> I say it can be tricky, because I never want to see them do harm to themselves or others, but what they’re doing might have potential to do that. It is trick

> I say it can be tricky, because I never want to see them do harm to themselves or others, but what they’re doing might have potential to do that. It is tricky, because the person can be aware you are aware of this, as you are trying to help. They may have been aware of it the whole time. And with every attempt to 'fix' the issue, the problem just gets reinvented. I say fix as in 'direct, require, guide with an expectation, approve'. Because that's what a person with a problem keeps doing. Over and over. And they eventually come to realize the way you see things. They could potentially be still hurting others or themselves. Over and over. But it can't be helped sometimes. You can try to control every detail and there's still that little room for improvement. Eventually it comes down to minutia - obsession with things that really have no relevance to the overall problem. The problem has instead turned into a dynamic of leading and following - one has to be right, the other has to approve of the information given by being 'fixed'. And that's sometimes enough for a person to just want to constantly go 'fuck it', because it's completely ignorant to all the positives - both from the help you've provided, and the improvement they've made. And if you let them see that you've been helped in the process too, that's validating for them and that's validating to you too. If you don't understand their problem in entirety, you have no goalpost to define for them. And the problem might be that they just want to accept themselves without the identity of 'having a problem'. But they just might not have figured out the words to say that yet, or they may be afraid of letting go of that identity because what if bad things happen the way they've come to expect? They may have both awareness - that they need to let go of the identity of having a perpetual problem, but also, some of those fears go very deep, and it's not so much that 'having a problem' is an excuse, it's more that, they've had shitty experiences, and the past can't be rewritten. It takes time to heal, accept the past for what it is, and be able to persist through the present while letting go of whatever fears they have. A lot of people with 'a problem' blame themselves. By trying to fix it for them, it doesn't allow them to see they can fix their own problems. Thank you for your reply as well!