I hear you’re feeling terrible—as if all your progress suddenly vanished. That must be very discouraging after the highs you’ve felt. Because of this bad day, you might even be wondering if your recent progress was just another flaky breakthrough: temporary growth that doesn’t last.
Here’s what might be happening: You had a mental model that progress should look like this…
That is, you expected progress to be continuous. Like getting over a cold: each day the discomfort easing a little until it’s finally gone. Sure, there may be some dips, but it’s not like your cold will randomly snap back to max intensity two weeks later……
But progress with issues like self-loathing and anxiety isn’t continuous. Suddenly feeling horrible after weeks of consistently feeling better is actually pretty common.
We often suffer when our insecurities are triggered. For the insecurities you haven’t yet unlearned, you may still experience the same level of discomfort as you did before. But this doesn’t mean you haven’t made any progress: As you unlearn insecurities one by one, many situations stop triggering your symptoms entirely. You may have already forgotten several triggers you’ve successfully unlearned (Want me to remind you of some?).
Counterintuitively, unlearning these insecurities may uncover “dormant triggers” you had never noticed before.
Given that your current suffering is from insecurities (as opposed to a health problem or something else), then this is exciting progress: You’ve discovered more triggers that can be unlearned! Congratulations.
I went through exactly the same process. For example, one of my emotional symptoms was chronic neck pain. Eventually, I noticed that my neck was tense in particular situations, such as when I felt I wasn’t expressing myself socially. Once that trigger was unlearned, I experienced what I thought was total relief from neck pain.
But after a few months, I began to notice moments where my neck was very painful “again”. Like you, I immediately got worried: Is all of my progress fake?? Should I give up??
I began logging every moment where I felt tension. Quickly, I found my neck wasn’t triggering in the old social situations—those mostly felt great. Instead, the tension was triggered when I thought I wasn’t being “productive enough”, and a few other situations. I hadn’t noticed these triggers before—they’d been hidden by previous triggers that hit daily. But now that those were unlearned, only the ~monthly triggers remained.
In a way, the fact that it took months to encounter these dormant triggers was actually proof of progress—I’d already unlearned the more common ones!
After I unlearned these newly-discovered triggers, the debilitating instances of my neck pain became less than half as frequent. To this day, I still occasionally find rarer and subtler triggers. It’s exciting. Recognizing these dormant triggers is what enables further unlearning.
I had expected progress to look like the worst of my neck pain gradually disappearing, but instead progress looked like the same intense suffering, much less often.
So, what you’re experiencing is normal. Be well and take care of yourself. Continue the take-home work I assigned, and continue to search for dormant triggers—you will find more.
–Chris
Good one! Another framing I like is that progress is mostly about speed of recovery, which cashes out similarly to your framing, but tracks a slightly different element.
I really like the graphics 👌