The Injury You Can't See - Where did the fun go?

If you have been climbing a while, there is a decent chance it doesn't feel quite like it used to. Maybe the psych has dulled. Maybe the projects feel more like pressure than play. Maybe you find yourself sticking to what you know rather than throwing yourself at things for the hell of it. And maybe you put it down to getting older, or busier, or just being over it.

But what if the fun didn't fade? What if it got injured?

I talk about mental injury a lot with my clients and I usually get the exact same look that is on your face right now. The slightly confused, slightly what are you talking about Kerrin look. But like with all my posts, if you are starting to realise that there is more to climbing than getting stronger this might be worth a read.

So let me explain what I mean, and I'll start with an analogy of a physical injury.

Imagine you are working a move that involves a heinous little crimp. You try it once, twice, fifteen times. Somewhere around attempt nine your ring finger gets a little tweak but you ignore it and keep trying. You wake up the next morning and your finger tells you all about the idiocy you got stuck in the day before. You knew you should have backed off but you didn't. Because in that moment the only thing that mattered was what? You were overcome by, what exactly? The need for the outcome to happen. To do the move right then and there, because otherwise what? It was only grade x so you should be able to do it. Your mate did it, so why can't you. Only you know the real reason you kept pulling on that crimp long after your finger started begging you to stop.

Here is the thing though. We can do the exact same thing to our minds. Repeat an action over and over until it leaves a mental injury. Take this example.

You throw yourself at a hard route. Attempt after attempt, falling in the same place, doing the same thing over and over, making no real progress and getting more frustrated each go until eventually you just stop. That stopping isn't because your body gave up like in the injured finger example. It's because something in your head did. And that mental injury is a lot harder to notice (at first) than a sore finger, but it leaves a scar all the same. And that scar is avoidance behaviour.

Now a quick but important note. When I say mental injury I am not talking about trauma. In the medical world they might separate a finger injury, say a partial pulley tear, from a finger trauma like a crush injury. It's the same with the mind. Injury and trauma are not the same thing, and I am talking about mental injury here.

The way we spot a mental injury is different too, but the logic is exactly the same. A physical injury announces itself through pain, and we can even measure it. How much does it hurt, on a scale of one to ten. A mental injury announces itself through behaviour, and we can measure that too by how much you avoid a particular thing. Did you used to love projecting until that one route absolutely broke you, and now, you just don't project anymore? Did you used to be psyched to try anything and now you find yourself staying within a comfortable grade range? Do you only ever climb one style? Zoom out on all of that and there is a simple word for what you are looking at. Avoidance. And the more of it there is, the bigger the injury underneath.

And this is where the mental injury starts to cost you something you might not have connected to it yet. Because every time you avoid, you are not just avoiding challenge. You are avoiding novelty. Play. The chance to learn. The chance to laugh at yourself. The try hard and the fight. That feeling of being pumped out of your mind and not letting go. And those were the things that made climbing exciting in the first place. So when we get mentally injured and start to avoid, we aren't just avoiding a hard route. We are avoiding all the things that made it fun.

So next time that little voice pipes up with no no no, notice it and examine your behaviour, are you avoiding? Dig into it. Ask why. What am I actually trying to avoid right now? And most of the time it's re-exposure to the same situation that hurt last time. Just like pain stops you repeating whatever injured your finger, avoidance is your brain going, na mate, this hurt last time, let's not go there again. It makes total sense doesn't it? Of course we don't want to get re-injured.

So what makes it a mental injury rather than just a preference? Because maybe you do genuinely just like slabs. But maybe you are climbing slabs because of avoidance of something else. 

Think about what a healthy mind actually looks like when it meets a challenge. It is curious and a little excited, drawn towards the thing rather than away from it, open to the possibility that something surprising might happen and genuinely interested to find out what the challenge holds. This is what psychologists would call an approach state, and it is the mental equivalent of a body that moves freely and without fear.

Now think about the opposite. A mind that has been hurt one too many times starts to close in on itself, becoming fixed in its thinking and quite certain things will end badly. It moves away from challenges rather than towards them, not because the challenge is genuinely dangerous but because avoidance feels safer than risking the same hurt again. That is an avoidance state, and it is the mental version of favouring an old injury. Guarding it. Refusing to load it in case it flares up.

Yet we know a protected body actually heals slower. Ask any physio. The tissue needs gentle, progressive load to recover properly. Wrap it in cotton wool and it just gets weaker and more fragile. So why would we expect the mind to be any different. Every time we avoid, every time we give in to that no no no and steer around the thing that hurt us, we think we are protecting ourselves. But we are really just wrapping the injury in cotton wool. And the injury never gets the chance to heal.

I know this because I have done it myself. I had a whole collection of stories I used to tell about what kind of climber I was. What I could and couldn't do. What wasn't my style. That I wasn't ready, or needed to be stronger first.

At some point I realised there were fewer and fewer routes I was willing to try, and the fun that had hooked me so instantly on climbing had disappeared. That loss of fun was what really made me realise I had to change something. So I spent a long time digging into this. In fact I went back and studied, first counselling and then psychology, to work out what had happened to the fun. What happened to my excitement at trying something new. Where was this dread, maybe even fear, coming from every time I thought about getting back on my project.

I started quizzing everyone I could. A big shoutout here to all my poor friends who have suffered through my endless questions. Do other people feel this too? Why? What happened? What were the antecedents? And then it clicked, I was self protecting from mental injury. I had conditioned myself into a systematic tendency to avoid as a result of mental injuries I had never rehabilitated.

Turns out the rehab was simple. Boring as hell (yep light weight lots of reps) and far from easy, but simple. Small, graduated exposure. Slowly approaching the very things I had spent so long avoiding.

And here is the part that really blows my mind. Committing to that and accepting the discomfort didn't just bring back the fun to my climbing. That steep thuggy route two grades harder suddenly looked like a fabulous challenge rather than something too hard. But so did that audacious business idea I had been talking myself out of for months. Turns out the mind I brought to climbing was the same one I brought to everything else. Rehab it in one place and it flows into all the others. Now that I have written that for the world to see it sounds rather obvious. We only have one mind so of course it works the same way in all situations, I guess I just hadn't connected the dots.

So here is a question for you to ponder.

What are the stories you tell about your climbing, and about what you can do in life? And are they actually true? Or are they scar tissue from a moment you would rather not repeat?

Because the beautiful thing about a mental injury, just like that finger, is that recovery doesn't ask you to rest. Resting, in this case, is just more avoidance. It asks for the opposite. Systematic rehabilitation. Gently, curiously, with a good dose of self compassion, approaching and engaging with the very things you have been protecting yourself from.

You might be surprised what you are capable of once you stop climbing around the mental injury and actually put in the time to rehabilitate it. You might just find the fun was never gone. It was only ever injured. And injuries, given the right kind of attention, heal.