Protocols
Twelve protocols and one clinical note, each rendered from its own document. The summary under each is that document’s own “The formulation in one line”. Floors are read off the locator, not asserted here.
The design draws on predictive processing, a framework for how brains use prediction. It is a lens, not a validated treatment. What you are actually doing here is a written behavioral experiment.
CourageLoop is a notebook with arithmetic. It is not a therapist, not a treatment, and not a substitute for one. If you are in crisis, use the resources below.
Protocol — Panic
ProtocolPanic presents on floor 3 (the verdicts: heart attack, suffocation, madness, public collapse), runs its engine on floor 7's ordinary noise, takes its orders from floor 2 (a body-scanning policy), executes on floor 5 (escape and a growing armor kit), is sometimes ignited from floor 6 (the first attack itself, or the family's cardiac story), sits in floor-8 water where bodies were emergencies — and the treatment follows the building, not the complaint.
Protocol — Social Anxiety
ProtocolSocial anxiety presents on floor 3 (the verdicts: defective, boring, visibly weak), runs its engine on floors 5 and 2 (the armor loop, governed by an inward-facing camera and a post-mortem policy), is usually ignited from floor 6 (a humiliation scene, a critical house), sits in floor-8 water (worth priced in performance and likability), and is worn on the rank dial — and the treatment follows the building, not the complaint.
Protocol — PTSD
ProtocolPTSD presents on every floor at once — floor 7's body alarms, floor 3's verdicts about the world and the self, floor 5's avoidance armor, floor 2's hypervigilant scanning and circling, floor 4's broken templates, floor 1's annexed identity — but the engine is a floor-6 trace stored raw and timestamped NOW; it sits in floor-8 water that silences or blames, and it taxes every dial at once — and the treatment follows the building down to floor 6, in that order, because in this riser Phase 6 is not a contingency: it is the destination, and everything before it is the road.
Protocol — OCD
ProtocolOCD presents on floor 3 as emergencies (contamination, harm, blasphemy, error, wrongness), but the fault is at floor 2's gate — mind-noise read as message, tried under a responsibility charter — executes on floor 5 (rituals overt and mental, and a household recruited into accommodation), is sometimes ignited from floor 6 (the blamed child, the scrupulous house, the coincidence that convicted), sits in floor-8 water (purity codes, doctrine, certainty-worship), and is worn on the mattering dial's moral edge — and the treatment follows the building, not the content.
Protocol — Worry (GAD)
ProtocolWorry presents on floor 3 as an endless docket of verdicts-in-waiting (the crash, the diagnosis, the layoff, the child unaccounted for), but it lives on floor 2 — a simulation-and-monitoring policy with a written charter — runs its engine on floor 5 (checking, reassurance, over-planning, the 3 a.m. list), keeps floor 7 at battle stations for years (tension, jaw, gut, sleep), is often ignited from floor 6 (the house where the child kept the watch), sits in floor-8 water where worry is priced as love and preparedness as virtue, and is worn on the mattering dial's caretaker edge — and the treatment follows the building, which in this riser means floor 2 is nearly the whole building.
Protocol — Depression
ProtocolDepression presents on floor 3 (the verdicts: worthless, hopeless, pointless), runs its engine on floors 5 and 2 (the shutdown loop, governed by a rumination policy), starves the body on floor 7 (sleep first), is often ignited from floor 6 (a loss, a defeat, a humiliation — or an old forecast that reaching makes it worse), sits in floor-8 water (worth priced in productivity), and is worn on the mattering dial — and the treatment follows the building, not the complaint.
Protocol — Insomnia
ProtocolInsomnia presents on floor 7 (the body that won't stand down), but runs on floor 5 (a bed re-taught as a battle station, and armor that dilutes the very sleep pressure it protects) and floor 2 (a monitoring-and-effort policy aimed at sleep itself), is priced by floor-3 verdicts about ruined tomorrows, is often ignited from floor 6 (the stretch of nights that started it), sits in floor-8 water that prices sleep as either weakness or a performance metric, and is frequently another riser's floor 7 in flames — and the treatment follows the building, not the complaint.
Protocol — Health Anxiety
ProtocolHealth anxiety presents on floor 3, runs its engine on floor 7, takes its orders from floor 2, executes on floor 5, is sometimes ignited from floor 6 or poured in floor-8 water — and the treatment sequence follows the building, not the complaint.
Protocol — Chronic Pain
ProtocolChronic pain presents as floor 7 and is floor 7 — but the engine is a forecast, not a damage report: a protection verdict issued at maximal precision from minimal signal, held in place by floor 3's fragility sentences, enforced by floor 5's guarding armor, patrolled by floor 2's flare-forecasting sentry, soaked in floor-8 water that equates hurt with harm — and the treatment closes the medical file once, honestly, and then re-addresses the forecast, because this is the one riser in the drawer where the model's central claim is true all the way down to the tissue.
Protocol — Addiction
ProtocolAddiction presents as floor 5 behavior, but the engine is a floor-6 procedure — a relief move trained to reflex — running on floor 7's alarm chemistry, defended by floor 3's verdicts (I can't cope without it; I'm broken anyway), concealed by floor 4's templates, soaked in floor-8 water that both markets the substance and damns the user — and the treatment interrupts the procedure while re-addressing the forecast that runs it, because the craving is a prediction, and predictions update from evidence, not argument.
Protocol — Prolonged Grief
ProtocolProlonged grief presents as sorrow that will not move, but the engine is floor 4 — a relational template still issuing predictions for a person the world no longer contains — kept unrevised by floor 5's twin armors (avoidance of the absence, and ritual proximity to the presence), policed by floor 2's betrayal gatekeeper (updating is abandoning), narrated by floor 1 as a story that cannot be told to its end, in floor-8 water that schedules mourning and then punishes both the fast and the slow — and the treatment lets the template meet the evidence at a survivable dose until the forecast revises, which is not forgetting; it is filing.
The self-story presents as a floor-1 verdict (not enough — defective, unlovable, less-than) enforcing floor-3 sentences daily, defended by floor-5 treaties (the rules for living: perform, please, hide), prosecuted by a floor-2 officer (the inner critic as policy), cast through floor-4 templates (a supporting cast selected to confirm it), usually written on floor 6 (the scenes where a child concluded correctly from terrible data), soaked in floor-8 water (meritocracy, comparison feeds, the family's worth-currency), and taxing both dials at once — and the treatment follows the building, from the oldest floor down.
Rank-Reactive Mood Instability
Clinical noteRank-Reactive Mood Instability