The bottlenecks hypothesis

How does therapy-resistant insecurity get unlearned?

Some people think they’ve ‘tried everything’ to resolve their insecurity but feel insecure everyday. Meanwhile other people successfully reduced the frequency of these feelings by over 10x. What’s different between these groups?

Through my work with clients, a hypothesis emerged: There are high-level bottlenecks to how therapy-resistant insecurity gets unlearned; progress continues when bottlenecks are targeted in reasonable order—and stalls otherwise.

These bottlenecks behave like valves in a pipe, each restricting natural flow until addressed:

These bottlenecks cluster into two phases: Readiness Work and Unlearning Work. Here’s some of how I think about them:

Readiness Work

Readiness bottlenecks were the bottlenecks that prevented deep changes to their mental strategies:

1. Life on fire: Their life had more pressing issues than how they felt— crisis, financial scarcity, severe mental illness; or physical factors, like poor sleep or nutrition that undermined their neuroplasticity. Deep unlearning required stability, time, and money or social resources they didn’t have.

2. Denial: They incorrectly believed “I’m not that insecure.”

3. Hopelessness: They were aware of their insecurity, but still treated it as an immutable trait—“This is just who I am.”

4. Fear of rocking the boat: Life wasn’t on fire, but risk-aversion prevented commitment—“What if this work decreases my productivity? What if it disrupts my relationships? What if it reduces my free time??”

5. Lacking scaffolding: They thought they could perform mental surgery on themselves lol.

While readiness bottlenecks were present, they weren’t ready for the transition of becoming secure.

Unlearning Work

Some of the common bottlenecks to deeply unlearning insecurity:

• Emotional blindness: When asked how they feel, they went blank or intellectualized.

• Self-rejection: Deep shame and self-doubt created an interlocking system that covertly derailed surface-level unlearning. (Common in clients who hadn’t resolved their insecurity in 100s of hours of meditation.)

• Triggers: Even with all other bottlenecks resolved, specific situations still triggered surface-level insecurities.

Finally, as they released more insecurities, they had fewer and fewer moments of suffering. By default, they feel a grounded calm (secure)—unless one of their few remaining insecurities is actively triggered.

Order matters

Hearing about clients’ unsuccessful past attempts has not only supported the bottlenecks hypothesis, but revealed consequences of targeting them out of order: They had attempted deep unlearning before readiness bottlenecks were handled? Their temporary growth was followed by flaky breakthroughs! Worked on triggers while self-rejection was still present? New triggers and a brand new shame loop! Or maybe they trained emotional awareness before they were ready to make big changes to their life and mind? They got to feel their existing suffering even more intensely! Overwhelm, increased self-rejection, and learned helplessness were also common.

Put another way, they had been throwing spaghetti at the wall for years: “TRE? Psychedelics?? A meditation retreat??…” This was the opposite of strategically identifying and targeting their current bottleneck. Some of their random experimentation got lucky, but on the whole their search algorithm was suboptimal. Reliance on random experimentation revealed their lack of scaffolding.

On the other hand, clients who were ready have often been surprised by the speed of progress.

V2. 2025 Sep 6 – 2025 Nov 6.