At a Glance
Feeling behind in life often comes from deeper emotional patterns like defectiveness, unrelenting standards, or self-sacrifice that fuels harsh self-criticism and low resilience. Schema Therapy helps you understand and challenge this inner critic, while Compassion-Focused Therapy teaches you to respond with steadiness and self-kindness. Small grounding practices can gently shift you out of fear and comparison. Dr McPhee supports adults struggling with these patterns and offers a free 15-minute consultation.
Believe That You Are Enough
Have you ever met a roadblock in life, such as a missed promotion or a breakup, a dream that didn’t unfold the way you hoped and instead of moving ahead, you turned inward with harshness? Perhaps you told yourself, “I deserve it” and “I am unworthy of love or success”?
Do you feel as though you are falling behind when you compare yourself to your childhood friends, colleagues or even a stranger on the internet? It’s important to remember that everyone’s path is shaped by different circumstances, opportunities and challenges. Your timeline is not meant to look like anyone else’s.
Self-critical thoughts can pull you down and often make you feel worse than before. Being unkind to yourself doesn’t motivate growth or help the situation. Rather it can prevent you from moving forward. The inner critic might believe it is protecting you, but in reality it often causes deeper harm contributing to anxiety, depression, shame and low self-esteem.
Hello, I’m Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, Chartered Clinical Psychologist and Advanced Schema Therapist. In this blog, I talk about a quiet pain many people carry, the sense of falling behind in life. On the surface, this feeling might look like comparison, frustration or disappointment. But underneath, it is often about something deeper and more tender, your sense of worth and your ability to treat yourself with kindness and compassion.
The Feeling of Not Being Enough
When we feel left behind, what is often stirred is not the situation itself, but the emotional meaning attached to it. For many people, this links to the Defectiveness/Shame Schema, the long-standing belief of being not good enough, flawed, or fundamentally lacking in some way.
This schema forms early on in life, often in environments where warmth, validation, or unconditional acceptance were limited. Instead of learning that you were valued simply for being who you are, you learned that your worth was something to be earned.
And so, life can easily become something you strive through, rather than something you inhabit. A performance rather than a presence.
The Drive to Try Harder and Do More
When the defectiveness schema is present, it often pairs with another pattern, the Unrelenting Standards Schema. This is the internal drive that says you must achieve, produce, improve, or excel to be acceptable. These self-critical thoughts can make accomplishments feel fleeting and rest feel unsafe. Even in moments of success, the mind quietly whispers you should be doing more.
The inner critic may help make it seem like you’re living the perfect life to others, but you end up struggling internally. This is because, from the outside, someone living with unrelenting standards may appear strong, motivated, and capable. But internally, there may be exhaustion, anxiety, loneliness, and a quiet sense that the goalposts keep moving.
The drive is not ambition. It is fear. Fear of slowing. Fear of failing. Fear of being ordinary. Fear of being seen and found lacking.
When You Have Been the One Who Holds Everything for Others
For some people, the feeling of being behind does not come from striving, but from giving away energy, time, and emotional care to others. This is often linked to the Self-Sacrifice or Subjugation Schemas. You may have grown up in a family or environment where your role was to support others, to meet needs rather than express your own, to be the steady one or the strong one, and you may have ended up forgetting how to be nice to yourself.
In those circumstances, your own development and needs may have had to wait, leading to low emotional resilience.
So, when others seem to be progressing in life, building careers, relationships, or identities, you may feel as though you have been left behind. But you were not idle. You were holding the emotional weight of everything around you. That labour is real. And it comes at a cost.
Working with the Inner Critic in Schema Therapy
The feeling of falling behind often activates the Inner Critic Mode. This is the part that evaluates, judges, and compares. The inner critic is based on the belief that it is protecting you from rejection, failure, or shame. But its tone is often harsh and unforgiving.
In Schema Therapy, to deal with your inner critic and the self-critical thoughts, we strengthen your Healthy Adult Mode, the part of you that can see your experience with steadiness, nuance, and care. The Healthy Adult mode can acknowledge the criticism without collapsing under it. It can say:
“I understand why you are pushing me. But I do not need to be spoken to like this anymore.”
Rather than being unkind to yourself, this is the part of you that can meet yourself rather than abandon yourself.
Where Compassion-Focused Therapy Supports the Healing
Once the Healthy Adult begins to take shape, we bring in Compassion-Focused Mind training to soften the emotional tone inside. We learn to speak to ourselves in a way that calms the nervous system and silences the self-critical thoughts. Compassion does not mean indulgence or avoidance. It means safety and being nice to yourself. It means giving your nervous system permission to stop bracing for failure or rejection.
This is not about learning how to feel confident. It is about remembering that you were never required to earn your worth.
A Gentle Practice for Moments When You Feel Behind
When the sense of falling behind shows up, the aim isn’t to convince yourself otherwise, but to meet the feeling with steadiness. You might place a hand on your chest or your abdomen and allow your breath to slow just slightly, with the out-breath a little longer than the in-breath. This helps the nervous system shift out of urgency and into a state where reflection is possible.
You can also name quietly to yourself what is happening: “I notice the part of me that is scared of not being enough,” or “This is the part that has worked so hard to keep me safe.” Naming the moment often softens the impact.
Small steps such as pausing for 30 seconds before pushing yourself, choosing one meaningful task rather than all of them, or checking in with how your body is feeling before deciding can help you return to your Healthy Adult mode, where decisions are made from clarity rather than comparison or pressure. Healing doesn’t require large acts of self-compassion, it begins with gradual, consistent moments of meeting yourself with respect.
If You Would Like Support
Schema Therapy helps us understand these self-critical thoughts and patterns as adaptations, not flaws. It supports you in strengthening your Healthy Adult mode, the part of you that responds to your emotional world with steadiness and care. Compassion-Focused Therapy then helps create an internal environment where you feel safe enough to soften, rest, and move forward from a place of inner stability rather than urgency.
I am Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with advanced postdoctoral training in Compassion-Focused Therapy and an ISST Accredited Advanced Schema Therapist. I support adults who experience low emotional resilience and self-worth, emotional exhaustion, comparison, and the quiet pain of feeling they should be further along in life.
I offer therapy online across the UK and in person in Petersfield, Hampshire.
If you resonated with something in this blog, you are welcome to reach out for a 15-minute free consultation to see if we are a good fit. Call or email me to book an appointment.