Your model of progress is suboptimal

To my client abruptly experiencing a bad day:

I hear you’re feeling terrible today, as if all your progress suddenly vanished. Because of this, you might even be wondering if your recent progress was just another flaky breakthrough—temporary growth that doesn’t last?

Here’s what’s likely happening: You had a mental model that progress with insecurity “should” look like this:

You had a mental model that progress is 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 that cold will randomly snap back to max intensity two weeks later………

However, rapid progress with insecurity isn’t continuous. Suddenly feeling horrible after weeks of consistently feeling better is actually pretty common.

We often suffer when our insecurities are triggered. When insecurities you haven’t unlearned yet are active, you may still experience the same intensity 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. As this happens, it’s also common to forget what used to trigger you, which can make it feel like you’re making no progress at all. (I can remind you of some of the triggers you’ve unlearned since intake if you like.)

It’s common to discover “dormant triggers” you’ve never noticed before through this work.

Assuming your current state related to triggers (as opposed to, say, a health issue), then this is exciting progress: You’ve discovered more triggers that can be unlearned!

I went through this process with my stress-induced chronic neck pain. At first I didn’t realize it was related to stress at first, but eventually I noticed my neck was tense in particular situations, such as when I felt I wasn’t expressing myself socially. It was a big trigger. Once it 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, and continue the search for dormant triggers—you’ll probably find more :)

V2. Revised 2025 Sep 30.