Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist Burnout podcast, episode 33. So today I am talking about imposter syndrome. I wanted to start with sharing a personal story. I was inspired by episode 32 when I talked with Arya Prasad about her experiences of imposter syndrome. So I’m going to start by sharing my own story of imposter syndrome, one of them, because there are many, and then talk a little bit about imposter syndrome from the perspective of other therapists. So I looked at a bunch of different posts in Facebook groups and kind of took some themes related to imposter syndrome. I’ll talk a little bit about the literature and what we can gain from that knowledge. Statistics are power, right? That you’re not alone. You are not the only one experiencing this. And then I’ll give you some, maybe some takeaways and things that you can do when you’re feeling these feelings. So I have training as my certified brain injury specialist. So to be a psycho, if you’re not a psychologist, you have to do the four years of school and then a fifth year internship in that is already, you know, 2000 hours of practical experience. We wouldn’t go over that in my state, not all states. You have to also do a 2000 hours postdoctoral residency. And I had mine all lined up. And this was after a year of waiting for my internship, by the way. So I had a year gap between the time I was able to finish my degree during the time of, I don’t know, maybe it was 2010, 2011. There was a match imbalance. Psychologists go through a match process and there was a match imbalance. So I had to wait a year. There was like 25% of people that didn’t match to an internship. Crazy. And now there’s like too many places now. I think when I looked at that, it was like, there’s more sites than there are students. That’s great. So I didn’t have to deal with, or they don’t have to deal with throwing laptops across the room. I digress. Okay. So I had my postdoc all lined up, and that was during the, I don’t know, last financial crisis. So this company, I was where my partner was also working for that company, he’s a psychologist. They went under. He was just finishing up his postdoc, by the way, he didn’t even get all his hours. I think he needed like 50 more hours. And that was a whole rigamarole to get his stuff together. But I was out of placement, and so if you are in the summer, about to start a postdoc, it’s really hard to find another one. So here I was waiting another year when I had waited that other year for internship, and I was just like, should I have become a psychologist? Like, maybe it’s not in the car. Oh, my gosh. I’ve heard so many stories about just getting through the licensure process, and I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I know that there is a percentage that is really large of people that do not make it all the way through the licensure. Licensure process. So, at any rate, I get to this point where I’m looking for a postdoctoral residency. My husband and I moved to the state of Maine because we didn’t have a job, so we had to move in with my in laws. We won’t go there right now. But that was nine months of being unemployed, trying to find a postdoc and then just trying to find a job. So I couldn’t really find a postdoc, and so I was just looking for a job, hoping I would find a job that I could just get hours towards working towards my license. So I had another 2000 hours, and so I was hoping to just maybe pay for supervision. This is very challenging, especially for someone with my licensure, because psychologists in my state cannot bill for insurance. So it’s hard to get an agency job because we can’t bill, bill insurance. Whereas for social workers, right, there’s a conditional license where they could bill and get reimbursed for services as well. For licensed counselors in my state, there’s like LLCPCC or something like that. So the conditional license for psychologists, we can’t do that, which is so fun. Psychology board, thank you so much for that. I was so salty. I was so salty about that for a long time. And I think now looking at it. When did I get licensed? In 2012. Yeah. So twelve years post. And so my. My experience was so protracted. There were two years in there where I had to kind of pause everything. I found a postdoc, so I cold called this doctor, this program, a nora rehab program. I’d interviewed for an internship, and I was just hoping that they might have a spot. And I was lucky. I do think this was luck. I know part of imposter syndrome, that’s our topic today, is that we always feel we’re lucky. Like, it just happened to me. There’s nothing that I did or anything that’s inside of me that that came out of that. And I know that part of it was me, right. Part of it was the skills that I brought and what they needed and what they were looking for. So with this postdoc, it was in a neuro rehab center, and I did not have any training, neuropsychology or brain injury. So imposter syndrome was huge. I was getting the Bible, what they call the Bible, on brain injury or neuropsychology, which is the lizac. They call it the Lizac because it is like the book on neuropsychology. And I was just trying to. I’m gonna grab my Lesac and see how many pages this thing is. Yeah, I was gonna say it was like a thousand pages. And it is so, I was so lucky that, you know, it came out during the year of my postdoc because we’re still on the same book from 2012. Here we go. Twelve years later, I still have the most updated book, although a lot of it is getting to be out of date. Anyway. So here I was, no experience in brain injury, no experience in neuropsychology, and I really felt like I was a fraud that I had to learn this thousand page book to hopefully make some kind