Why do we accept that emotional issues take years to resolve? (UPDATED: 2025 August.)
It took too long to outgrow the worst of my anxiety. Afterward, I wondered, “How could this have been 10x easier?” This was my guiding light as I began helping others with their therapy-resistant insecurities.
Some clients have only needed ~1 conversation to overcome issues that resisted years of therapy. Examples of “one-shots”:
Anxiety resistant to talk therapy, CBT, and IFS
First attempt was with a man I met at a CFAR reunion. He was struggling with lifelong anxiety resistant to talk therapy, CBT, and IFS. 11 months after we spoke, he says:
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.
This wasn’t a strict one-shot — he benefited from two more hours in month 9 — but pretty good for a first attempt imo.
Update 18 months later: He says all is good and he continues to grow because of the work.
Anxiety resistant to 8 years of talk therapy
A man I met at a prediction market conference set a bounty on reducing his lifelong social anxiety. He had already tried eight years of talk therapy.
In our one conversation, he got unblocked and learned how to “turn anxiety into excitement” (his words). He continued the practice on his own. After 6 months, he reported:
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.
Other people started describing him differently:
One of my new friends said, “You're so adventurous.” That shocked me.
Update 12 months later: He says he’s doing great.
Multi-decade porn addiction
A man set a bounty on resolving his multi-decade porn addiction. In one conversation, he learned a skill that he’s applied in times of need ever since.
Update 7 months later: He says he doesn’t have urges anymore.
Approach anxiety resistant to years of IFS therapy and meditation
A tech founder in SF placed a bounty for asking out crushes, something he had been unable to do despite hundreds of hours of IFS therapy and meditation over many years. After our first conversation, he went home, immediately went to sleep, woke up with muscle soreness, and within two weeks had easily asked out multiple crushes.
Update 11 months later: He’s in a happy relationship. He asked her out in person.
Patterns noticed
One-shots depend on client agency.
Issues with clear emotional components, like anxiety, tend to one-shot more readily than pure avoidance patterns, like numbness and (often) procrastination.
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.
This was a pleasure to read, I have been surprised on a few occasions when I have been told that something I said was transformative, I use metaphors very often and sometimes they really hit home for people.
One was talking about loss/grief, and I talked about what it's like to close a book and hold it in your hands, and the impact that it had even several months later surprised me immensely.