Rung 15 · Graded exposure
Three noes this week
Set yourself three refusals this week and count them as the target. Ask in ways that can genuinely be declined.
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
Counting successes makes every no a failure and every ask a gamble. Counting noes inverts it: the thing you were afraid of becomes the thing you are collecting, and a yes is a pleasant accident.
What it buys — By the third one the word stops being an event. That is not resilience talk — it is what the tally does to it.
Repeated, varied exposure with an explicit expectation to violate is the mechanism. The quota is our packaging of it.
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.
Here — Popular “rejection therapy” challenges are anecdote, not evidence. The clinical part is the prediction and the review, not the stunt.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under. The quota is refusals; the climb is still three calm attempts at 2 or under.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 16 — Tell one person it happenedSource
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 09 of that lesson.