Making Sense of Anxiety, Self-Doubt & Imposter Syndrome
Practical, compassionate articles for capable people who overthink, second-guess themselves, and feel like frauds despite the evidence. Drawing on CBT, ACT, CFT and EMDR, these posts will help you make sense of what your mind is doing, understand the patterns that keep you stuck, and learn to trust your own experience.
When people come to therapy for imposter feelings, they usually want to jump straight to the solution. How do I stop feeling this way? How can I finally feel confident? It’s completely understandable, because feeling like a fraud is exhausting. But we can’t change what we don’t yet understand, and that’s why the first step […]
Ever felt like you’re doing well on paper, but quietly waiting for someone to realise you don’t quite deserve it? Maybe it shows up before a big meeting, when you get positive feedback you can’t quite accept, or when you take on more responsibility and find the self-doubt gets louder rather than quieter. From the […]
The Superhuman Imposter In the fifth post focusing on the five types of Imposter Syndrome as identified by Dr Valerie Young, we look at the fifth type which is less about perfectionism, knowledge, or doing things alone, and instead is about doing everything, and still feeling like it’s not enough. This is the Superhuman Imposter: the […]
The Natural Genius Imposter In the fourth post in this series looking at the different types of Imposter Syndrome as identified by Dr Valerie Young we will be looking at the Natural Genius, the fear isn’t about being wrong, it’s about struggling at all. This type believes that competence should come easily. And when it […]
The Soloist Imposter This is the third post in the series looking at the one of the five patterns of Imposter Syndrome identified by Dr. Valerie Young. In the previous two posts we looked at the Perfectionist Imposter, and then the Expert Imposter. For others, imposter syndrome isn’t about being perfect or knowing everything, it’s […]
Imposter syndrome doesn’t show up in the same way for everyone. For some it shows up through perfectionism and in my previous blogpost I wrote about the Perfectionist Imposter (click here to read). For others it can show up as expertise and the belief that you should always know more, have all the answers, and […]
In an earlier blog post I wrote about the 5 different types of imposter syndrome as defined by Dr. Valerie Young. Click here to read. In this post I write about one of those types in more detail – The Perfectionist Imposter. The Perfectionist Imposter Imposter syndrome shows up in different ways for different people. […]
When self-doubt or anxiety hits, it can feel like being lost in a storm.The skies are dark, the winds are loud, and it’s hard to see clearly. In earlier blogs we’ve explored how to steady yourself (Dropping Anchor), why fighting feelings makes them worse (Dropping the Struggle), and how emotions are like the weather, constantly […]
We all know what it’s like to wake up to a grey, rainy morning. You may not like what you find when you open the curtains, but you also recognise there’s not much you can do about it. You don’t control the weather. You only control what you do when it’s raining. You might pull […]
Most of us are experts at struggling with our own minds.When anxiety or self-doubt shows up, our instinct is to push it away, silence it, or out-think it. And for a moment, it might feel like it works, but very quickly, the doubts creep back in, often louder than before. This is what keeps many […]