This does not apply to outcomes of belief creation, however. Is there a good way to test things like that? Or am I misinterpreting your suggestion? Or... ?

I mean that if you're going to go digging around your head to change something, it would be best to have a criterion by which you can judge whether or not you've succeeded. Otherwise, you can rummage around in there forever. ;-)

An example criterion in this case might be "Thinking about not believing in God no longer causes an emotional reaction, as evidenced by my physical response to a specific thought about that."

Defining a test in this way -- i.e., observing whether your (repeatable) physical reaction to a thought has changed -- allows you to determine whether any particular approach has succeeded or failed. I suggested the two books I did because I have found it relatively easy to produce such repeatable, testable results with their techniques, once I got the hang of paying attention to my sensory responses to the questions asked, and ignoring my logical/abstract ones. (Since changing one's logical beliefs isn't the hard part.)

The rest of your comment is interesting to me because it directly focuses on the prediction of trauma due to dropping Theism (and related subjects). I hadn't really thought about the details of the fallout beyond key trouble spots. Is this a fair two-sentence reduction of your suggestions?

Looking at similar past events that carry the same emotional trauma due to dropped beliefs can give me the ability to question the validity of my fear of the future by comparing and contrasting the differences. In addition, this process may reveal a solution to the projected trauma by preventing it from happening or weakening its impact.

No, what I'm saying is that your projection is based on some specific, sensory experience(s) you had, like for example your parents speaking disparagingly about atheists, or other non-followers of your parents' belief system. At some point, to feel threatened by being outcast, you had to learn who the outgroups were, and this learning is primarily experiential/emotional, rather than intellectual, and happens on a level that bypassed critical thought (e.g. because of your age, or because of the degree of emotion in the situation).

Identifying this experience and processing it through critical thought, weakens the emotional response triggered by the thought, then gives you the ability to think rationally about the subject again... thereby leading to potential solutions. Right now, the fear response paralyzes your critical and creative thinking, making it very hard to see what solutions may be in front of you.

IOW, your prediction of trauma comes from a past trauma -- our brains don't come with a built-in prior probability distribution for what beliefs will cause people to like or not like us. ;-) If you want to switch off the fear, you have to change the prediction, which means changing the probability data in your memory... which means accessing and reinterpreting the original sensory experience data.

In order to find this information, you focus on the sensory portion of your prediction, prior to verbalization. That is, when you ask, "What bad thing is going to happen?" refrain from verbalizing and pay attention to the images, feelings, and general impressions that arise. Then, let your mind drift back to when you first saw/felt/experienced something like that.

A recent personal example: I discovered yesterday that the reason I never gave my software projects a "1.0" version is because I was afraid to declare anything "finished" or "complete"... but the specific reason, was that when I did chores as a kid, or cleaned my room, my mother found faults and yelled at me. Emotionally, I learned that as long as someone else could possibly find a way to improve it, I was not allowed to call it "finished", or I would be shamed (status reduction).

Until I uncovered this specific way in which I came by my emotional response, all my conscious efforts to overcome this bad habit were without effect. The emotion biased my conscious thoughts in such a way that I really and truly sincerely believed that my projects were not "finished"... because the definition I was unconsciously using for "finished" didn't allow me to be the one who declared them so.

But having specifically identified the source of this learning, it was trivial to drop the emotional response that drove the behavior... and immediately after doing so, I realized that there were a wide variety of other areas in my life affected by this bias, that I hadn't noticed before.

Most psychological discussion of fears tends to focus on the abstract level, i.e. obviously I was afraid to declare things finished, for "fear of criticism". But that abstract knowledge is almost entirely useless for actually changing the feelings, and therefore removing the bias. Mostly, what such abstract knowledge does is sometimes allow people to spend a lifetime trying to work around or compensate for their feeling-driven biases, rather than actually changing them.

And that's why I urge you to focus on specific sensory experience information in your dialoging, and treat all abstract, logical, or verbally sophisticated thoughts that arise in response to your questions as being lies, rumor, and distraction. If your logical abstract thoughts were actually in charge of your feelings, you'd already be done. Save 'em till the bias has been repaired.