of sense with people. And when I reflected on my experience of my postdoc, I know now they were looking for someone with really strong therapy skills. And I do believe that I have really good therapy. I have not had. I have good therapy skills. I have good intuition as a therapist, and it still may find me at some point in my life, just not today. So I want to transition into kind of some of your stories and statements from other therapists that you’re not alone in feeling imposter syndrome. So I’m just going to give you some statistics here. So from an American Psychological association article, how to overcome imposter phenomenon, and I’ll link that in the show notes. It’s a really, it’s a short one, but it’s really great. It’s from the Monitor on psychology, which is our flagship journal. Up to 82% of people face feelings of imposter phenomenon, struggling with the sense that they have earned up to 82% of people face feelings of imposter phenomenon, struggling with the sense that they haven’t earned what they’ve achieved and they’re a fraud. Furthermore, there’s an ongoing fear that usually experienced by high achieving individuals, that they’re going to be found out. Right, similar to what my feeling was or be unmasked as being incompetent or unable to replicate past successes. And that’s from Audrey Irvine, PhD. Well, people commonly, and they’re talking about imposter phenomenon. And so I was, you know, as old as I am now, that really, really, the term was coined under phenomenon because syndrome is pathologizing. Right? We don’t, if 82% of people experience this phenomenon, it’s really more of like a social psychology concept versus a syndrome that we are experiencing or that we can be, quote, unquote, diagnosed with. Okay? And so while people commonly, colloquially. I am not saying that correctly, I just said it three times, and we’re going with it. This as imposter syndrome phenomenon or experience are better terms because imposter phenomenon isn’t a clinical diagnosis. And that was from Pauline Rose Clance php I’m speaking in the morning, and so, my word, I always cannot speak as well in the morning when I do this, when I, right, when I get up. But you’re getting raspy. Jen. Voice here you go. So it’s especially prominent among people with underrepresented identities. For example, BIPOC. BIPOC. People who work or study in predominantly white environments wrestle with imposter feelings at higher rates, either contending with feelings they don’t belong or that they are products of affirmative action. And that’s by Kevin Coakley, who’s really big in the space. So check out Kevin Coakley’s work, which is phenomenal. Also, trans and nonbinary people experience a similar phenomenon, according to Irvin, who frequently works with the gender expansive clients. So the effects of imposter phenomenon is that it’s natural to wonder how we’re going to measure up on a competitive environment. So for me, when I was in my postdoc, you know, I’m wondering, like, how many measuring up to even the interns. So, you know, if you’re on a postdoc, the interns are kind of quote unquote below you, or they’re, you know, kind of that junior member. And I should quote unquote know so much, even though, because I’m just a year ahead, whatever, it’s, it’s, it really just messes with you. The brain wants to make sure that we have all the boxes checked whenever we’re in an uncomfortable new setting. Okay? So sometimes it can, as I’m mentioning this article, the phenomenon can catalyze our growth. So I think it did cause me to learn so much about neuropsychology. I’m not a neuropsychologist. I’m a certified brain injury specialist. So I do know. I know a great deal about that topic. I’m not as much as a neuropsychologist with regard to assessment, but I feel like, you know, we’re comparing brains, right? What? Some brains just absorb different information differently. You know, there’s some interns that I’ve worked with where I’m like, wow, they seem to have a better grasp on this topic than I have. So, you know, it’s just so interesting how we can perceive ourselves and compare ourselves to others. Right? At the other end of the spectrum, imposter phenomenon can interfere with a person’s mental health and overall functioning. Coakley says that imposter feelings are strongly linked to increased anxiety and depression, and his research suggests this is especially true among black, asian, and latino college students. Psychologists may work hard to overcome these feelings, but that can come at a mental health cost when achievement is driven by internalized doubt. Okay, so I’m going to talk. I’m going to dive into some of the comments from other therapists. So key themes that I noticed when I looked at hundreds of posts on a Facebook group. Okay, here we go. First, not feeling knowledgeable enough. So one person said, I felt like I knew nothing compared to my colleagues. My biggest fear was that a client would come in with a problem I wasn’t prepared to solve. Many therapists express feeling overwhelmed by the expectation to know everything right from the start. And I feel, you know, that really came up for me when I started in neuropsychology and working with folks with brain injury. How was I supposed to know the things that I know now after working with these populations for twelve years, I could not have known that. Now I have the wealth of information from working with the population for these many years, right? I can’t just come into a situation and know all of that. What I did bring was my curiosity and my desire to learn my nervous system, which I think I just was able to absorb a little bit more at that age because I didn’t have as many demands on me at home. So really I could have a bunch of time