Rung 11 · Graded exposure
Do it badly on purpose
Approach someone with a deliberately unpolished opening. Fumble it slightly, on purpose, and carry on.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
Everything you have built so far can quietly become a way of never being clumsy in public. Fumbling on purpose is how you find out that the polish was never what kept you safe.
What it buys — A rung you can only clear perfectly is a rung you have not really cleared. This one takes the safety net away deliberately.
Deliberately dropping safety behaviours and varying the conditions of exposure produces more durable learning than performing the feared thing carefully.
What it cannot show — Written for exposure therapy delivered by a clinician to people in treatment. Applying it to unsupervised practice for ordinary shyness is our extension, and the paper takes no position on doing it alone.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, each genuinely fumbled. A smooth one does not count, however well it went.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 12 — Ask for contact details once a weekSource
Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek & Vervliet (2014). Maximizing Exposure Therapy: An Inhibitory Learning Approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58.
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 06 of that lesson.