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The Introduction The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it. Seen from the outside, this process manifests itself as stress, anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, creative blocks, loss of motivation, inability to let go of the past, constant starting and stopping on one goal or frequent switching between goals, low self-esteem and many other things. From the inside, however, these counterfactuals can feel more real to us than reality itself, which can make it difficult to even notice it's happening, let alone being able to stop it. Unfortunately, even though each specific instance of the curse can be defused using relatively simple techniques, we can’t just remove the parts of our brain that generate new instances of the problem. Which means that you can’t sidestep the Curse by imagining yet another counterfactual world: one in which you believe you ought to be able to avoid falling into its trap, just by being smarter or more virtuous! Using examples derived from my client work, this article will show how the Curse operates, and the bare bones of some approaches to rectifying it, with links to further learning materials. (Case descriptions are anonymized and/or composites; i.e., the names are not real, and identifying details have been changed.) THE DISCLAIMER To avoid confusion between object-level advice, and the meta-level issue of “how our moral judgment frames interfere with rational thinking”, I have intentionally omitted any description of how the fictionalized or composite clients actually solved the real-life problems implied by their stories. The examples in this article do not promote or recommend any specific object-level solutions for even those clients’ actual specific probl