As we will see, a few approaches to counseling and psychotherapy preserve, to some extent, the traditionally passive role of the patient. Most of them, however, require a good deal of initiative and just plain hard work on the part of the patient or client.
In building the house of one's life or in its remodeling, one may delegate nothing; for the task can be done, if at all, only in the workshop of one's own mind and heart, in the most intimate rooms of thinking and feeling where none but one's self has freedom of movement or competence or authority. The responsibility lies with him who suffers, originates with him, remains with him to the end. It will be no less his if he enlists the aid of a therapist; we are no more the product of our therapist than of our genes; we create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change. The one who suffers, who wants to change, must bear responsibility all the way. "Must" because so soon as responsibility is ascribed [outside oneself] the forces resisting change occupy the whole of one's being, and the process of change comes to a halt. A psychiatrist may help, perhaps crucially, but his best help will be of no avail if he is required to provide a degree of insight which will of itself achieve change.[[3]]
[[3]] Wheelis, How People Change, pp. 101-102.
WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED?
For better or for worse, human nature is a many-splendored thing. It doesn't take an advanced degree in psychotherapy to know that people can have many different kinds of personal problems. This fact, if we appreciate it fully, makes more understandable why there are so many alternative approaches to helping people with their difficulties.
In the world of theory, a model is a simplified representation of reality. Your checking account record is a model, in just this sense, of how many real dollars and cents you have in the bank.
Here is a much simplified model that represents five main psychological, emotion-laden dimensions of a person:
