, because many clinicians don’t understand the experience of being an athlete. I'm not at all saying this is a reflection of their clinical skill or ability to be a good therapist. Most clinicians simply aren’t trained in the specific culture, pressures, and experiences that can come with competitive sport. If you’ve been searching for a therapist for former athletes and keep finding people who are perfectly good clinicians and still not the right fit, there are some specific things worth knowing before your next consultation call. I’m going to cover what the different professional titles mean and why they are not interchangeable, the step I see former athletes skip most often, where to look, and what to ask once someone is on the phone. I am a former Division I athlete and coach as well as a licensed therapist, so I have sat on both sides of this.
Key Takeaways
Credentials and titles matter, but they're not the whole picture, and knowing the difference between something like a CMPC and a licensed therapist can save you a lot of wasted time in the therapy process. The step I see former athletes skip most often is getting specific about what they're actually navigating. Being athlete-informed and being trained in a particular concern are two different things, and a therapist can be great at one without the other. A consultation call is a two-way street. You're finding out if they're the right fit just as much as they're finding out about you, which means you're allowed to ask questions too. At the end of the day, finding the right therapist is less about checking every box and more about the relationship you build with the person across from you. And if the first person you talk to isn't the right one, looking for someone else is allowed.
Why is it so hard to find a therapist who understands athletes?
Most therapist profiles list specialties or challenges they specialize in like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, grief or life transitions. But those words don’t always tell a former athlete whether the clinician understands what years inside competitive sport can do to identity, self-worth, and the way a person responds to pressure.
I want to be clear that what I’m not saying is a clinician has to have played competitive sport to “get it”. Many of the best clinicians for athletes never competed at all, and what matters more is whether they understand the complex layers of how sport profoundly shapes and impacts well being, behavior patterns, coping and more.
Former athletes are shaped by more than simply having spent years in a competitive environment. For many, sport has structured a significant part of their lives for a decade or longer: how they spend their time, who they spend it with, what they work toward, and how they measure progress. But they have also spent years absorbing the explicit and implicit messages of sport culture about what it means to be tough, disciplined, committed, competitive, successful, and worthy.
Those messages don’t necessarily disappear when someone stops playing. They can continue to shape how a former athlete relates to rest, failure, achievement, their body, their emotions, relationships, and their own sense of worth long after their playing career ends. That context matters when trying to understand what someone is experiencing after sport.
There is research supporting how seriously this transition deserves to be taken. Runacres and Marshall (2024) pooled 37 studies covering 24,732 former elite athletes and found the prevalence of anxiety and depression to be more than twice that of comparison to general populations, with real variation between sports. Leaving sport isn’t the sole cause of a mental health condition but those numbers do suggest former athletes deserve support that treats the transition as significant rather than as something they need time to adjust to.
Former athletes often come into a first session saying some version of “I do not know who I am anymore”, or “nothing is inherently wrong but I never feel happy” or “I’ve accomplished everything I was supposed to accomplish and it still does not feel like enough”. Those statements deserve real curiosity from whoever is sitting across from them.
Do I need a therapist or a sports psychologist?
The answer depends on what someone wants help with. A qualified sport psychology professional may be a good fit when the goal is mental performance, confidence, motivation, or competing under pressure. A licensed clinical therapist may be the better fit when someone wants to explore the deeper layers of their life and understand how experiences, relationships, attachment dynamics, childhood, and past experiences may be shaping how they think, feel, relate, and respond today. A therapist can also provide assessment and treatment when concerns like anxiety, depression, trauma, or eating disorders are present.
Searching for this gets confusing quickly, because typing sports psychologist near me returns psychologists, therapists, performance consultants, coaches, and credentials most people have never encountered, and those roles are not interchangeable even though the search results present them side by side.
For clinical care, the NCAA's mental health guidance recommends that formal evaluation and treatment be provided by a licensed mental health care provider working within the scope of their clinical license, and it names clinical and counseling psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, licensed mental health counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists among those providers (NCAA, n.d.). Depending on the state, that shows up as credentials like LCSW, LPC, LMHC, LMFT, PhD, and PsyD.
CMPC comes up frequently as well, which stands for Certified Mental Performance Consultant. That certification comes from the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies, and requires graduate coursework, supervised applied experience, an exam, adherence to a code of ethics, and ongoing professional development (AASP, n.d.). The CMPC on its own does not license someone to provide psychotherapy. Some clinicians hold both, which can be useful depending on what a person needs.
How do I know if a therapist is the right fit?
There are many considerations that go into finding the right mental health provider, and credentials, licensing, and clinical training all matter. But at the end of the day, the relationship you have with your therapist is one of the most important parts of whether therapy can actually work for you.
