What do people who think they’ve “tried everything” for their interpersonal insecurity to no avail have in common?
Their current bottleneck was never correctly identified and effectively targeted.
Through my client work, I’ve seen eight high-level bottlenecks to how people unlearn therapy-resistant insecurity. I model these bottlenecks like valves in a pipe: each bottleneck restricts natural flow until it’s been addressed.
Critically, the bottlenecks have an approximate order. When someone has tried for years but made little progress, they haven’t been led to resolve the bottleneck they’re actually stuck on.
These bottlenecks cluster into two phases: Readiness Work and Unlearning Work.
Here’s some of my model:
Readiness Work
Readiness bottlenecks prevent people from committing to the deep unlearning of insecurity:
Denial: They call themself “introverted”, not realizing that they’re avoiding social interaction because it feels bad. Insecurity strongly influences their daily decisions and actions, but they haven’t noticed. (You don’t get stressed, you just have mysterious “back pain”.)
Hopelessness: They’re aware of their insecurity, but they treat it as an immutable trait. “This is just who I am.” It feels unfixable, so why act on it?
Life on fire: Their life has more pressing issues than how they feel around others. Crisis, financial scarcity, severe mental illness; or physical factors, like poor sleep or nutrition, undermine their neuroplasticity. Deep unlearning requires time, money, and other resources they don’t have right now. They need more stability first.
Fear of rocking the boat: Their life isn’t on fire, but they worry working on their insecurity could make it worse: “What if change decreases my productivity, harms my relationships, or reduces my free time?” They perceive risks in resolving their insecurity and haven’t committed to the work yet.
When readiness bottlenecks are present, it can be difficult if not impossible to sustain lasting growth. This is because they’re unable to invest in long-term integration. They may still experience “breakthroughs” of course, but relapse is likely long-term.
Once all Readiness bottlenecks have been addressed, they’re ready for deep unlearning.
Unlearning Work
I’ve seen that the work of deeply unlearning insecurity follows this approximate order:
Lacking scaffolding: They attempt to perform surgery on themself. The bottleneck and sub-bottlenecks they’re actually stuck on are invisible to them—imagine trying to see your own blindspots or catch your own self-fulfilling prophecies. And for those with deep shame (#7): imagine hiring a guide who hates you.
Emotional blindness: When asked how they feel, they go blank or intellectualize. They’re disconnected from subtle somatic signals that carry crucial emotional information: a tight chest, hollow stomach, or clenched jaw. Without this felt sense, they’re navigating in the dark.
Self-rejection: Deep shame and self-doubt create feedback loops that derail their unlearning: shame about feeling shame, contempt towards their own emotions, self-sabotage because secretly they feel like they don’t deserve to get better. Self-rejection is “deep” when it has several interlocking layers of sub-bottlenecks. Deep self-rejection is near-ubiquitous among those suffering from insecurity resistant to years of therapy, meditation, etc.
Triggers: All earlier bottlenecks have been completely addressed, but specific situations still trigger their insecurities: flirting feels stressful, talking to strangers triggers body pain, thinking about the future brings dread. They may have dozens of small insecurities. For someone at this stage with good scaffolding, releasing any little insecurity takes minutes or less.
Finally, as people release more of these insecurities, their anxiety becomes less frequent. During the times when no insecurities are triggered, they feel a grounded calm (secure).
Why order matters
Unlearning insecurity is easy when bottlenecks are targeted in order. It’s significantly harder when they’re targeted out of order:
Flaky breakthroughs: When earlier bottlenecks go unaddressed, integration gets blocked, so “breakthroughs” tend to be flaky.
Learned helplessness: Experience enough flaky breakthroughs and they may come to feel that lasting growth is impossible. Even if they don’t have a hopelessness (#2) bottleneck now, they can acquire it later.
Overwhelm: A common experience when attempting deep inner work (#6–8) while experiencing crisis (#3).
More anxiety: If they increase their emotional awareness (#6) while having readiness bottlenecks (#1–4), they’ll just feel their existing anxiety more intensely without being ready to work on it!
Loops of deep shame: If they attempt deep inner work (#6-8) without trusted scaffolding (#5), it’s common to enter unhelpful feedback loops like endless rumination.
More triggers: If they work on triggers (#8) before self-rejection (#7), their anxiety may shape-shift: public speaking fear becomes email fear becomes… *endless morphing*.
Some people attempt to resolve their insecurity by throwing spaghetti at the wall: “How about I try breathwork this month? How about I try TRE? How about I try…?” This is the exact opposite of strategically identifying and targeting their first bottleneck. While some degree of ‘random experimentation’ can bear fruit, people who mainly do random experimentation tend to suffer from anxiety for more years than the counterfactual.
On the other hand, people make rapid, lasting progress when their current bottleneck and sub-bottlenecks are effectively targeted.
Some resonances here with Prochaska’s (much broader-in-scope) “stages of change” model, in case you haven’t come across it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheoretical_model
As with many of your insights, I really like the project of trying to identify and conceptualize sequential bottlenecks, even if the specific sequence you’ve identified strikes me as too idiosyncratic to generalize widely :)
I though I was at the Self-rejection or Triggers bottleneck but I was at Denial 😭😭😭😭