>>58621>it's kind of a fatalistic view on the whole thing attributing the cause of real change to unnkown forces. I think it's useful to acknowledge that no modality has understood psychological change, otherwise they'd be able to maximize it beyond every other one and there would a clear winner statistically. People do happen to change, even in therapy, it's just that it's completely random and has very little to do with the methodology itself. The funny thing is that even modalities that do the opposite things, produce the same outcome, meaning that they are so far off the mark that it doesn't really matter what they do at all, people will change but not consciously and deliberately.
The thing that all them have in common is that beyond their supposed elegant theory of change, in practice, change always boils down to brute-force. At some point, a person reaches an impenetrable wall of their psyche and they are forced to hit their head against it. This usually means suppression and dissociation from symptoms. For instance, in CBT, the idea is that rational arguments is what is needed for people to change their irrational beliefs (the cause of disturbances), yet in practice, it's never as elegant as someone following and accepting a rational argument, usually requiring the person months of so-called "practice" for them to actually accept the belief (or rather, work on suppressing the symptom long enough to appear as if change happened).
The change you describe is the change on the level of behavior. Certain approaches focus entirely on that, but as you've noticed, it's very shallow change. One could train oneself to act contrary to one's emotions and instincts, suppressing and dissociating from them and working on producing the "correct" behavior. Yet this shallow change is never permanent because it requires constant effort and maintenance, continually fighting against oneself, as such it's usually not sustainable in the long run.
Genuine psychological change, what some would call "transformational change" is very different. The markers of such change are symptom cessation, non-reactivation and effortless permanence. Meaning: symptoms disappear, can no longer be re-activated by usual triggers and the change persists without effort. Such markers indicate a change on a deeper level i.e. a klepto no l
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