TRANSCRIPT
A few people have recently reached out to me asking that I make a video on impostor syndrome. That idea that people who are competent, people who even are gifted, whatever they do, feel that they’re fakes, feel that they’re not good at it, feel that they’re incompetent, feel that other people are better than them at whatever it is that they’re doing, even though there might be a lot of evidence to the contrary.
And why do people feel this way? Well, someone specifically actually asked that I make a video on therapists who have impostor syndrome and asked the question: why do so many psychotherapists who are actually good at it feel like they are imposters? I related to that myself when I heard that, when I read that, because early on when I became a therapist and even throughout my career, I often felt like an impostor. But certainly early on, I felt it most poignantly and painfully.
So what is it? Well, I think in the most general sense, our world is full of liars. Our world is full of fakers and liars and impostors. Our family systems, where we all came from, are full of imposters. Often, the people who are in control and in power and who define the rules are imposters. Often our parents are impostors, real impostors. They don’t have impostor syndrome; they’re actually real impostors. Our governments, our politicians, the biggest impostors of all so often. Or maybe our parents are bigger impostors because they’re the kings and queens of our family, and so often they are so deficient.
I think it really comes down to the family system. This is where people gain that sense of feeling like impostors when they’re not. Because what happens to a beautiful, healthy, alive, talented, gifted child, a normal child even, in a very screwed up dysfunctional family system with parents who really are not competent? That child can’t say, “Oh, my parents are terrible and horrible.” So often, so commonly, so normally, children in order to survive in their very screwed up families need to believe in the goodness of their parents, even when their parents are not good, even when their parents are terrible, when they are imposters, when their parents should never have been parents.
And the children need to believe in the goodness of their parents, need to idealize them. It’s very normal for little children to do this in their screwed up families. And part and parcel of idealizing their parents, of not being able to see how sick their parents are, of being in denial, is that the children have to turn against themselves. They have to look at themselves as screwed up and troubled and bad and even fundamentally corrupted when they are not. When actually they are not the problem, actually in this system, they are the healthy ones. But they have to disassociate from their healthiness, disassociate from their goodness. They have to lose confidence in themselves. They have to stop trusting themselves in order to be able to trust these screwed up people who they depend upon.
And then they grow up and enter a world that actually reflects their screwed up family system, reflects the same screwed up dynamics, where the people in power around them, the people who call the shots and make the rules and are the bosses and write the textbooks and teach the classes, are just as screwed up as their parents were, just as in denial. And here they are, these people who still have some core connection with their own goodness, some gentleness, some intelligence, some gift to be able to see life’s goodness, some talent. They are the ones with less power, and in order to survive, they try to fit themselves in.
So thinking about myself early on as a therapist entering this insane mental health system that told me every single person that comes into your office has some sort of mental illness. You must find their diagnosis. You must find what their disorder is. You must check off the boxes from the DSM about what sort of mental illness they have and probably refer them to different psychiatrists to take different medications that will correct these chemical imbalances. It’s all a lie. People don’t have chemical imbalances. People have unresolved traumas. People have problems resulting from their traumatic histories, not diagnoses. Diagnoses are just, I don’t know, putting a dress on an elephant. It doesn’t fit. It’s not necessary for healing. Medications are not only not necessary for healing; they block healing. They’re not helpful.
Yes, sometimes they can help people push their feelings down, more feelings that are painful. But we need these feelings to grieve and to grow and to evolve. And somehow I knew all of this intuitively when I became a therapist. That’s why I became a therapist in the first place, because I had already started to figure stuff out in myself. I realized what I was doing in my relationship with myself intuitively was so much better than any of the therapy I had ever had, better than anything that had ever helped me, better than the psychology books that I’d read. And I wanted to share this with others.
And yet I got into the mental health field, and my classes in school and my supervisors and the books that I was reading, everything was telling me, “You’re doing it wrong.” What was I left with? I was left with feeling very insecure. I felt like an impostor. I felt like I didn’t belong, and it made me feel really terrible. I remember sitting in session. I think I’ve shared about this in other videos. Early on in my therapy career, early on in my therapy work, before pretty much every session I had, I would become overwhelmed with anxiety. The client would be sitting out in the waiting room. I’d be sitting in this little office that I had and looking at the clock and saying, “Oh my God, in three minutes I have to go out to the waiting room and get the client to come in and begin the session.” And I would be overwhelmed by anxiety. Impostor syndrome: you’re a bad therapist. All the messages that I’d gotten from my supervisor and from school that you’re not doing it right, you’re not gifted, you’re not a genius, you don’t know how to connect with them. And I just felt terrible.
