Imposter Syndrome: Origins and Exits
One kid comes to Mommy with a crayon drawing of a flower. Her face blooms into a smile, spontaneous, genuine, delighted. “What a beautiful picture you made! Thank you, [name].” Another kid, with a very different Mommy—or a similar Mommy who’s having a much harder day—brings her a picture of a bird. She says the right things, but without any matching facial expressions or body-language. Or she offers what she thinks is constructive criticism, five or six years too soon. Or she gives crumbs: “That’s nice.” The crumbs mean she did notice, but the kid’s picture did nothing to or for Her.
This is a story of two sharply different kinds of response to a child’s bid for the kind of praise/acknowledgment that Heinz Kohut called “mirroring.” There’s no abuse in the story, and nothing that amounts to neglect. It doesn’t merit the term “trauma,” neither big T nor small t. But it evokes the origin of a feeling that can persist throughout a lifetime: “imposter syndrome.” It’s an irony of pop slang that the word syndrome is in there, since it denotes a cluster of signs and symptoms with no clear origin. And nearly every client I’ve ever had who reported feeling like an imposter also professed to have no idea why. But this post explains my hunch about it.
The parent’s genuine appreciation of the kid’s work product (and/or work process) does a lot more than shape behavior with reinforcement. It adds a few molecules to what will gradually become the internal armature of a self-confident, self-reliant, wholesomely interdependent adult in a circle of peers. It doesn’t just mean your flower picture is good; it also means you can add goodness to the world, you can contribute value, and therefore you can succeed as part of the human community.
Any adult—a professional AI robotics engineer, an orchestral violinist, an Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy—has an unconscious that does not distinguish between those professional responsibilities, and drawing flowers with crayons. The CBT therapist can treat the symptom, helpfully habituating you to tell yourself positive affirmations when the imposter feeling comes around in its acute form. And this can help with the quieter, chronic form it takes in the background.
But psychodynamic therapy attends to the past as well as the present, glimpsing the bygone era when a smile from the woman who brought you to this planet felt like sunshine breaking through the clouds; like life winning against death; love against stupor; beauty against bleak oblivion. It does not require you to remember any such experience; Freud had figured that out by around 1910. It requires only that you and the therapist consider this general story (of the two kids with two differently responsive parental figures), and watch what feelings it brings up.
Now what to do about it? It’s a doing that can’t be observed from outside the way you can watch someone build a shed (or, say, draw a flower). It’s action on the inside: not imaginary, but imaginal. When you read the opening paragraph of this blogpost, you saw it in your mind’s eye (or if you’re aphantasic, you felt it) and felt some feelings, faint or firm.
Now run the scene again, and have the second kid receive the good stuff, like that other, luckier kid down the street with the happier, warmer mother—the mother who wasn’t burdened with her own depression, or poverty, or resurgent bigotry in the neighbors and the news. Some mothers endure all these stressors and more, yet still manage to thread the needle of Good-Enough Mothering, but that’s the territory of the miraculous, and we’re not there right now. Right now we’re actively imagining, with intention, the better outcome we always wanted.
Run the story in your mind again. Open your heart and run the story deeper down, where it becomes inner action, not mere image without event. Feel the warmth reaching the child you were. Feel that very warmth emerging from you, as you’ve become in the long slog of the meantime: your adult self. What you were once totally dependent on another to provide, you can now supply from an infinite source that is yours to draw upon, without depletion: the love that is your ultimate nature.
When this has been practiced enough, like a muscle built up by repeated work, it fills-in the emptiness where imposter feelings used to be. Here’s an analogy.
In the world of contemporary philosophy, there are some thinkers who are so committed to a materialist worldview that they feel they must deny that anything nonmaterial can be fully real. Believe it or not, they feel duty-bound to maintain the preposterous claim that consciousness is “not real,” just an “illusion.” It’s a position called “eliminative materialism,” held famously by the late Daniel Dennett. By contrast, the philosopher Galen Strawson called it “the silliest claim in the history of human thought.” Consciousness is the only thing we know directly; all else is known through consciousness, as Descartes observed. An illusion is not a reality, but a mere seeming. But consciousness is what seeming is: it is experience. Nothing can merely seem to seem, because if it seems at all, then it seems indeed.
That’s the analogy. How does it apply? Well, once I have achieved enough loving self-acceptance to realize I am a person in full—with an internal locus of valuation, decision, taste, and control—the notion that I am a mere imposter becomes ridiculous. Nobody who is an actual imposter complains of imposter syndrome. Even if you feel overestimated and under-equipped in your professional role, that ain’t imposter syndrome, it’s a legit alarm signal telling you to train further and learn more. The weirdness of “impostor syndrome” is that those who feel it are well aware of its unfairness and inaccuracy. It’s like body dysmorphia, but about your skills instead of your physical form. Both are resolved by love.
I will close with the lyrics of this Paul Simon song from 1973, about the supreme self-confidence of someone who did get the golden good stuff when he was little. Remember that you can learn to provide this for yourself. We all must.
LOVE ME LIKE A ROCK
When I was a little boy
And the devil would call my name
I'd say, now who do
Who do you think you're foolin'?
I'm a consecrated boy
I'm a singer in a Sunday choir
Oh, my mama loves me, she loves me
She get down on her knees and hug me
Like she loves me like a rock
She rocks me like the rock of ages and loves me
She love me, love me, love me, love me
When I was grown to be a man
And the devil would call my name
I'd say, now who do
Who do you think you're foolin'?
I'm a consummated man
I can snatch a little purity
My mama loves me, she loves me
She get down on her knees and hug me
Like she loves me like a rock
She rocks me like the rock of ages and loves me
She love me, love me, love me, love me
And if I was President
The minute congress call my name
I'd say now, who do
Who do you think you're foolin'?
I've got the Presidential seal
I'm up on the Presidential podium
My mama loves me, she loves me
She get down on her knees and hug me
Like she loves me like a rock
She rock me like the rock of ages and loves me…
By Paul Simon, 1973. “Loves Me Like a Rock lyrics” © Sony/atv Songs Llc
If this perspective appeals to you, consider booking an appointment with me today at 917-873-0292, or use the contact form on this website.