Very good article, but I would say that exposure therapy has limits. I live in an area with lots of rattlesnakes and am terrified of them. I'm certainly not going to risk a venomous bite to get over my fear.
By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using women as a prop for self confidence is pretty douchey.
I don't find anything in that story to be douchey. What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women. I'm not really sure how else he should do it. Maybe he could have established friendships with them, and "used" them even further?
Really? Try to imagine a world where EVERY guy resolved to ask 1 pretty girl a day for her phone number to improve his own self confidence. Now imagine being a pretty girl in such a world. Now try to figure out what purpose the pretty girl is serving in this self help exercise and if she had the option to opt out?
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#53Anyone have a deck of cards for handling fear of success?
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using women as a prop for self confidence is pretty douchey.
I don't find anything in that story to be douchey. What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women. I'm not really sure how else he should do it. Maybe he could have established friendships with them, and "used" them even further?
"What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women.
"
Specifically, by learning to not care about the women in question or the interactions.
This is why comparing talking to people with shooting freethrows is goddamn weird. People are not basketball rims. The basketball rim lacks subjective experience.
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit (I admit not entirely) like saying that "Maybe all those free-throws you practiced between games didn't score us any actual points." 100% of the women he didn't ask did not give him his number. The exercise served the purpose of pushing him past the fear that would have otherwise paralyzed him during a real request.
Except women are people, not inanimate objects to bounce balls off of. Those women did not choose to participate in SeanDav's practice, and it was not cost-free to them to be used and discarded that way. More to brazzy's point, SeanDav doesn't get to decide how he comes across to people. Pretty young women get hit on constantly and it is really exhausting and demoralizing to be rudely interrupted every five minutes w…
Ironically, it seems you're trying to sympathize with women by saying they're not inanimate objects to bounce balls off of, but you're still denying them autonomy.
When women want attention, they dress attractively. When they don't want attention, they dress casually. It's just like birds. Ever wonder why they call it the birds and the bees? If you're a guy and you hit on women in sweatpants, you'll most likely fail, b/c those women are not signalling their availability and interest.
And before someone goes all "women should be able to dress however they want and not get raped," consider that I'm not advocating rape. I'm pointing out that the previous poster asked "attractive" women for their phone numbers, not every woman. Logically, this implies that he was asking women who were seeking attraction by dressing attractively and presenting themselves as available and seeking mates, just like birds who sing to signal their availability.
The reason everyone confuses attractiveness is that our media present it as a thing that you have or don't. "Movie stars have it, computer nerds don't." But the real truth is that attractiveness is something you do. When you want to "get out there," to signal your availability and interest in mating, you do attractiveness. It doesn't matter how fat or pimply you are: You adorn yourself, you clean yourself, wear fancy clothes, you grab attention, you impress people, try hairstyles. Once you're married, reproducing, dropping kids off in a minivan on Saturday morning, you wear sweatpants and other casual clothes and no one (except social retards, of which there are unfortunately plenty) hits on you. Or else if you miss that egoistic feeling of being attractive, you dress up a little bit and reject all the people that hit on you.
This is how it works. It's just one step advanced from non-speaking mammals. Political correctness is just an attempt to cover up the realities that not everyone understands, just like religion and the Republican party are shorthand behaviors/scripts for people to follow when they don't know exactly what to do.
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#56He could accelerate his progress if he just did 50 cold calls to random strangers selling diapers a day - he would be super hardened after a week ;-)
Which raises an interesting question - do people with such jobs deal exceptionally well with rejection? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they do, but then I wouldn't be if they were more than averagely depressed, either. Surely someone must have looked into this.
> do people with such jobs deal exceptionally well with rejection?
Yes. Martin Seligman has done research (or at least reported the reasearch) on this and there is a full chapter about people doing cold calls in his "Learned Optimism" book.
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#57Anyone tried anything like this, informally as described here or in a formal setting? I wonder how often it is successful.
Exposure to your fears is a pretty standard method out of the wide spectrum of cognitive-behavioural-therapy tools. Of course, preparation for that is the most important part of it. AFAIK, it works for about a third to half of the patients, depending on what measurement for success you apply.
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#58It's possible (probable) that he had developed a fear of rejection due to his divorce, but the very fact that he had a divorce indicates that he had been able to date and marry in the first place (to a poor choice, no doubt). I'm sure that his approach was able to return him to where he was before, and perhaps improve him, but I wonder if it would be any good for someone with a deep-seated fear of rejection, or if it might not make things worse (perhaps due to a few scenarios ending poorly, or the subject finding himself unable to complete even the simplest ones, and retreating further into himself).
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#59Very good article, but I would say that exposure therapy has limits. I live in an area with lots of rattlesnakes and am terrified of them. I'm certainly not going to risk a venomous bite to get over my fear.
They actually use somewhat the opposite of this type of training with dogs to keep them from messing with rattlesnakes. It's more controlled, so the rattlesnake has a rubber band that keeps its mouth shut and the conditioning is given to the dog using a shock collar, but it doesn't take too many shocks before the dog won't go anywhere near a rattlesnake. It may seem cruel, but for dogs that live in area with lots of rattlesnakes where they allowed outside on their own, it can be lifesaving.
Now that I'm thinking about it, opposite is probably the wrong word...it's more of the reverse. Whereas the man in the story is using the game to condition himself to learn that there's no (emotional) shock where one is expected, the dog trainers use exposure therapy to train dogs that there is a shock where one isn't expected. They're two sides of the same coin.
Re: By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit (I admit not entirely) like saying that "Maybe all those free-throws you practiced between games didn't score us any actual points." 100% of the women he didn't ask did not give him his number. The exercise served the purpose of pushing him past the fear that would have otherwise paralyzed him during a real request.
Except women are people, not inanimate objects to bounce balls off of. Those women did not choose to participate in SeanDav's practice, and it was not cost-free to them to be used and discarded that way. More to brazzy's point, SeanDav doesn't get to decide how he comes across to people. Pretty young women get hit on constantly and it is really exhausting and demoralizing to be rudely interrupted every five minutes w…
There's something to be said for the benefits from the extra challenge of approaching particularly attractive people, but good point.