I would get on my knees. I’m not even religious. I would get on my knees and I would pray, “Oh my God, please, please, please, please help me. Please help me be a good therapist. Please help me connect with myself. Please help me be there for my client. Please help me say the right thing.” And it did help. It helped me connect with myself, go out, get the client, bring them into my office, talk with them. And strangely, what I found was the best thing for me was just to be myself in session, not to take all these rules and lessons and theories and all this crazy, stupid external stuff that the mental health system and my supervisors and teachers were all pressuring me and even forcing me to do, but instead just sit, be there, listen, ask questions, indulge my curiosity in a loving and caring way, try to get to know this person, find out who they were, find out why they’re there, get them to tell their story, make it safe for them. All the things that actually I was very good at to begin with, even gifted at to begin with. And the mental health system didn’t honor that. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me for having this gift and instead wanted to remake me in its image.
Incidentally, the exact same thing that most therapists do with their clients: kill their healthy impulses, kill their feelings, medicate them, give them all these diagnoses and theories, and make them this and that, and not just sit with them and listen and get to know them. Instead, treat them as a conglomeration of symptoms. No wonder so many people don’t trust the mental health system.
Eventually, I started figuring it out that I actually wasn’t an impostor as a therapist, actually. And you know who taught it to me? Two people taught it to me. First, it was my clients who taught it to me because I remember learning that it could be therapeutic for me to say to them, “Am I doing the right thing with you? Am I behaving properly with you?” Because actually before I had been a therapist, I had worked in customer service. I’d worked in restaurants and other places and behind a counter where I was selling things and doing things.
Making things, and I learned the lesson from that work that the customer is always right. I remember sitting with these clients and thinking, well, they are customers in a way. They’re paying money for this service, and even though I was an intern and wasn’t yet getting paid, I soon would be paid. I remember feeling like I’m working for them, so shouldn’t I ask them for feedback here and now?
What I got from feedback is clients who told me, “I like it when you listen. I like it when you ask me questions. I like it when you give me a chance to talk about myself and my feelings.” Nobody else does that in my life. Nobody else is curious about my childhood. No one else is curious about my pain and my feelings. All the other therapists I’ve had all want to put me on anti-depressants and mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety meds and antipsychotics, and want to discuss diagnosis with me and want to do X, Y, and Z to me, to me, to me. And I like it when you just listen. I like it when I have a safe place to talk.
It made me think, God, what’s up with this mental health system where all I have to do is just sit back and be kind and curious and open-minded and listen? It seems sort of like a scam that therapists should have to go to school to do this when it’s actually, if you’re kind of healthy, it’s normal.
The other person who taught me that I wasn’t an impostor eventually was me. Because when the clients told me that again and again and again, I started realizing that’s how I’d always felt myself. I started sloughing off the stupid supervisors I had and the stupid professors and the stupid books I was reading and stupid articles that all were sending me this message that there was something wrong with me when, in fact, there was something right with me. And I knew it.
I loved going into private practice and getting away from all these terrible other clinicians and supervisors. I loved it. And I think this is universally true with people who have impostor syndrome, therapists or not. The world is full of lies and imposters. The world is full of creeps and people on power trips who love to shut down people who have gifts. It’s so true in family systems. Parents so often like to shut down their gifted, spirited children, crack them, break them, make them be quiet. Only speak if you’re spoken to. Shut up. Don’t have your feelings, especially if you have post-traumatic feelings. If you’re crying and if you’re angry, especially at us, you have no right to feel that way. You are the problem. You, you, you.
Children feel like impostors. People feel like impostors in the world as the result of that. And the cure, the cure for impostor syndrome? Figure out your history, ’cause it was true for me also. I came from a very screwed-up family, and the mental health system and my supervisors and my professors were just like my parents. Once I got to the core and realized the ways in which my parents were imposters, when they weren’t real parents, the ways in which they were fake parents, and the ways in which they harmed me in mild ways and in terrible ways, once I figured this out, once I got my feelings back, once I grieved the loss of having had bad parents, I could apply this to other areas of my life.
I could grow strong within and love myself more and realized that I was a valid person who was healthy fundamentally. And this gave me the ability, much better. I still have these problems sometimes in this crazy world that’s so dysfunctional and dishonest, but at least more and more now, and I’ve seen this with other people, more and more, more and more, I can connect with my truth and see truth and not get faked out by the liars of the world. And I see this with others. The healthier people get, the more of a deep connection they have with their good true self, the less they feel like impostors, and the more that they can see the real impostors around them, especially the impostors in positions of power for the impostors they really are.