What was really going on for you in this situation? 

For those who don’t know, up until last Month Tim Paine was the Australian Cricket Captain, he took over the Captaincy after the Sandpapergate Scandal (March 2018), where the previous Captain was banned for one year from playing any cricket.  Last month when a sexting scandal from late 2017 involving Tim Paine was about to be exposed in the newspaper, Paine fronted the media (with no Cricket Australia backdrop) wearing a CA Top advertising Dettol (I’m pretty sure they would have preferred him to make a different choice) and explained what had gone on, and fessed up and stood down from the position of Captain of the Australian Test team.  He has subsequently stood down from all cricket sighting Mental Health reasons for this. 

I am not writing about this because I have any reason to Judge Tim Paine, but when I learnt that the text messages were sent on the Morning of the first day of the first test match against England in November 2017, when Paine was getting ready to play his first Test Match since 2011.  He had had many injuries to his fingers during this period and even had made the decision to retire from cricket and take up a job with Kookaburra (a cricket bat and gear company).  He was talked out of that decision, and other injuries and retirements led to his selection and preparation to return to the Test arena in November 2017.  The question in my head was, what were you doing Tim?  Surely you could focus on the game? 

The only answer I could come up with was he was numbing, numbing the anxiety, focusing on something else, anything else than the thing that you have spent your whole life preparing for, and he engaged in the sexting behaviour.  Tim was in a very anxious situation, and when faced with an anxious situation, the options that you are presented with are fight, flight or freeze.  Tim was ready to fight, but it wasn’t time for the game yet, he wasn’t going to run away, so he froze, well at least he looked for some way to numb the anxiety, to think about something else, to move his focus. 

I don’t know Tim Paine, I am not sure whether this is what has taken place, but I am sure if the behaviour that he displayed on that morning in 2017 was normal for him, we would have heard from some if not all of the other people that he had engaged in sexting behaviour with.  It appears that Tim numbed the pain.  Numbing is a commonly understood behaviour, we can do it in order to avoid feeling strong emotions, to avoid the feelings, and the appearance of being over the top.  Sexting is a pretty extreme behaviour in order to avoid the feelings that someone is going through, far more common and socially acceptable behaviour would be scrolling on your phone, playing games, watching hours of television, getting lost down youtube or internet rabbit holes, drinking slightly more alcohol than you should.  There are all sort of things we can do in order to freeze and not really deal with what is going on around you.   

How do you cope with reality?  How do you deal with the need to be a leader who is able to cope with everything that comes at you without being over the top, to be measured, to be clear, to be strategic and optimistic?  When it is often seen as unacceptable as a conservative leader to feel the weight of emotions, how do you cope?  Do you freeze when neither fight nor flight are viewed as acceptable? 

I know the frustration of numbing behaviour because I can’t cope with ‘all the feels’, for my years in ministry there are many occasions when I numbed rather than talking about what I was feeling, because I didn’t know who I could talk to, I wish I had a supervisor at that time, to listen to what I was going through to spit ball possible solutions when there was too much to feel. 

I hope that Tim Paine is able to get through this period of his life, and in the next phase (I presume he won’t make it back as a player) he will be a man who is able to cope with the feels and love his wife and family and know forgiveness from a sporting nation who appreciated his service in a very difficult period of his life. 

Simon Elliott (Professional Supervisor and Pastor)