One-shot Unlearning
Over a year ago I began an experiment: Could lifelong insecurities that resisted years of therapy, meditation, and other attempts be addressed via ~one session + homework?
1-year follow-up:
A. Interpersonal insecurity one-shot
A prediction market conference attendee set a bounty on increasing his agency. His bottleneck turned out to be lifelong interpersonal insecurity.
Even after 8 years of talk therapy, his interpersonal anxiety persisted:
![[Text message conversation. Question: "What did you try before working with me?" Response: "8 years of talk therapy. 1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations. This helped, but working with you once accelerated this immensely, like 4 years of exposure in 4 hours."]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WIoB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece2fecf-26e7-4eeb-9fca-04bed4cdc7dc_1125x645.jpeg "[Text message conversation. Question: \"What did you try before working with me?\" Response: \"8 years of talk therapy. 1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations. This helped, but working with you once accelerated this immensely, like 4 years of exposure in 4 hours.\"]")
One session with take-home work. 6 months later:
Every week I had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I kind of pictured doing but never really did.
One of my new friends said, “You're so adventurous.” That shocked me.
1 year later: Bob (pseudonymous) says he’s doing great.
B. Anxiety two-shot
This case was my first attempt, so the longest follow-up. I met Antoine at a CFAR reunion, he was struggling with lifelong anxiety even after working with multiple therapists.
11 months after main session + take-home work:
It’s a bit hard to recall exactly what has changed because most of it does not make sense anymore.
I used to get triggered by very small things that some of the people surrounding me would say or do… These things would incapacitate me for 48 hours, I would have to shut myself in my room. Now I just laugh.
We had another call in month 9, so that makes this a “two-shot”.
1.5 years later: Antoine says all is well and that he continues to grow from the work.
C. Approach anxiety one-shot
SF tech founder couldn’t ask out crushes even after 100s of hours of IFS therapy and meditation. One session. Two weeks later he’d easily asked out multiple crushes.
After the first session, he went home, immediately went to sleep (at 5pm!), and woke up the next day with muscle soreness.
A few additional sessions with take-home work were necessary to unlearn related romantic insecurity.
5 months after first session we recorded this audio interview.
1 year later:
D. Addiction one-shot
A man set a bounty on resolving his multi-decade porn addiction, which had resisted over a decade of attempts to quit.
One session with take-home work.
7 months later: He reports no longer experiencing urges.
1 year later: He’s doing great, no urges.
Pattern I noticed
Avoidance patterns, like numbness and some types of procrastination, seem much less likely to resolve after one session with take-home work than issues where the emotion is directly accessible, like insecurity and anxiety.
V2. 2025 Feb 27 – 2025 Oct 30.
I’ve had some “one-off” successes like this too (sometimes in as little as 30 minutes, though this was in an environment where we had a lot of shared context). A lot of your intuitions about this match mine, and I hadn’t actually made the “anxious vs avoidant” heuristic explicit to myself until I read your account of it, so thank you! Also love the “bounty” idea, and will think about how I might be able to implement it in my own practice.
I'm super curious, I've reread a bunch of your pieces. whaty do tou do in these sessiosn?