I think change always happens slowly. Watching shows like Intervention and Biggest Loser, etc. we get the idea it should happen in an hour a week

I think anyone who wants to and works at changing will. It is mostly not having been trained in skills needed to make a change, being ignorant about how to go about it. So it can take some time to learn to observe and then learn to know what to do about what one observes, etc. That's why I think therapy was so helpful for me; there was someone else pointing out things that I could do, different ways to think about a problem, and how to better move forward.

When we're growing up we get a certain education. Often we learn poor coping skills or no skills of a certain sort of all so later we have to replace the poor skills with better ones and learn a bunch of other ones that we had no teachers to teach us about before. It's an educational thing to me, not a personality or fault problem. No one else can know what another individual might need growing up and parents do/do not do the best they can with their own parenting problems and an individual takes what one can and protects self against the rest and gets to a certain age where it's possible to take stock and rearrange a bit, jettison some stuff and add more, better stuff in its place.