Most people arrive in therapy able to describe their inner critic in vivid detail. It has a tone. It has favourite phrases. It tends to get loudest at particular times — before sleep, after a social event, the moment before you try something new.

What surprises people is the suggestion that this voice started out as protection. Somewhere earlier in your life, being hard on yourself first was safer than being caught out. If you noticed every flaw before anyone else could, you stayed one step ahead. If you kept your expectations low, disappointment couldn’t knock you down.

The inner critic learned that keeping you small kept you safe. It has never been told the danger has passed.

Why arguing with it doesn’t work

When the critic says “you’re not good enough,” the instinct is to fight back with evidence: the qualifications, the people who value you, the things you’ve managed. It rarely helps for long. The critic isn’t really making an argument — it’s expressing fear. You can’t reason someone out of a feeling they were never reasoned into.

What tends to shift things is a change of relationship rather than a change of content. Instead of “is this true or false,” we get curious: how old does this voice sound? Whose words are these, originally? What is it afraid will happen if it stops?

What we do instead, in sessions

• Notice the critic as a separate voice, not the whole of you — “a part of me thinks…” rather than “I am…”
• Trace a few of its lines back to where they were first said, and by whom.
• Practise responding the way you would to a frightened friend: acknowledging the worry without obeying it.
• Let the kinder, steadier voice get some practice too. It’s usually underused.

None of this makes the critic vanish. The aim is smaller and more durable: it stops being the only voice in the room, and you stop taking every word as fact.

“Taking up space” can sound like a slogan — something that should involve being louder, bolder, more visible. For a lot of the people I work with, that framing is exhausting rather than freeing. It becomes one more performance to get right.

In practice, it usually looks like this:

• Saying “actually, I’d prefer…” and not immediately softening it into nothing.
• Letting a pause sit in a conversation instead of rushing to fill it.
• Not apologising for asking a question, needing a break, or existing in a room.
• Noticing when you’ve made yourself the manager of everyone else’s comfort — and putting some of that down.

You are allowed to be a person other people have to make room for, rather than the one always making room.

Where the shrinking came from

If you learned early that being smaller, easier, and less demanding kept the peace — at home, at school, in systems that weren’t built with you in mind — then shrinking isn’t a flaw. It was a skill. It worked. The work now is noticing that you’re still doing it in rooms where it costs you more than it protects you.

We go slowly with this. Expanding into space you’ve spent years staying out of can feel like too much at first. That’s not a sign to stop — it’s a sign to be gentle about the pace.

Sometimes the idea of starting therapy is its own hurdle — one more thing to organise, one more thing to be ready for. If you’re somewhere before that point, here are a few small practices that don’t require you to have any of it worked out.

Name the feeling without fixing it

Once a day, put words to what you’re feeling — “I’m anxious,” “I’m flat,” “I’m tired in a way sleep won’t fix.” You don’t have to do anything about it. Naming alone lowers the volume slightly.

Lower one bar

Pick one thing you do to a standard nobody asked for, and let it be adequate this week. The email that doesn’t need three rewrites. The dinner that’s just toast.

Self-compassion isn’t a reward for getting better. It’s part of how getting better happens.

Borrow a kinder voice

When you catch the harsh commentary starting, ask what you’d say to a friend in the same position. You don’t have to believe the kinder version yet. Just try it on.

If and when you do want to talk to someone, a free 15-minute consultation is a low-stakes place to start — no commitment to book anything after.

Before the first full session there’s a free 15-minute consultation — a short video call to get a feel for whether we’re a good fit. You can ask anything. There’s no obligation to book after it.

The first session itself

We meet online, by video. I’ll usually start by asking what brought you here now — not your whole history, just what’s been sitting with you lately. You lead. If something feels too big to go into yet, we leave it for another time.

Some of the first session is practical: how we’ll work together, confidentiality and its limits, what happens if you need to cancel, how often we might meet. The rest is simply beginning to talk, at whatever pace feels manageable.

You don’t need to arrive with it organised. “I’m not sure where to start” is a completely normal place to start.

What you don’t have to do

• You don’t have to cry, or perform distress, for it to count.
• You don’t have to have a diagnosis or the right words.
• You don’t have to commit to months of work — we review how it’s going together, regularly.

Mostly, the first session is about finding out whether this feels like a room you can be honest in. That’s the only thing it really needs to establish.

A lot of us are carrying a rule we never chose: rest has to be justified. You can sit down once the list is clear, once you’ve been useful enough, once nobody could accuse you of slacking. The list is never clear. So the rest never quite arrives, and when it does it’s shadowed by guilt.

You are allowed to rest because you are tired. That is the whole reason. It was always enough.

Where the rule came from

If your worth got measured in output early on — at home, at school, in a culture that prizes grind — then stopping can feel genuinely unsafe, like you’re about to be found out. That’s worth taking seriously rather than pushing through.

A smaller experiment

Once this week, rest before the list is done. Ten minutes, deliberately, with nothing to show for it. Notice what the internal voice says — and treat that as information about an old rule, not a verdict on you.