Years ago, when I was doing hypnotherapy at the wellness centre, a client sat down and told me something that didn’t quite add up.
They were working harder than they’d ever worked. Long hours. Real discipline. Genuine effort toward a goal they cared about.
And almost nothing was moving.
Not laziness. Not lack of commitment. I could see the effort — it was written all over them. But the results simply weren’t showing up to match it.
I remember saying, almost without planning the words: “It sounds like your poor self-esteem is holding you back. In a way, it’s like stepping on the gas while your foot is firmly planted on the brake.”
Their eyes went wide.
They sat there for a moment. Then: “Oh my goodness. That’s so true. I had never thought of it that way.”
I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Not because the observation was particularly clever — I hadn’t studied anything to arrive at it, I’d simply watched enough people in that chair to recognize the pattern. Effort with nowhere to go usually isn’t about willpower. Something underneath is holding the line, even while the person above it is pushing as hard as they know how.
What struck me, then and now, is how much more that metaphor did than a plain explanation ever could have. I could have said, “I think low self-esteem might be limiting your progress.” True enough. But it would have landed as an idea to consider, turned over, maybe argued with. The gas-and-brake image did something different. It didn’t ask to be believed. It simply became visible. You don’t argue with something you can suddenly see.
I’ve found that to be true repeatedly in this work. A well-placed metaphor can do in one sentence what an explanation can’t do in ten — not because it’s more accurate, but because it bypasses the part of us that’s ready to defend against being told what’s wrong with us.
Years later, I came across research that gave that old metaphor a physiology I never had at the time. Nervous system researchers describe something close to exactly what I’d been watching in that room: a state where the accelerator and the brake are both engaged at once. The alarm system fully on, ready to move — and an older, deeper system clamped down over the top of it, conserving effort the body has decided it can’t afford to spend. Exhausted and wired, simultaneously, for reasons that have nothing to do with character.
I hadn’t read any of that when I sat across from my client. I’d simply seen enough people caught in that exact bind to recognize it by feel. It turns out the feel was accurate.
What the research adds, that I didn’t fully have language for at the time, is this: you can’t talk your way out of that state, and you can’t simply rest your way out of it either. The nervous system doesn’t jump from stuck to calm. It has to move through activation first — however small — before it can settle. Which may be part of why the metaphor worked better than the diagnosis. My client didn’t need me to explain the brake. They needed something that let them recognize it, so they could start, in whatever small way, to ease off it.
I don’t know exactly what shifted for that client after that afternoon. But I remember the look on their face, and I remember it wasn’t shame. It was recognition. There’s a real difference between those two.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. So often, what looks like a lack of effort, or a lack of discipline, or a lack of caring enough, is actually a person pressing the gas as hard as they can — while something underneath, usually built long before we ever met them, keeps a foot on the brake.
Self-esteem work, at its best, isn’t about pushing harder.
It’s about finding the brake.