Heat transfer deterioration (HTD) is one of the important issues in the study of supercritical fluid (SCF) heat transfer. However, when the SCF crosses the pseudo-critical point, the none-quilibrium process occurs in liquid, so SCF is very complicated. Recently, the existence of SCF pseudo-boiling on a macro scale has sparked controversy. There is still no unified understanding of the mechanism of gas-like and liquid-like transition affecting heat transfer. In this work, it is assumed that SCF has a macroscopic phenomenon similar to subcritical flow boiling. By analogy with subcritical boiling heat transfer, a boiling critical point model is proposed to describe the HTD in supercritical CO₂. Our study reveals that the HTD caused by pseudo-boiling only occurs under large temperature gradient, which makes the superheated liquid-like layer cover the wall, and the gas-like and liquid-like may present different distribution forms, thus changing the heat transfer characteristics. When the wall temperature is higher than the pseudo-critical temperature and the enthalpy of the fluid layer covering the wall exceeds a certain value, the HTD may occur. The proposed theoretical model can explain the experimental results well, and the prediction accuracy of heat transfer correlation considering pseudo-boiling is greatly improved. In this work, the connection between supercritical heat transfer and subcritical heat transfer is established theoretically, which provides a new idea for studying the deterioration of SCF heat transfer, thus enriching the theory of supercritical heat transfer.