Is there anything you avoid that exposure still hasn’t fixed?
…
Why is that?
In my experience, people who avoid X are usually not afraid of the average X…
For example, I spoke to someone who is afraid of starting conversations with women he’s attracted to. But as far as I can tell, he has no fear of how this will usually go (probably just fine).
Instead, he’s afraid of something like: he goes up to a girl, she finds him creepy and ridicules him, he ends up on social media and the whole world hates him. Exactly like this 19-second short parodies.
(I sent him this and he said, “LOL. They made a skit about my worst fear.”)
I suspect that people who are afraid of something, even after ample exposure, are afraid of the rare, worst case scenarios. The (subjective) disasters.
Why doesn’t exposure fix it?
Because exposure cannot disprove that something terrible might, at some point, happen. Update: See Kaj Sotala’s comment below.
Exposure can’t rule out disasters
Link post
Is there anything you avoid that exposure still hasn’t fixed?
…
Why is that?
In my experience, people who avoid X are usually not afraid of the average X…
For example, I spoke to someone who is afraid of starting conversations with women he’s attracted to. But as far as I can tell, he has no fear of how this will usually go (probably just fine).
Instead, he’s afraid of something like: he goes up to a girl, she finds him creepy and ridicules him, he ends up on social media and the whole world hates him. Exactly like this 19-second short parodies.
(I sent him this and he said, “LOL. They made a skit about my worst fear.”)
I suspect that people who are afraid of something, even after ample exposure, are afraid of the rare, worst case scenarios. The (subjective) disasters.
Why doesn’t exposure fix it?
Because exposure cannot disprove that something terrible might, at some point, happen. Update: See Kaj Sotala’s comment below.
Need something stronger…
The general tool I like is memory reconsolidation. Here’s an example of how I use it.