You need to be able to build a sense of safety, trust, respect, and collaboration with the person sitting across from you. Therapy asks you to be vulnerable. You’re bringing someone into some of the deepest and most complicated layers of your life, and you need to feel like you can be honest with them, tell them when something doesn’t feel right, and trust that they will listen. Flückiger and colleagues (2018) pooled 295 studies covering more than 30,000 clients and found a consistent positive relationship between the therapeutic alliance and treatment outcomes, across treatment approaches, client characteristics, and countries.
This is something I think former athletes need to pay particular attention to. We are often really, really good at committing. We are taught to not quit, to push through, to see things through, to stay when things get hard. That can be an incredible strength, but I’ve also seen it keep former athletes in therapeutic relationships long after it became clear that the relationship wasn’t working for them. I’ve experienced this myself. Sometimes you can keep telling yourself to give it more time, try harder, or stick with it because that’s what you’ve always been taught to do.
Therapy will not always feel comfortable, and a good therapist may challenge you or help you see something you would rather avoid. Discomfort and lack of safety are not the same thing. You should be able to have hard conversations while still feeling respected, heard, and fundamentally safe in the relationship.
And if the first therapist isn’t the right one, you’re allowed to keep looking. You can give a therapist feedback, say when something didn’t land, ask questions, disagree, and decide that an approach or relationship isn’t working for you. You’re in choice around all of it. For someone who spent years being coached, corrected, ranked, selected, benched, and told when to push harder, that can be a genuinely unfamiliar position to sit in and an important one to practice.
What should I look for beyond someone who works with athletes?
Former athletes should get specific about what they’re actually navigating before they start searching. Being athlete-informed is one set of skills while specialized clinical training is another. A clinician can understand sport culture and still not have the training or experience to treat a specific concern.
There are mental health concerns that benefit from working with someone who has specific training and experience in that area, including eating disorders and disordered eating, trauma, OCD, chronic pain, and other concerns that require specialized care.
This can come up when a former athlete chooses a therapist because they mention working with athletes, only to realize later that the clinician isn’t trained in the issue they’re actually struggling with. That doesn’t make them a bad therapist. It may simply mean they aren’t the right clinical fit for this time.
You wouldn’t go to a heart surgeon to get your ACL repaired. Both are doctors, but their training is different. Therapy deserves that same level of specificity. It’s reasonable to ask a clinician what they’re trained in and what concerns they regularly treat.
Naming the concern first helps. Identity struggles may call for someone experienced in athlete identity or life after sport. Perfectionism calls for someone who understands how it shows up beyond sport. When food, body image, or compulsive exercise are involved, look for specialized training in eating concerns. And trauma, OCD, panic, or chronic pain deserve more than a profile that simply says, “I work with anxiety.”
How do I find a therapist who works with athletes or former athletes?
Using several routes tends to work better than relying on one. Athlete-specific directories, general therapist directories read carefully, athlete advocacy organizations, university programs, and referrals from people who already understand the problem will each surface different clinicians.
The Association for Applied Sport Psychology maintains a directory searchable by location, sport, and specialization. When therapy is what someone needs, it is worth checking whether the person also holds a clinical license.
General directories like Psychology Today have a sports performance filter, and the filter alone will not sort this out. Reading profiles closely for specificity matters more, meaning words like athletic identity, former athlete, sport injury, sport transition, perfectionism, grief, disordered eating, or body image, written in a way that suggests the clinician actually thinks about them. A profile listing sports alongside dozens of other specialties usually indicates someone who works broadly rather than deeply in this area.
Sidelined USA is worth knowing about for former athletes whose careers ended through injury, since they focus specifically on athletes facing permanent removal from sport and point people toward clinicians familiar with grief, injury, and transition.
Local universities are an underused route. Counseling programs, athletic departments, sport psychology programs, and kinesiology departments often know exactly who in the area works with athletes privately. Physicians, athletic trainers, dietitians, and former athletic departments may know someone as well.
The aim is a short list of clinicians whose training overlaps with both sport culture and the specific concern someone is carrying.
What questions should I ask a sports therapist in a consultation?
Starting with the specific concern tends to work best. You’re gathering information about someone you may trust with a lot, so it’s reasonable to ask questions like:
What experience do you have working with [specific concern]? Whether that’s OCD, an eating disorder, chronic pain, suicidality, perimenopause, or an identity transition.
What experience do you have working with current or former athletes?
You can also ask how familiar they are with the transition out of competitive sport or any sport specific challenges like navigating injury or chronic pain in post-sport life.What therapeutic approaches or modalities do you use? You don’t need to become fluent in therapy acronyms. What matters is whether they can explain their approach clearly and connect it to what you’re coming in for.
