This is a linkpost for https://appliedtranshumanism.substack.com/p/how-to-engineer-authentic-confidence
[Epistemic status: I’m simultaneously convinced this is life-changing information that also has clinical validation while also suspecting that I might be a crank who should not be trusted. I’m certainly not a therapist. Caveat lector.]
Last November I attended a dating workshop because I got so stressed out around girls I wanted to date. I expected it to be exposure therapy for romantic anxiety specifically: get rejected enough times by paid models until I develop emotional calluses.
What actually happened was far stranger.
Through a series of extremely desperate psychological contortions, I accidentally achieved something like enlightenment. The models loved it. The instructor loved it. A heavily-polished CEO guy (I have no idea why he was there) congratulated me on my apparently-gargantuan balls. After a few months of integrating this experience, I no longer class myself as either socially or romantically anxious.
For months, I thought I'd discovered something bizarre and unprecedented. I gave talks. I wrote excessively long blog posts. I developed elaborate theories about approval-seeking and incompatible goal structures and then cornered people at parties to talk about them.
Then, like a week ago, I discovered a book.
Its cover is teal, featuring an abstract image of nothing in particular. It's called "Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression" by Adrian Wells, it costs fifty-five dollars, and it has a grand total of seventy reviews averaging 4.5 stars. Published 2011.
It reads like someone translated cement into prose, then translated it back into cement, then published it with no further edits. Inside this torpor-inducing tome is a therapeutic protocol describing like 70% of the mechanism I applied to myself in that dating workshop which led to me resolving my various social and romantic anxieties with attendant greater levels of romantic success.
[CLICK LINK ABOVE FOR FULL POST, sorry to do this but i always hate having to make changes in N different posts instead of having a single canonical post]
tl; dr:
