# Solving irrational fear as deciding: A worked example

[Last post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AnJptnj7yWuSxtXLu/how-to-actually-decide) I sketched some of the mechanics of how we actually make decisions and change our mind, as well as some ways we fail to complete this process and what it would feel like to get back on the track to make a decision we've been failing to make. In this post, I'll give an example of when I walked a friend through this process.

A friend of mine once told me that she had a fear of heights that would come up when rock climbing. It wasn't extreme, and she would generally just push through it, but she couldn't shake it. "It's irrational", she said. She'd had it for years, and made no progress reasoning with it -- the CBT she was so fond of and had so much success with wasn't working here. She wanted to learn how to deal with irrational fears (especially so that she could help others), so I told her to come visit the rock wall I had made with a friend, and we'd see what we could do.

Our rock wall had the advantage of not being at a real climbing gym. It was on the wall of my friends workshop, with a bare concrete floor. There was nothing screaming "This isn't safe to climb", but perhaps not all of the usual signs that it is either. Once she made it to the top of the wall, I started having some fun with her fear. "Oh, by the way, can you give that concrete anchor a shake to make sure it's solid? I want to make sure it's not coming loose again.". "Good thing this fear is irrational, because that concrete floor is hard. Can you imagine what would happen if your head hit this concrete? I don't think you'd bounce... I'm sure you're fine though. Being afraid would be irrational".

How do you think she responded? How would *you* respond, in a situation like that?

The first thing that comes to mind, is "Screw you, I can tell you're trying to provoke me!". But keep in mind that *she asked for my help*. The reason she's up there in the first place is that she wanted to get over her irrational fear, and to learn how it works. That's why she was up there, and that's why I was teasing her. If she were to change her mind on that, that's fine with me. She knew my intent wasn't jerkish, which makes it hard to claim jerkish intent, so "Screw you" doesn't really fit anymore. And without that, what's left? "I can tell you're trying to provoke me?". Yeah, congrats for noticing ;). She was too smart to walk into that one.[^m6eqf2sm71n]

Another possibility that comes to mind is "Get me down!". But again, she's up there for a reason. She can ask for me to let her down, and I would, and I would congratulate her on her newfound realization that her fear isn't irrational after all -- because after all, if the danger isn't *real*, then why are you *acting like it is?* She could see that one coming too, and wasn't ready to accept that the fear was rational and worth cowing to.

  
What other option *is there*, besides staying up there and letting me tease her, which doesn't have similar problems?

She stayed up there and let me tease her, fully grasping the point. If her fear is irrational, I shouldn't be able to get to her. She's free to take it seriously any time she wants, but I'm going to *notice* when she does, she's going to notice me noticing, and she's gonna have to find a way to square that.

The challenge, in cases like this, is in mind-reading what the fear is really about. If she's afraid that the concrete anchors will fail, and I incorrectly assume that her fear is about my potential inattentiveness during belaying, then all I could do is say "Well good thing I'm paying attention, right?" and she'd be able to say "Yes, but it's still scary" with no conflict. Because I wouldn't have addressed the actual cause of the fear.

It's a bit like playing battleship. Poking and prodding semi-blindly and empirically *finding out* what she believes which is leading to fear. We're poking and prodding to see what connects, as those are her *revealed beliefs* about what is dangerous.

If I were to ask her something stupid like... "What if a meteor comes down and blasts through the rope, causing you to fall!?", she could just say "I think I'll take my chances", and roll her eyes at the idea that this is a real threat. When I asked if she was *sure* her knot was tied correctly, she didn't find it so funny. That question connected with the fear, and she could sense it. She can either say "No", thereby admitting that maybe her fear wasn't entirely irrational, or say "Yes" and risk getting caught in a fib, or try to distract and deflect.

The conversation went something like this:

"You did check my knot, right? Are you *sure* that it's tied correctly"

"You wouldn't have put me up here if it weren't tied right"[^x1rr85f5snl] 

"Yeah, probably not, you're right. It's not like I ever make stupid mistakes... right?" [^n2hoab4q34f]

Every time she'd deflect I'd just redirect her to the questions of importance: "How do you actually know you're safe up there? *Or do you?*"

How does she square her idea that her fear is "irrational", with the the fact that I am *obviously* error prone and that she didn't even check my knot?

She could always say "Shoot. Yeah, I screwed up didn't I" -- if she's ready to admit there might be something to her fear.

Hypothetically, she could say "You obviously make your fair share of dumb mistakes, but you're also smart enough to know when you can't get away with them, so I know you triple checked my knot" -- if it really was that clear to her that it didn't call for checking my work. Or thinking about it explicitly, even. But that means accepting the risk, because if she says that and dares look down to check the knot, she's getting called out on it and she knows it.

The other thing is that unless you've sat down and thought these things through ahead of time, it's kinda hard to come up with explanations that make that much sense -- and when you do, you often find them convincing. If you don't, then it just kicks the can one step further down the road ("Yeah, probably.... How do you feel about betting your skull integrity on that?").

We went through this process for everything I could think of. Are you sure the knot is tied right? Are you sure this guy you don't know set the concrete anchors right? Are you sure the rope isn't going to fail because it's been stored in a bucket of harsh chemicals or something? Did you put the harness on right?

Every time I caught a glimpse of a fear response -- every time she couldn't *convincingly* act like it wasn't an issue, I'd dig in and poke around until we figured out what's going on. Okay, sure, I'm pretty aware of when I can and can't get away with making stupid mistakes, but she really should have checked the knot I tied. Fair enough. Okay, yeah, Jimmy knows whether his friend knows how to set concrete anchors, they've tested them, and there's more than one for redundancy. Over and over, we went through figuring out "Is *this particular fear component* rational, in part, or is it completely unconcerning?"

The knot thing concerned her at first, but after thinking it through, it's just "No, *of course* he's not going to be making fun of me for not checking the knot without triple checking himself. The knot is safe". The anchors, rope, etc, all had some slight component to the fear, at first. After looking into them, and realizing that *in this case* there's no danger, it just kinda felt like... there was no danger. At least, with respect to *these* things failing.[^li1wsnag6ld]

"Okay, so it can't be the knot, or the anchors, or the rope, or the harness. But clearly there must be *something* we're missing. There must be *something* that can go wrong here. It can't just be *safe*... right!?"

Same thing, generalized. She's free to feel fear and I'll commend her on her newfound wisdom and caution. Or she can realize that "Okay, fine, no there isn't anything else that could reasonably happen".

"But what if there's an earth quake! The wall could fall on you!". Sure, but at that point the universe is just out to get me, so might as well have fun while it lasts.

She can't *possibly* win, because it's heads I win, tails she loses. Either she takes her fear seriously -- in which case I win. Or she doesn't -- in which case... I still win. There's no such thing as a thing that is dangerous and also not dangerous *by the same judgement* \-\- and the judgement was hers. This is what I mean when I say that what I'm aiming to convey is [nearly tautological](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JpY7uztEdTF7HSDrT/beneath-psychology-introduction-part-2-the-solution-and-what). There was no chance of "failing" here because I wasn't trying to get her to not be afraid. Despite her request to help her do so, I refused to write the bottom line first.

Instead, I rigged the game by making sure not to sign up to do anything I might not be able to do, and only sat back to point out where she *had to* be wrong. She had to be wrong because she was saying "I have an irrational fear", and that can't *possibly* be justified from her perspective. What she's saying what amounts to "Heights are dangerous, but my belief that heights are dangerous is wrong".

These [Moore's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_paradox) sentences are obviously absurd when stated plainly like that, to the point where it seems paradoxical. Yet people do this *all the time*. We just like to reword things a bit to launder our irrationality. "It's not *me* that's irrational, it's my *subconscious*. Yeah, that's it! I'm not the crazy one, it's *that other entity in my head!*". So long as you see it as "I have an irrational fear generated by mysterious subconscious processes over which I have no control" + "I know heights aren't dangerous", there's no contradiction to resolve.

But once we're secure enough to risk offense and point and look at what the revealed beliefs actually show, things change. All of a sudden, we recognize that she's *acting* like her beliefs are "Heights are dangerous", "That belief is wrong", "I don't have that belief". No "subconscious", no "*I* believe one thing but *my fear* believes something else" -- just a mismatch between object and meta level beliefs, and a mismapping of her own beliefs which steers her away from noticing that she has something to resolve.

And once you notice that you're just disagreeing with yourself, you start wondering...   
  
How do you actually know you're safe up there? *Or do you?*[^w5j8wj7cfn]

What do you think happened to her fear, by the time she came back down?

What can *possibly* happen to her fear, provided that she's too smart and secure to miss the point?

Do you think she said "Hm, you're right, these are completely reasonable concerns to have... and it's still irrational"?

Do you think she laughed at *every conceivable danger*, including *the danger of the unseen*... and was *scared?*

Or do you think maybe she started taking her fears a little more seriously, thinking them through a little more, and making her mind up about which risks were worth taking, in each specific circumstance?

It shouldn't come as too big a surprise, but it was the latter.

Each different context has different factors to consider, and just because you don't need to be scared in one situation doesn't mean you don't have to be scared in another. It took a month or so for her to figure out the answer in her various climbing contexts, and by the end of a month her climbing on the wall was fluid in a way she hadn't realized she was missing.

She *thought* she knew how much caution she needed, but she disagreed.

It was never that her fear was unreasonable, just that she had never set aside the bottom line and actually reasoned about it.  
 

[^m6eqf2sm71n]: Notice how this is only possible with significant security? If she were to freak out and fail to remember why she's up there, I'd have had to slow down considerably to ensure that she could keep all the relevant contradictions in mind at the same time.The prerequisites of security and respect still need to be earned before you can direct attention like this. The point of this post, is to show an example of how once you have security and respect, you can systematically direct attention towards reality enable people to make decisions they were convinced they couldn't make. 

[^x1rr85f5snl]: Notice how this doesn't actually answer the question? That's because it's a flinch. Saying either "Yes, I am sure" or "No, I am not sure" is uncomfortable, so she reached for an excuse to not answer instead -- and succeeded in delaying her decision.It pays to be suspicious of your own motivations, when you find yourself not directly answering questions. If it really is a dumb question, we can always say "No, I'm not sure, and here's why it doesn't matter". Not "but", "and". 

[^n2hoab4q34f]: Here I'm doing the opposite. I'm deliberately not flinching from her valid point that I wouldn't have put her up there without making sure the knot was tied correctly. It's true, so no harm in engaging with it -- if it throws me off then I should be thrown off, and take a moment to reorient to what I've just had a chance to learn.The next step though, is right back to the thing she's dodging. Her own fear shows that she finds that to be not convincing, so maybe we can look at that too. And when you turn towards the possibility that things might not be perfectly safe, it's often easy to see why. 

[^li1wsnag6ld]: At a glance, this looks similar to CBT in that we're looking at evidence showing the fear to be unfounded, and she's getting less afraid as a result. However, the first thing we do is almost the opposite of CBT. I'm not not looking for evidence that it's safe, I'm looking for evidence that it's dangerous. I'm not trying to help her feel safe, I'm trying to help her feel afraid. I'm not trying to suggest that her fears might be irrational, but that they might be rational.This is because the conditions that call for CBT didn't apply. If you have someone who hasn't already considered the evidence against their fears, and who was open to doing so, then CBT is a novel insight and falls right out of the framework. She already considered it and concluded that her fear was irrational, and was closed to considering the evidence that the fear was wrong because she thought she already did that. So the opposite of CBT is what fell out. 

[^w5j8wj7cfn]: It's worth pointing out that I was primarily not saying "Look, this is contradictory. You need to pick one", because convincing her of that would only convince her that she was doing it wrong -- which she kinda already knew. My focus was on "is this actually dangerous or not?", because that's the object level disagreement that she needed help resolving, and if she knew how to resolve it from meta observations alone she would not have needed help.The meta level stuff came after, in the explanation of "Okay, so why did that work? What was I doing, exactly?" -- and a little bit of real time teasing between the lines like "You know that there's no way for you to get out of this without looking a little silly, right? :P"/"Are you starting to notice how I'm systematically shutting down your deflections and redirecting you to what you're avoiding?".The object level teaches a new response. The meta level teaches how to teach oneself the new response, and is much easier done following an example.