4 Past caring: depersonalisation

Coaches who are experiencing burnout may stop caring about their sport – but they may also stop caring about people and become cynical about others. But why might this be?

Such depersonalisation has been described by leading psychologist Christina Maslach. She wrote about this in a work context but it applies equally to sport. Depersonalisation, which results in personal detachment, serves as a defence mechanism, as you will learn in the next activity.

Activity 4 Depersonalisation as self-defence

Timing: Allow about 15 minutes

Listen to this account from Maslach about why people start treating others with cynicism. To what extent have you seen this disconnection with people in your own sporting workplace?

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Transcript: Audio 2

CHRISTINA MASLACH

But the really important aspect of burnout is not just exhaustion. It is this feeling of-- this negative feeling about the job and the people in this take this job and shove it. It's this cynicism that's, you know, de-personalising people. And it leads you to do the job in not a great way. You know, you're going to cut corners. You going to do the bare minimum rather than trying to do your very best.

And so burnout has these real impact on the quality of whatever it is, the service or the care or the education or whatever it is that you are providing. And where we were seeing it, at least initially, was primarily in any kinds of occupations where people are working with other people in some capacity.

INTERVIEWER

And there's a term that you describe in some of your interviews, which I think you kind of touched on, dehumanisation in self-defence. What's that?

CHRISTINA MASLACH

Well, that was one of the things that when I first was hearing these stories in my interviews, I was trying to look for concepts in psychology or sociology or somewhere that might capture what was going on. And so there was a concept out there that I found called dehumanisation and self-defence.

And the idea was that you begin to treat other human beings in non-human ways, as objects, as things, rather than the person, so that you would not get as emotionally involved as you would with another human being. So if you're in a hospital, you might be talking about the infarction and room 202, rather than Grace Smith, who's an elderly woman et cetera, et cetera.

So this dehumanisation, I was thinking maybe this is related to that aspect of cynicism de-personalising the students, the patients, the customers, whoever they are that you're working with, as a way of protecting yourself against, you know, all of the feelings that you may be feeling about having to deal with somebody in that context.

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Discussion

Maslach’s fascinating observation suggests that depersonalisation and personal detachment are mechanisms through which one can avoid confronting complex feelings and emotions. Cynicism towards others is not unusual in workplaces and is also, sadly, common in sport where coaches treat athletes as objects or commodities. Coaches may avoid dealing with complex difficult situations appropriately in order to protect themselves. This is not often talked about openly but, if you witness someone who is under prolonged stress and who is becoming detached from others, then depersonalisation may be part of the issue. Most organisations now have a welfare officer with whom you should discuss the situation.

Depersonalisation is a further distinct difference between coach and athlete burnout. You will next explore figure skating coach Molly’s own personal account of her burnout where you can see her detachment played out in a real life setting.