Exposure can’t rule out disasters

I care about truth and substance and not about debating.

The trouble is that I don't know what you'll be receptive to. I don't want to talk randomly in your direction and have it not address your cruxes.

"Why don't you put more effort into finding out that the thesis on which you wrote a post is true?"

Thanks!

Though, you haven't specified which thesis, so I'll assume you meant the title:

Exposure therapy can’t rule out disasters

First, I'll explain what I said in the post, which I originally thought would've been sufficient. 

Afterward, I'll explain related context which I'm operating from which I did not include in the post.

First:

As I say in the post,

In my experience, 

There is something like I say in the post that definitely seems to be the case in my experience helping myself and others grow. I have seen many people vaguely try more exposure therapy and make little progress. 

You can consider this for yourself:

Is there anything you avoid that exposure still hasn’t fixed?

Do any examples come to mind in your life? Please let me know if yes or no.

Frankly I thought this would be self-evident for each reader to find things like this in themselves. I expected the evidence to come from you. (But I'm happy to explain this now that you've asked.)

Note that nowhere in the post do I say that exposure can't work or never works. Obviously it works sometimes. But not always. Again:

I suspect that people who are afraid of something, even after ample exposure, are afraid of the rare, worst case scenarios. The (subjective) disasters.

Maybe that could've been avoided if instead I added one word: "Exposure therapy can’t rule out all disasters"? 

But the reason I was okay with the title as-is was this:

Because exposure cannot disprove that something terrible might, at some point, happen.

This seems obvious so I'm not going to explain why this is true. Same reason that math proofs require actual proofs, rather than trying lots of numbers.

But I will clarify one thing:

My model of exposure is that if it updates unconscious predictions [LW · GW], it can only update predictions relating to stuff that actually happened. If average-case exposures made you unlearn your fears, then surely you weren't afraid of any worse case scenarios. (Maybe you happened to unlearn the fears simultaneously through other means, but that would be mere correlation.)

To unlearn fears to scenario X, you must be exposed to scenario X. However sometimes scenario X is so rare/bad that exposure is not workable.

(If that wasn't the case, then this seems like accepting the argument that "living" is exposure therapy for fear, and so simply by living you will unlearn all of your fears.)

Also:

I'll let you in on some context to my state writing this post. I didn't include this before but it seems helpful to say now.

I have helped people -- people who have tried intentional exposure for months and sometimes years before talking to me -- overcome much or all their aversions in just a couple of hours, no exposure necessary. (I will be sharing one of these case studies in another post soon.)

In general, I've learned much more about minds -- real results both for myself and others -- simply by iterating on my own, just like the post above. 

I recently had the chance to counsel a cofounder of Coherence Therapy and he said he was surprisingly impressed and made progress on an issue he wasn't able to make on his own.

The first person I counseled with my new method told me that our one conversation was "significantly more productive than my last 6 months of CBT and talk therapy I did". 

If mainstream growth theory was good, surely there would not be $100 bills lying on the ground like this?

I've also vaguely had the experience of trying to read mainstream academic material (with the exception of memory reconsolidation) and simply not understanding it because I disagree too hard with the assumptions. 

This has led me to somewhat avoid "the academic literature" out of fear of thought-contamination.

Does that make sense? Please let me know if you have any specific questions.