to just kind of relax and not have so much stress because I didn’t have less demands on me at that phase of my life. So I brought that definitely to that role. So this theme comes up frequently. Therapists feel like they should be experts immediately. My second theme is feeling incompetent despite accomplishments. So one therapist said, I work so hard to get to this point, but I don’t feel like I deserve to be here. I’m constantly waiting for someone to figure out that I don’t belong. So this is kind of a fear of being exposed and it runs deep when we have that feeling that no matter how much we achieve, it’s not enough to silence that voice of self doubt. And I think what can happen, I am so guilty of this, y’all. So what can happen for therapists is that some of us just feel like we need to stack all the certifications. So, and I’m just thinking right now of a post on LinkedIn where someone was posting about coaching certification, right? So this person was like, just so you know, there’s no regulation for coaching and there’s no requirements that anyone has to have a particular number of hours of coaching experience. And they were saying, like, they had, I don’t know, like 200 or 300 hours of coaching experience or something like that. And I just was like, that makes sense that there’s no, like some people don’t have, they have different levels of experience as a coach. And I’m not saying like, coaches are incompetent. I am not saying that. I’m just saying as a psychologist, I had to have 6000 hours of supervised experience. Yet many of us do not feel like we’re experts. No matter how much we achieve, it’s not enough. Right? And so we feel like, all right, my 6000 hours. Okay, that’s pretty good. But I need to have that extra certification. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t continue to learn. I’m just saying that for me, especially a lot of that gaining certifications, doing these trainings was about feeling like I didn’t know enough and wasn’t enough to silence the voice of self doubt. It wasn’t enough for me to just listen to the knowledge that I had and know that was part of it. I am a big believer of continuing to have consultation and things of that nature. And so I’m an EMDR certified therapist and dearly consultant. So I continue that throughout my training. And I believe in that power of consultation. And so I love that model. But I think just getting certifications for the point of certifications is kind of driven from that need for more accomplishment due to feeling incompetent, that perceived incompetence when we’re not, we’re not incompetent. We have so many great skills. Okay, I move on another theme, the difficulty of accepting feedback. So every time I receive feedback, I’m convinced it’s because I’m bad at my job. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it means I don’t know what I’m doing. So this theme captures on how feedback, even when constructive, can reinforce imposter syndrome, making therapists feel like they’re being judged rather than supported. And I think especially for therapists who are in invalidating environments where they’re receiving feedback about productivity. I see a lot of posts on getting called into your supervisor’s office because you didn’t meet those productivity requirements. And I remember that from working agency where my supervisor, part of the supervision, was looking at my hours and how I was lining up for productivity. And just reminders that, hey, remember, if you want to take vacation, you really need to be at that 30 hours mark. Right now we’re at 28, so we need to make sure we’re getting those hours up so that you can take vacation. I think that feedback can be really tough on the therapist because we’re feeling like less than, because we are struggling to meet these productivity requirements that are not good for us, they’re not good for our work. I just want to empower you that it does not mean you’re bad at your job if, let’s say, Sally therapist can do 40 out clinical hours a week and they’re fine, which is not normal, by the way. I think of this therapist. When I was on internship, they were a very senior therapist. They would do mostly intakes in this community mental health center, and they were praised for it. You know, like, oh, I’m making up this name, Sally Therapist can, you know, they do seven or eight intakes a day. They’re a tank. They just can show up and do that work. And I felt like, oh, wow, I don’t think I could do that. That seems pretty tough. I remember their DSM being. Their DSM was like falling apart because they had used it so much, because they did diagnosis. I think feedback is hard for therapists, and I think that was really hard for me, especially in internship. I had a rough internship where I felt targeted by a senior staff member, had to go to HR or had to call my college and let them know that I may not get this doctoral degree because my internship was really causing. I was under a lot of stress of that internship, and I felt really incompetent that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I would be called into, you know, the office. I was publicly humiliated for not knowing the cumbersome electronic health record, which I received no training on, by the way. I got through it. That was hard. I think definitely there’s a lot here in this difficulty accepting feedback for therapists. Comparisons to others in the field is another huge theme, and I kind of touched on that a little bit. So I look at other therapists who seem to have it all figured out. And I wonder what I’m doing wrong. I’m constantly comparing myself, which only makes me feel worse. So just like me, my experience on my postdoc placement, other therapists often feel inadequate when