I saw my therapist twice with 9 years in between and was shocked she changed/grew just like I did :-) Actually she was better at it. We got into the "same" arguments in the second series of seeing her and it was her responses which provided the way out of our painted-into-a-corner-same-responses-as-before conundrum. I realized then that I had been "too close"/limited in my perceptions of the ongoing process and what I wanted/expected.

I decided I wasn't a very good judge/jury of another's processes; if you don't know what a smile is, how to smile, how smiling "works", the modelling by another might look a lot like a grimace?