Have you ever felt that your own inner critic is the very thing holding you back?

I know I have.

A few weeks ago, after a session that really stayed with me, I found myself wanting to write about self-sabotage.

The idea felt clear.

And yet, I didn’t write it.

Days passed. Then weeks.

Every time I sat down to begin, I found a reason not to.

No one will read it.
What will people think of a therapist who admits this?
It’s not good enough yet.

The more I tried to push myself to write, the more stuck I became, caught between what I thought I should be able to do and what was actually happening for me in that moment.

And this is often how self-sabotage shows up.

Not as something obvious or dramatic.

But as a quiet pulling away from the very thing we want.

It made me think of a client I’d seen recently.

He had done well on an assignment, objectively well, and yet he couldn’t stop picking it apart.

Rewriting.

Doubting.

Tightening.

The voice in his head didn’t let him land anywhere.

When we slowed things down, we didn’t try to silence that voice.

We listened to it.

Where had it come from?
What had it needed to do in the past?

And slowly, something important emerged.

That voice hadn’t appeared out of nowhere.

It had helped him.

It had pushed him through school, supported him to achieve, kept him going in an environment where he had to work harder than others because of his neurodiversity. often learning to adapt himself to spaces that weren’t quite shaped for him.

It made sense.

And at the same time… it wasn’t helping him anymore.

There’s something difficult about that moment.

When you realise that the very thing that once supported you is now the thing holding you back.

Because the instinct is to get rid of it.

To push harder. Be stricter. Do better.

But that often recreates the same dynamic in a different form.

What shifted for both of us, in very different ways, wasn’t effort.

It was something quieter.

Letting the experience be there without immediately trying to change it.

For him, it meant noticing the voice without obeying it.

For me, it meant allowing myself to sit in front of a blank page without forcing myself to be anything other than where I was.

Not eloquent. Not insightful. Just… there.

There’s a paradox in that.

The more we try to become something we are not, the more we lose contact with who we are.

And without that contact, there’s nothing to shift.

But when we allow ourselves to be exactly where we are, even if that place feels stuck, unsafe, or frustrating, something begins to move.

Not always in big or visible ways.

But enough.

I didn’t write this because I suddenly became disciplined or inspired.

I wrote it because I stopped trying to be the version of myself who “writes well”.

And allowed myself to be the one who, at that moment, couldn’t.

If you recognise yourself in this, in the stopping, the pulling away, the quiet self-doubt, you might not need to push harder.

You might just need to pause long enough to notice what’s happening.

What is that part of you trying to do?

What has it needed to do, in the past?

And what happens if, instead of fighting it, you stay with it for a moment?

There’s something relieving in that.

Not fixing.

Not improving.

Just noticing.

And sometimes, that’s where change begins.

If this resonates, it might be something worth exploring in therapy, at your own pace.

Marta Carbajo Gutiérrez is a UKCP-accredited Gestalt psychotherapist working with individuals and groups in London and online. You can find out more about her way of thinking on her substack at Kintsugi Mind.