I’ve alluded in previous posts to the misleadingly reductionist methods promoted by self-transformation gurus. In a recent article on the science website Big Think, Jason Gots (Full Disclosure: he’s my nephew) makes a similar point about the process of personal growth. I hope my recent meditation chronicles have also shown that it takes hard work to eliminate bad habits, adopt better ones, and rewire the brain.

Even the research tested, cognitive-behavioral treatment protocols—which in countless studies have proven to ameliorate complex psychiatric syndromes, such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, insomnia, and attention deficit disorder, to name just a few—have their limitations when it comes to real world applications.

Why? Because the manuals presume an ideal situation in which life and people don’t muddy the pure, scientifically controlled waters.

In reality—that is, in settings like my office where clinicians see real people with complex problems and complicated lives, not carefully screened research subjects who get eliminated from clinical trials if they don’t precisely fit the study criteria, miss appointments or fail to comply with the treatment regimen—change just isn’t as straightforward as the books would have us believe.

One of the challenges I face as a clinician is managing expectations. If, from the outset, I don’t help patients anticipate the difficulties they may encounter with the therapy (and sometimes even when I do), they may get frustrated and end the treatment before they’ve given it a fair chance. I partly blame the self-help movement on causing some people—particularly many of the perfectionists I see, who tend to view the process of change through an all-or-nothing lens—to give up too soon when the results they envision aren’t as immediately forthcoming as they’d hoped.

I don’t mean to sound overly pessimistic about personal growth. If I believed that modifying the ways we think and behave were unreasonable goals, I’d be in the wrong line of work. But expecting an instruction manual to magically transform your life without requiring you to make a long-term investment of time, energy, and honest self-reflection amounts to believing in, well, magic.