I help people unlearn insecurities that resisted a lifetime of attempts.
Four of the ~one-session cases:
A. Interpersonal insecurity one-shot
A prediction market conference attendee set a bounty on increasing his agency. Turned out to be rooted in lifelong interpersonal insecurity.
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.
![[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.\"]")
1 year later: Doing great.
B. Anxiety two-shot
This case was my first attempt, so it has the longest data. I met Antoine at a CFAR reunion, he was struggling with lifelong anxiety.
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: He says all is well and he continues to grow from the work.
C. Approach anxiety one-shot
A tech founder in SF set a bounty on asking out crushes. After our first session, he went home, immediately went to sleep, woke up with muscle soreness. Within two weeks, he had easily asked out multiple crushes.
Five additional hours were needed to unlearn romantic insecurity.
5 months after first session: Audio interview.
1 year later: He’s in a happy relationship. (He asked her out in person!)
D. Addiction one-shot
A man set a bounty on resolving his multi-decade porn addiction. One session with take-home.
7 months later: He reports no longer experiencing urges.
1 year later: Doing great.
Pattern I noticed
Avoidance patterns, like numbness and some types of procrastination, are much less likely to one-shot than issues where the emotion is directly accessible, like interpersonal insecurity and self-loathing.
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.
Fascinating. Nice work Chris!