they compare themselves to more experienced or specialized colleagues. I think often I look at the giants in our field, right? Like Gottman, Yalom, or those big names, and they’re the experts, right? They’re the people who I look up to. They’re the therapists that I strive to be. They are these larger than life figures. And it feels like compared to them, I don’t measure up, right. I could never have their level of expertise. And I still feel this way. I still feel this way when I talk to some people who can talk really well on certain topics, right, that I don’t know something and they seem to know so much more than me. They have it all figured out. And I think that’s just human. We’re naturally going to compare ourselves to others in the field, no matter what phase of practice we are in. So if we’re new in the field, if we’re a student, we’re going to constantly feel like because we’re a student, we haven’t met, you know, those milestones of licensure or postdoc or whatever it is that we don’t know enough. And I just want to empower you here, is that. I think the trap in comparison is that you never feel grounded in yourself and grounded in your own knowledge, and you have something that’s unique in you that you can bring to the client, to the situation that no one else can. And I think just knowing, you know, being in this therapy streets for a while, there’s just certain therapists that can speak to certain clients, and that’s their own magic. And I think just to lean into your own magic, to your own therapeutic power. So just a piggyback off of one of the other themes. So, about feedback. So one therapist noted, in my little research, I had a supervisor who was critical of every little thing I did, which only made me feel like I was incapable. So supervision plays a huge role in shaping how therapists perceive their competence. So unsupportive feedback can really deepen the sense of being an imposter. While validating supervisors can provide the much needed reassurance that therapists aren’t alone in their struggles. And I am so grateful for a supervisor. Many of all of my supervisors were actually really, really great. I didn’t have a. The experience I had was like, a clinical director that had. She wasn’t my direct supervisor, but they were the ones that were kind of targeting me. But all of my supervisors were fantastic. Certainly they’re human. They have their own little things, right? But I remember especially, I had an out placement on my internship where I worked at college counseling, a college counseling center where I ran process groups with a senior therapist and had pre process, post process, and someone even made their own coffee beans. And it’s where I fell in love with coffee. So I even have this memory of, like, this smell of coffee that I’ve never smelled even since. It’s the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life. So here I was. I had time to hold my warm cup of coffee. I had this rich experience with my supervisor who was just so supportive and gentle and masterful. I just want to have her on, I think, talk about that experience and how wonderful it was for me. Maybe I will, because I’m just, like, getting a little clumped talking about it. It was so rich. And I think what I needed during that time, because I was feeling so much like I couldn’t get through this experience that I made many mistakes. And when I started and being more open with my experience when I started that placement, and I think part of me was like, maybe I should be more closed off and have protected myself more. Yeah. I think a lot of folks in agency likely feel that way because it’s a hard environment to be in. So what can we do about it? We know all of these things. So I would think I’m taking some of this from the article, from the monitor and psychology. So, first, I would say, is learn the facts. That’s one of their tips. Uh, so let’s put it into a CBT frame, right? What are my thoughts? What are my feelings? What are my behaviors surrounding this? What am I telling myself that, you know, oh, that was so dumb that I said that. I’m such an idiot for not doing this in the. In that session or making mistakes with the client. When mistakes are normal, they’re completely normal. And we’re learning, especially as new therapists, we’re learning all the time. And even as a seasoned therapist, I felt like there were clients and situations where, oh, my. Oh, my gosh, I haven’t dealt with this before, and so that’s normal because humans are really diverse in their experiences. So always, even throughout our careers, there’s going to be new clients and new situations where we don’t know what to do and we need support. We need to. Okay, well, maybe I need to take a course on this or learn about this or learn about that. That is really normal because there are so many different things that we need to learn in our careers as therapists or as psychologists. You know, it’s interesting. One of their suggestions is our training takes years and years of work, education, accomplishments, and they recommend zooming out and consider where you are now and how it compares to where you were last year or five years ago. So I am kind of wrapping up my consultant. My, what am I? I always say this on the podcast. I’m a consultant in training with EMDria. And so I will soon we’ll have my consultant status as a EMDR consultant. And I sat in with one of, with my consultants, EMDR consultation groups, and they were clinicians who had just gone through part one of EMDR training. Right. And I was just comparing, comparing my knowledge of EMDrhe. So I first did my EMDR training in 2014. Yeah, 2014. And, yeah, that’s nearly ten years ago. So my view of EMDR is so much more nuanced. I have a lot of