Impostor Syndrome in Therapists

Ask yourself: are you even good enough to have impostor syndrome?

In all seriousness, statistics show that around 70% of adults report experiencing impostor syndrome at least once in their lifetime. It was first documented in high-achieving women in 1978 by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, but rest assured, the handsome gender suffers just as much, if not more, due to performance anxiety.

If you’ve been around the therapeutic block more than once, you already know that feeling like an impostor is a psychological pattern in which a person doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent, often internalised fear of being exposed as a fraud.

It is, in fact, fear of being humiliated in public for your lack of skills, although you have zero evidence to suggest it’s even remotely possible. You’re well educated and you scored high on your final exams. You did well in your supervised internship, and you’ve seen enough clients who got better because of your expertise.

So what can we do to make your ego take a break from hammering your sensitive parts with perfectionism and anxiety?

Take some comfort from the company you’re in. Maya Angelou said it about each new book: “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find me out now.’” Tom Hanks brings it up in interviews. Brené Brown has written about hers. Michelle Obama wrote about hers in Becoming. Albert Einstein, in his late letters, called himself an “involuntary swindler.” If you had to guess who feels it most acutely in any given field, the honest answer is usually the people who’ve earned the seat most.

And accept that it doesn’t fully disappear. It quiets with seniority but spikes at every transition: a new specialty, a new modality, going solo, raising your rate, taking on a harder caseload. Anyone telling you year ten is the year it goes away either got lucky or isn’t being straight with you.

The internal work is the obvious list: your own therapy, supervision, a peer group. There’s also an external piece nobody mentions, and it runs on a different principle entirely.

So how do you overcome impostor syndrome on the outside?

You can use a principle called one-upmanship, which is how we read authority and recognise value at a glance. A pastor stands on a stage in special clothes. An officer wears a uniform. What do you have? Your diploma on the wall and a nice office. Is that enough, when most of your client’s homework happens on their phone between your weekly hours together?

my-cbt makes your practice look like what it is: the work of a therapist who actually wants their clients to change. When your client can pull up their thought record, read your last comment on it, and check the date of your next session on a portal that lives on your domain, you stop being the one-hour-a-week therapist. You become a presence in their week. It makes them want to do their homework, and come into the next session wanting you to acknolwedge their efforts.