How do you approach the therapeutic relationship? What values or principles guide how they work with clients? This might be one of the most valuable questions to ask in order to gain a sense of understanding around what therapy will be like with them.
How do you handle collaboration, feedback, conflict or disagreement from a client? That one gets at whether they expect a client to follow their lead or genuinely see them as a collaborator, and the answer says a great deal about what the work will feel like.
How are sessions typically structured? Ask what you can expect when you walk into a session and whether they incorporate work between sessions.
What are the practical details? Ask about availability, scheduling, fees, cancellation policies, and insurance.
These questions may feel unfamiliar, especially for former athletes who spent years in relationships where authority, hierarchy, evaluation, and compliance were built into the structure. Therapy shouldn’t become one more room where you need to perform or simply do what you’re told as the client. You’re allowed to ask questions, have preferences, give feedback, disagree, and decide whether the relationship feels like the right one for you.
Finding someone who gets the whole picture
Ultimately, finding the right therapist can be a little like dating. There is a lot to consider, and sometimes you have to talk to a few different people before you get a sense of what feels right. Therapy is vulnerable work. You’re bringing someone into some of the deepest and most complicated layers of your life, and you deserve to do that with someone you can build a sense of safety, trust, respect, and collaboration with. There is no single checklist that can tell you who that person will be. Sometimes you have to ask questions, pay attention to how you feel in the room, and give yourself permission to keep looking when something doesn’t feel right. Finding the right therapist is part of the work, too.
At Perrin Wellness and Performance, I offer individual telehealth therapy for former athletes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Former athletes who have been searching and keep feeling like they have to explain the entire athlete experience before they can get to themselves do not have to settle there. You can read more about individual therapy for former athletes or book a consultation to find out whether it feels like a fit. If you are struggling and want support right now, you can call or text 988 at any time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between a sports psychologist and a therapist?
A therapist is a licensed mental health professional qualified to provide clinical care within the scope of their license. A sports psychologist specializes in the psychological side of sport, and some are also licensed clinical psychologists while others focus primarily on performance. The NCAA recommends licensed mental health providers for formal mental health evaluation and treatment (NCAA, n.d.).
How do I know if I need a sports psychologist or a clinical therapist?
Start with what you want help with. A qualified sport psychology professional may be appropriate when the primary goal is mental performance, such as concentration, confidence, or competing under pressure. Someone seeking treatment for trauma, depression, significant anxiety, eating concerns, OCD, or suicidality should look for an appropriately licensed clinician with relevant expertise. Some professionals have training in both areas.
What questions should I ask before booking with a sports therapist?
Ask about their experience with current and former athletes, their familiarity with the transition out of sport, their expertise with your specific concern, the approaches they use, how they handle feedback and disagreement, how collaborative their sessions are, and the practical details like fees and scheduling. Identifying what you need first makes it easier to evaluate whether someone has the training to provide it.
Can therapy for former athletes be done online?
Yes. Individual therapy is regularly provided through video sessions when it is clinically appropriate, and my own practice is fully telehealth. Licensing still applies, because a therapist generally has to be licensed in the state where the client is physically located during the session, so that is worth checking early in the search.
What credentials should I look for in a sports-informed therapist?
Start with an appropriate clinical license when therapy is the goal, which depending on the state may look like LCSW, LPC, LMHC, LMFT, PhD, or PsyD. Then look at training and experience in the specific concern, along with real familiarity with athlete mental health or sport culture. A CMPC credential signals specialized mental performance education and experience, and it does not function as a clinical therapy license (AASP, n.d.).
About the Author
Emily Perrin, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, former Division I soccer player, and former Division I coach. She works with current and former athletes who are dealing with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, identity loss, and the emotional weight that can come with years in competitive sports.
Having spent nearly 15 years in athletics, Emily understands the pressure athletes often feel to keep going, stay disciplined, and look like they have it handled, even when they are struggling. Her work combines clinical training with lived experience in sport.
Emily's approach is trauma-informed and body-centered. She helps clients make sense of patterns like emotional shutdown, overthinking, people-pleasing, chronic stress, and harsh self-criticism. Her goal is to help athletes feel more grounded in who they are outside of performance, achievement, and sport.
She has supported athletes, coaches, teams, therapists, and sports organizations, including Division I programs and professional teams.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care, diagnosis, or treatment.
References
Association for Applied Sport Psychology. (n.d.). Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) certification. https://appliedsportpsych.org/certification/
Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
National Collegiate Athletic Association. (n.d.). Mental health best practices. https://www.ncaa.org/what-we-do/health-safety-and-performance/mental-health/best-practices/
Runacres, A., & Marshall, Z. A. (2024). Prevalence of anxiety and depression in former elite athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 10(4), e001867. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2023-001867
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