Hello,
Imagine you are a tree with a trunk and lot of branches and twigs.
(This is a willow in our garden)
Imagine, each branch and twig is a kind of behavior from you.
You like the most oft them. They make you what you are. You are an individual.
But some of them are in the way. Always when you get into a special situation, you act in a way, that you actually don't want. It is a behavior, you want to get rid of.
Imagine this behavior is a small twig.
You can tear it down and you rip a small wound into your bark.
Next year the wound has disappeared, none can even remember that you have changed.
But what is with bigger branches. You cannot bunk them off.
Sometimes, by accident, you get into a new situation and you have to get used to it. This is often a hurting event. Maybe you lose an important person or job or you change your location. Then a big wound is cut into your stem. It takes many years to close.
If the wound is too big, it cannot close anymore. Water gets into the trunk and the wood starts to rotten.
What I mean with this allegory is: Maybe you can change a small behavior.
Maybe, when you have good friends which tell you, what kind of behavior is not good, you can see some twigs, which are not good for you and you can rip off that twig.
But you cannot bunk off bigger branches. You cannot change properties of yourself, that are deep inside of you.
You have trained some behavior, when you were a baby. It is so deep inside of you, that it is a part of yourself.
If you would try to change it, you would end like this:
But that's not the point of this story. The point is: It is even very hard to change yourself. It is nearly impossible to change someone else.
Regards, Achim