Knowing the problem and not fixing it

I'm a CBT therapist in Krakow and the foundational assumption of cognitive behavioural therapy is that changing thought patterns produces behavioural change. After ten years in practice I believe this is often true and I also know it is not always true, and the gap between those two things is where my fiction comes from. The characters I write understand themselves completely. They have named their patterns. They know their triggers. They have done the work, in some cases literally, and they continue to behave in ways they would not recommend to anyone they loved. I find this more true and more interesting than the arc in which self-knowledge reliably produces change. It's not the arc that therapy promises. It's the terrain that therapy actually covers. I live near the Wawel and write on Saturday mornings. The psychological drama I'm writing follows three characters across a year of therapy with the same therapist, alternating perspectives. It is not a portrait of therapy as a process. The therapy is the setting. The novel is about what happens in the hours when they aren't in the room. I've been working on it for three years and I believe it is almost right. The character whose perspective I find hardest to write is the one I understand best, which seems like meaningful information.