and... my gunnery sucks..
Regarding shooting; it is more psychological than technical when you have the Yips. it is analogous to driving a car or motorcycle through fast, sweeping bends. Although there is a temporal decoupling in that you are driving to a point you already saw some time ago and are now looking through the subsequent curves, if you’ve preloaded your consciousness properly then a good driver can put the edge of his tyre within an inch of the apex, reliably at 60-m.p.h. say. That's extraordinary when you think about it.
The inverse is similarly true: hence the phenomenon of hitting a grid or man-hole cover on a wet road: if your consciousness is pre-loaded, ‘fixated’ with that then you will converge right to it even though you know logically it is a bad idea.
With aerial gunnery if you’ve become convinced you have bad gunnery then your subconsciousness will certainly help support your fixation. In archery they call this gold-shy. If you think you will miss you will to the point where some archers struggle to even aim at the gold (it’s yellow, but yellow shy-sounds like some executive relief game they play in Amsterdam on a Friday night for €146/hour).
I have an exercise for you. Next time you’ve found a fair fight, employed superior ACM to a high standard and have earned a nice, honest, no-pick shot opportunity, I want you to make your preparations as you normally would with the caveat that just a few moments (let’s say seven, not three) before you actually fire you close your eyes and squeeze the trigger calmly.
So in other words you’ve lined up your shot, your gunsight is converging to the point or path in space you know is correct, you are peripherally tracking your target flying into that point / path, you can and you see or feel a shooting solution unfolding, relax knowing you've done all the work diligently, close your eyes and squeeze the trigger when you feel is appropriate. Afterwards have a look what happened. You have nothing at all to lose since the method you're employing now is not working. Get rid of expectations.
There’s a second stage to this exercise involving sports Psychology including an explanation of how this comes to be but just go and give this a try for a week and let me know. I think you might find the experience interesting.
