Often in psychotherapy a person's goal is to resolve a conflict between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind in favor of the conscious mind. You may hear it called an irrational unconscious belief. Someone may unconsciously feel unworthy of respect and acceptance but they consciously believe that this is irrational. What is interesting is that psychotherapy can work exactly as desired if the logic of the unconscious belief can be made fully conscious. It will not happen through mere deduction however. It has to be done by consciously accepting the feeling that results from the unconscious belief and embracing it. Then the unconscious logic can be clarified. The conscious mind has resources to test the veracity and validity of unconscious beliefs. The unconscious itself cannot do this. So an unconscious belief will usually remain unchanged even if one is aware that it is problematic. It is the psychological equivalent of debugging faulty code. The code will not change just because the user is frustrated by it. It will only change if a programmer edits it and runs the edited version in place of the faulty version. That is the major obstacle in psychotherapy. It is getting the code into the editor, so to speak. The logical flaws in irrational unconscious beliefs are not difficult to see. They are usually obvious. What is difficult is getting them clear in consciousness. It doesn't happen naturally. That is why things like mindfulness and Gendlin's Focusing are considered very useful by many psychotherapists. The real obstacle is the making conscious of the implicit unconscious beliefs.

Can someone tell me if I understand this correctly : He is saying that we must be clear before hand what constitutes evidence for and what constitutes evidence against and what doesn't constitute evidence either way?

Because in his examples it seems that what is being changed is what counts as evidence. It seems that no matter what transpires (in the witch trials for example) it is counted as evidence for. This is not the same as changing the hypothesis to fit the facts. The hypothesis was always 'she's a witch'. Then the evidence is interpreted as supportive of the hypothesis no matter what.

I read the first of those two articles posted awhile and took issue with it for making statements like this:

Here’s an easy indicator. If it’s a paper that presumes to tell you the evolutionary basis of differences between the sexes or races, it’s bullshit.

But I didn't read any of his other stuff and the second article has good arguments that I had not heard before. And quippy articles are okay, sometimes, if there they are backed up.

Who are the people that are using evolutionary psychology to cast aspersions on women? Heartiste doesn't seem like a representative pick-up artist, he is the most misogynistic and "bad" to my knowledge.

The best conversations are in places that put a low value on humour. Unfortunately in wider society disliking humour is seen as a massive negative.

SBNation.com blogs are like that. The main people write the main blog posts but anyone can post 'fanshots' (really short posts) or 'fanposts' (longer posts) and if the blog bosses think a fanpost is really good they can move it to the main section.

But what is causing the fear?

A prediction of failure. As if the brain asks: "what is the likely result of this?" and the memory answers: "feeling bad".

So can it be unlearned?

Yes, by creating situations which your brain can classify as belonging to the same reference class, and the result is not feeling bad. The problem is, how to design such situations, if mere memory of feeling bad yesterday can make you feel bad today.

Here CBT has some strategies; for example creating so weakened variant of the situation that your brain does not put it in the same reference class, and you hopefully succeed; and then very slowly increasing the intensity, so that your brain still pattern-matches it to the previous weakened version, instead of the full version.

It's an inconsistency of brain. Imagine that when some variable x = 10, you feel bad, and if x = 0 you feel good. If you ask "what happens if x = 8?", your brain will predict feeling bad, because it's closer to 10 than to 0. -- But if instead you ask "what happens if x = 1?", your brain predicts feeling good; and then you ask "and if x = 2?" etc. and when you come to "and if x = 8?", the brain will predict feeling good; especially if each step is then confirmed experimentally. And then when you come to x = 9, the memory will return: "there are multiple matches: we have good feeling for x = 8 and bad feeling for x = 10"... and then you apply some cognitive pressure and say something like: "but you know, the x = 8 data is fresh, and the x = 10 data is obsolete" and the brain gets convinced that the correct prediction is feeling good. And then you use the same trick even for x = 10, and you win.

In some situations this can happen "naturally", but that depends on luck. In a specific situation your brain may say: "well, the old memory is not relevant here, because... something important has changed". Or you can be tricked into doing the task first without having time to make a negative prediction.

If a big part of the fear is not just the pain of rejection but also fear of expressing the pain, then expressing the pain in a supportive environment will extinguish the fear of expressing the pain.

A hostile environment can increase the pain, which makes the fear reaction stronger. You get 1 unit of pain from the rejection, and perhaps 10 units of pain from people who keep mocking you for weeks. So your memory associates the event with 11 units of pain, instead of 1. This alone is enough to explain why the situation is worse.

Maybe the brain processes those additional 10 units in a different way than the original 1 unit (for example because when the 1 unit is over, you know it is over; but you never know in advance when those people get tired of mocking you, it could in theory go to infinity), but this additional hypothesis is not necessary to explain why the pain in a hostile environment is worse than in a supportive environment. (By which I am not saying it is false.)

Have you tried it yet?

Even if the prefectionist didn't get negative feedback for a long time he still seems to fear it. It has become a habit. A part of personality.

The perfectionist keeps punishing themselves by generating fear.

The old causal chain was like this: trying something -> rejection -> feeling bad

The new causal chains are like this: trying something -> fear -> feeling bad

The "rejection" part is no longer there, but the "feeling bad" part still is, and it keeps conditioning against that kind of action.

For example, I was researching an entirely unrelated post which began with a reference to the Litany of Gendlin, and from that learned who Eugene Gendlin was, found and read his book on therapy, which seems like it might be as useful for dealing with akrasia as it is for other problems.

It is. As it turns out, the thing I thought I invented called RMI is basically the same as Gendlin's Focusing; I'd just never heard of it and came up with a version of my own. Nowadays, I recommend that book to my new students if they have trouble learning the method from my materials. (Like Gendlin, I've noticed that some people seem to just already know how to do it, or pick it up almost immediately; the rest need varying amounts of practice and training to do it successfully.)

In and of itself, I do not consider "focusing" (boy is that the wrong name for the process) to be a panacea or even much of a cure for anything, let alone everything. It'd be like saying that a screwdriver is a cure for your television set not working. All it really does is let you open up the access panel and have a look in... or in Gendlin's case, provide an opportunity for the therapist to have a look in and offer some suggestions of what to tweak in there. If you're going to do more with it than poke around randomly, it helps to have some schematics and assembly diagrams of what you're working on.

(Btw, the reason I say "focusing" is the wrong name for the process, is because what most people would think of as a mental act of "focusing" would lead them to do almost the exact opposite of what is required to succeed at it. I wish he'd called it, I don't know... searching? grasping? contemplating? I suppose those wouldn't have sold a book as well, but then, it's not a book for people who need to focus, either, so, go figure!)

You have an interest in it and you stay with it. You are supposed to ask it ( I hate that anthropomorphizing of it but that's what they say) what it wants and stuff like that until you get a 'shift' where you have a sort of epiphany which is marked by an unmistakable release of tension.

I have to be missing the purpose of this. Wouldn't a feeling of insecurity have a simple response like: get away from the speech podium, etc? I did look at some "focusing" websites, but this point I can't figure out from the few bits and pieces around.