sessions and expertise behind me of EMDR, and still these new EMDR clinicians brought just richness and other things that I didn’t think about. And I could also see my competence. I could also see what I’ve learned over the years, and it didn’t make them less than, I just saw them as learning something new. But I could also see them holding onto, like, oh, my gosh, I don’t know this. Like, when my consultant would ask a question about, like, what is phase three of EMdR? What do we do in phase, you know, four, what do we do in phase five? Because they’re trying to get to them to learn. But when we don’t know something, all those feelings come up, and that’s completely normal. So zoom out and look at yourself. Where were you five years ago? Where were you one year ago? What do you know now that’s different? I think it’s important, and I constantly talk about community on here is acknowledging that talking to other people is one of the biggest ways that we can help, help mitigate our struggles with this imposter phenomenon. So I’m just going to read you a quote from another therapist. So, talking to others in the field who felt the same way help me feel less isolated. It’s like we’re all in this together, even if we don’t always admit it. So it’s important about opening up about imposter syndrome. I don’t know if I recommend doing this in a therapist group, because sometimes, you know, you’re opening up, you’re like, I’m really struggling with X, Y and Z. And then you have, like, shady therapist Julie come in and, like, just read you, and you’re like, I’m not here for this. So I think doing this in more of a smaller group of people that, you know, feeling people that you can trust. It is my hope to build such community as I go forward with this podcast as well, where I curate the community. And if people are being inappropriate, no, we’re out of there. So I think in these. These therapist groups, I don’t know why we get into some of these behaviors. I know you know what I’m talking about, but it becomes easier. Break that feeling of isolation when we. We can share that vulnerability together. We really need to normalize as well, the learning process. Many therapists express the sentiment of, it doesn’t feel okay to just be learning. Like, if I don’t have all the right answers, if I don’t have all the answers right away, I’m not good enough. And knowing everything from the start is unrealistic. It was so unrealistic of me in this postdoctoral placement to know everything about neuropsychology, to have downloaded this 1000 page book on neuropsychology in my brain, to have all the nuance of seeing brain injury clients for over ten years. Being new doesn’t equal being incompetent. It’s normal, a natural part of the process. So, in closing, I just want to emphasize that this is very common among therapists. It doesn’t mean that you lack competence or the deep care that you have for your work. And I think some of the things that we can do is, you know, celebrate your successes, celebrate the work, the things that are going right in therapy. That is one of the biggest takeaways, like celebrating those successes and really seeking that support, finding a community of other therapists, if you don’t have it, to be able to talk about these things. I had to wait for the guy on my street with a motorcycle to go by anyways. So seeking supportive consultation or supervision and remembering that being new is a strength, not a weakness. And that was my biggest takeaway from my postdoc, is that I was chosen, I believe, for that postdoc because of my newness, my curiosity, and my skill interpersonally, not what was in my brain at that time. And so thinking about that and thinking about what you’re bringing as a whole person versus the letters beside our name all right, I’m just going to give a shout out to my newly revised guide for therapists who are done with one on one therapy and they’re trying to find other ways to work as a therapist and so I am giving you this guide. I’ve also curated a number of my podcast episodes, so it’s kind of like a pod course as well, where I’m kind of walking through different episodes on the podcast and also giving you this guide of the first things you can do to make money now versus trying to like get three new certifications and start a coaching program to try to get out of one to one therapy. This is all. Those are all the things I did and I think driven a lot by this theme of imposter syndrome. So I’ve curated this guide and some of the episodes more on money curated the episodes around the themes that therapists who want to get out of one to one therapy due to burnout or due to just wanting to do something else. It doesn’t have to be from burnout, it could just be I got into private practice and it wasn’t like a great fit for me. Have we ever thought about that? That’s more of what I’m saying lately. I think for my first whole year after I closed my practice, I felt like I failed, that I couldn’t hack it. I wouldn’t say that out loud so much, but it felt a lot like failure. And now I’m seeing it just wasn’t a good fit. I mean, I need to be around other people. I need to be doing other things. For me, sitting in a room one on one all day long isn’t great for me. So I just have you look at that. Grab the link in my show notes and I will talk with you guys next week or I’ll do a hot take. I am not sure yet. It is still summer. All right, have a good one.
Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the joy after Burnout podcast. Be the first to hear new episodes by following the podcast in your podcast player. This is an informational podcast only. Any information expressed by the host or guest is not a substitute for legal, medical, or financial advice.
