Imposter Syndrome

Have you ever had the thought “I have no idea what I’m doing and eventually people are going to realise I have no idea what I’m doing”? If so, you have experienced imposter syndrome. 

Imposter syndrome is incredibly common in the healthcare profession, particularly for early career psychologists. Imposter syndrome isn’t a diagnosis, but a pattern of self-doubt and often attributing our successes and qualifications to luck or other people overestimating our abilities. 

Instead of thinking “I worked really hard at this” it’s often “I got lucky, I don’t actually know what I am doing”. 

Ironically, imposter syndrome seems to show up often with people that are actually quite capable with extensive experience and qualifications.

In psychology in particular, imposter syndrome is thought to be so common because the feedback we receive in this work is generally quite limited. When in a therapy room with a client, there is no one else observing our session and providing instant and constructive feedback on our technique or intervention. While we have supervision to discuss client cases and treatment planning, this lack of direct observation still makes it quite difficult to gage how we are actually doing in the therapy room. 

How we measure progress in therapy is also often a long drawn out process that is far from linear. Client progress often happens over months or years, rather than days or weeks, which can often leave us questioning our ability, perhaps attributing a lack of client progress to our own ability as a therapist. 

Often when we experience imposter syndrome, it can also be difficult to celebrate milestones and the wins we do have, because we may continuously ‘raise the bar’. We then expect more from ourselves to continuously improve and perform at a higher standard to feel competent in our work. 

So if we have imposter syndrome.. how do we get rid of it? Or what do we do about it? 

Well, the goal isn’t to get rid of imposter syndrome entirely. Hear me out.. Imposter syndrome shows we care. We experience imposter syndrome because we care deeply about doing a good job in our work. Being a ‘good’ psychologist and helping people, is often what drives us to this career. And caring deeply about our work, means that we care how well we do and how we may impact our clients. This is a good thing. This allows us to continuously reflect as practitioners and it allows us to genuinely care about our clients and the therapeutic work that we do with them. 

We don’t want to get rid of the imposter syndrome, but we want to be able to work alongside it. To acknowledge that yes, there is self-doubt, but I can continue to show up in a way for myself in this work that also validates my experiences. It’s acknowledging the two truths that we can experience self-doubt and imposter syndrome and I can still be good at my job.