[2] Allen Wheelis, _How People Change_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 101, 107. Therapy involves a three-fold relationship among a helping professional, the approach to therapy used by him or her, and, what is most important, the outlook of the individual client. In this book we will examine each of these three dimensions of therapy in some detail, but here we will concentrate on the one therapists generally agree is the most important: you--the kind of person you are, what your attitudes and outlook are, and, of course, how much you really want to develop or change. Your attitudes will determine, probably more than anything else, what variety of therapy you will most benefit from. Therapists, like teachers (which they really are), find that their clients or patients can be divided into two groups: active and passive learners. When you go to a doctor with a broken arm, your relationship to your doctor is a _passive_ one: you need only to cooperate as he examines your arm, perhaps administers an anesthetic, and sets the break. You may take medication for pain, and then you simply _wait_ until, thanks to the body's automatic healing processes, the break is fused. The public's conception of medicine is predominately a passive one. To be a "patient" is for the most part to be a passive bystander: the physician is the active agent who brings about healing. There are occasional {25} exceptions--for example, physical therapy and rehabilitation therapy after a serious injury or illness, when the patient must become more active and accept more responsibility. 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]