I do not know exactly when my journey westward began.
It was not a decision made at a desk, with a precise date marked on the calendar.
It was more an accumulation of moments: those evenings when, after having done “everything right” for weeks, I found myself again inside an old pattern.
As if someone inside me had rewound the tape to the beginning without asking my permission.
I have always wondered why people notice relapses more than progress.
Why, after ten steps forward, attention sticks to that single step back, as if it erased everything else.
Why one “bad” evening can make you forget weeks of practice, discipline, self‑care.
At first I thought it was just my problem.
Then I started seeing it everywhere.
I see it in the person who has stopped smoking and, after a cigarette in a moment of stress, says: “I ruined everything.”
I see it in someone who has been working on themselves for months, then explodes once and concludes: “I have not changed at all.”
I see it in someone who changes their diet to feel better and, after a week of paying attention, crushes themselves with guilt over one extra pizza.
It is as if the brain took a magnifying glass and pointed it only at the moments when “you are not enough”, while everything else fades into the background.
For years, the answer I kept hearing was always the same:
“You lack willpower.”
“If you really wanted it, you would not relapse.”
Or the holistic‑new age version: “You attracted this.”
I believed this story for a long time.
I built guilt, improvement plans, and to‑do lists on top of it, all meant to make me “more disciplined”.
At a certain point in my life, however, this explanation stopped being enough.
Not because willpower does not matter, but because it did not really explain what happens when a person makes real progress… and then, suddenly, finds themselves again in their old pattern.
That is where my journey westward really began.
Not towards a geographical place, but towards a part of me I did not know well: the one that pulled me back just when I was moving forward.
I started asking myself a different question: what is really happening inside me when I relapse?
Because if I have seen that a certain way of living makes me feel better, why does a part of me insist on taking me back to where I felt worse?
I went back over my whole path of personal growth, NLP, parts work, inner transformation.
But this time I added one more piece: I started looking at how the mind works when we change, when we learn, when we go backwards.
I began connecting what I saw in coaching processes with what research says about how the brain records successes, mistakes, new habits and old automatisms.
What I found is simple and uncomfortable at the same time.
It is not that you are “defective”; it is that your system is programmed to give much more weight to what is not working than to what is.
Inside you there is a kind of radar that is always on, picking up the slightest sign of risk, error or possible failure and lighting it up with a spotlight.
The moments when you succeed pass quickly; the moments when you fall stay imprinted much longer.
This made sense in a world where making a mistake meant putting your survival at risk.
If you mistook a poisonous berry for an edible one, you did not get a second chance.
The inner system learned to remember above all what could hurt you, not what made you feel good.
Today, however, that same mechanism risks turning into a trap: it makes you believe that one relapse wipes out the whole journey; it makes you say “I have not made any progress” even when, objectively, you have made a lot.
Every attempt at change becomes a kind of exam: one low grade is enough to make you tear the whole notebook apart.
And while this is happening inside us, things are not much better on the outside.
We live in a time where we have got used to choosing the “least bad” instead of the best.
We settle for lukewarm relationships, jobs that do not nourish us, levels of energy and presence far below our potential, just because “that is how it is for everyone” or to keep the peace.
It is as if our collective standard had gradually lowered until normality became a very low average quality of life.
We no longer raise our hand to say “this is not okay for me”; we go along with the flow and hope at least it does not get worse.
There is another piece we cannot ignore.
On the one hand, we are flooded with messages like “follow your happiness”, “be the best version of yourself”.
On the other hand, we have normalised chronic complaining and the hunt for someone to blame.
It is much more acceptable to say “it is the system’s fault”, “it is this country”, “it is the times we live in”, than to look straight at how much we are really committing ourselves within what we can control.
Context matters, very much so.
But if we use it only to justify the fact that we do not take even one step, that context becomes a nicely furnished cage.
Sometimes it seems to me that we have turned excuses into a kind of social currency.
We immediately understand each other when we say “well, you know how it is…”, we comfort one another, we tell each other we are right.
It is human, but it comes at a very high price: the more we train our ability to justify ourselves, the less we train our ability to choose.
And without concrete choices, personal growth remains just a nice sentence written under a motivational post.
When you put all this together – an inner system that focuses mainly on what is not working, a society that invites you to settle, and a culture that rewards complaining more than commitment – it becomes easy to understand why many people give up.
They do not see the steps forward; they see only the effort and the relapses.
They no longer feel entitled to ask for something better, for themselves and for others.
Little by little, they convince themselves that “this is just how I am” and that the only possible thing is to survive on the bare minimum.
For me, getting out of this picture has meant changing the question.
I stopped settling for generic explanations about willpower, “true desire”, the law of attraction or stock phrases like “if it happened, it was meant to happen”.
I started asking myself: what is my mind trying to do, in good faith, when it takes me back into the old pattern?
Why does it record the fall in such a big way and the progress in such a tiny way?
And above all: how can I use this knowledge to stop blaming myself and start collaborating with my system instead of fighting it?
I discovered that, when you try to change, there is not a single linear “you” inside.
There are at least two forces moving together: one part that wants to move towards the new, and one part that pulls you back to the old because there it knows how to move, even if it is not the best place for you.
It is not just abstract psychology: it is habits, inner pathways travelled thousands of times, which under conditions of tiredness, stress or fear are still the easiest ones to take.
When you eat something you know will make you feel bad, when you send a message you know will reopen a wound, when you procrastinate on something that really matters to you… it is not that you are stupid or weak.
It is that a part of you is using an old solution to give you fast relief: a bit of pleasure, a bit of avoidance, a bit more apparent safety.
The problem is that this short‑term solution sabotages you in the long term.
This article is born from here:
from the idea that you are not your latest mistake, and that relapses are not proof that “you have not changed”, but moments when the old system is trying to take back control.
For me, “journey westward” means exactly this: stopping chasing only the idealised character of myself and starting to truly get to know that part that is afraid, that resists, that clings to what is familiar.
In this first stretch of the journey, what matters most to me is that you can feel this:
you are not wrong or broken because you relapse.
There is a logic, there is a story, there is a system that is simply doing the best it can with the instructions it has received so far.
We can update those instructions, but first we have to stop telling ourselves that everything comes down to willpower or “if you really wanted it, it would already be done”.
In the next stages of my journey westward, we will go a bit deeper.
In the next part, we will go inside those moments of relapse: what really happens, step by step, inside you when you go back into an old pattern, and why certain “falls” arrive precisely when it seems you are doing better.
Later on, we will see how to start training the mind to register progress as well, not only mistakes, so that you can step out of the trap of self‑sabotage and the “it always ends the same way anyway”.
For now I leave you with an image: the journey westward is not an escape from who you are, but the path towards a version of you who can look your own relapses in the eye without confusing them with a life sentence.
In the next stage, we will step into that space together.
Es como si el cerebro cogiera una lupa y la dirigiera solo hacia los momentos en los que “no estás a la altura”, mientras que todo lo demás se queda en segundo plano.