Imposter Syndrome
Imposter Syndrome involves feelings of doubt despite having skills, education, and experience. Often the person is worried to be identified as a fraud. There is a clear conflict on how others see you and what you believe about yourself. When others praise your work or accomplishments, you excuse yourself with just having been lucky or dismiss the praise somehow. It frequently leads to working more, to find ways to make up for your lack of intelligence but also in finding ways to dissolve the feelings you have about being a trickster. Every minor mistake just reinforces your belief in your lack of abilities.
When living in a cycle of fear of being found, one of the things to do is trying to get better and better and needing to be perfect. It is an awful lot of pressure. Because of this constant pressure you may start to believe that if you cannot do things perfectly its best to not do them at all.
A number of factors are likely to cause imposter feelings. You may have been criticized a lot, compared to your siblings, or may be put under pressure to work hard at school. There is a chance that school was straight forward and suddenly in college you had to try hard to keep up. Maybe you started thinking that you should not be there.
Imposter feelings always involve uncertainties about one’s abilities and do not coincide with what others think of you.
Therapy can help in changing feelings of perceived fraudulence, anxiety, and any other emotional issue. Hypnotherapy could also help you to resolve the lack of self-regard which lays beneath the imposter syndrome.
