That doesn't mean that doing so is easy. It is hard to see your own areas of weakness, to see the possibility for changing what you have accepted as "just the way it is," and to see when you're focusing on the parts of the problem that are hardest to change. You are the expert on your current life and mind, but you may not ask the right questions, or see the full possibilities for your life and mind to be operate differently. This is why individuals seek help from a psychotherapist, or other consultant. This is why couples counseling can start with individual sessions, or at least start with an orientation that a relationship includes individual wishes, attitudes, ideas, histories, and desires combined in a larger pattern of communication, coordination, and commitment.
Whether the pattern we are hoping to change is a personal habit of thoughts, feelings, or actions, or something socially larger like a marriage, family, organization or community, it's much easier to change a system that we're participating in. In fact we'll, do a better job of selecting the appropriate direction and tools for change when we know the territory and the resources and can harness healthy forces already in play.
Here again, though, we may get caught up in problematic patterns of relating and have trouble seeing other perspectives and other options. This again is where a consultant, coach, therapist, organizer, or friend could play a role. Inviting such a person to join the system temporarily, as a participant-observer, may help you find unexamined, stuck, problematic patterns of power and communication and decisionmaking and transmission of gossip and incorrect perceptions, and contagious self-serving behavior.
With help, you can find these stuck places, in which small changes that could make a difference. Partnering with a clinician can help you unstuck.
The kind of partner you make a long term commitment to, may join you in the stuck pattern, get invested in things not changing too much, and lose the ability to see the pattern from the outside. Usually, then, after the process of building understanding and then facilitating change in the patterns of relating and coping, this consulting or therapy partnership can end.
I'd like to comment on Jim's entry of Wednesday, November 13, 2013, entitled "Partners in Change", from the perspective of a philosophy professor. Jim's a professional counselor -- I am not! But I wish to add an element to what he's written here; he notes that change is not easy, and that it "is hard to see your own areas of weakness, to see the possibility for changing what you have accepted as 'just the way it is,'. This is true, but I would argue that there is a further reason that it is diffult for people to change, even when that change is vitally needed -- such as when they are engaging in self-destructive behaviours. As I teach in my philosophy classes, change can mean for many people a loss of identity, and loss of identity is one of the most terrifying aspects of human existence. Indeed, our fear of death can in some sense be seen as a fear of loss -- the ultimate loss -- of identity. So, people cling to their identities dearly; that identity might be based on gender, race, ethnicity, profession, or even political affiliation. Even pathologies can be a source of identity. Changing, and thus modifying or even giving up a prior identity, can cause existential anxiety of the highest order. But sometimes, of course, this is exactly what is needed to address self-destructive behaviour, or, as Jim discusses here, to address "problematic patterns of relating..."
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