A neurodivergent take on imposter syndrome
What if imposter syndrome isn't irrational?
Imposter syndrome as a phenomenon first came to public attention after being published in a book in 19851. Since then, it has remained an underexplored topic with largely no clear treatment guidelines2 , despite potentially having quite a high prevalence rate3 (as high as 82% in some contexts). In this post, I borrow ideas relating to common types of struggles among the neurodivergent community and apply them to the topic of imposter syndrome to provide a novel perspective.
Definition4
Imposter syndrome is a feeling of unworthiness or incompetence, despite achieving accomplishments and success. This feeling is most common in the workplace, but it can manifest itself in just about any part of life. Those with imposter syndrome often go to great lengths to hide it, which can stunt their future success.
People who suffer from this syndrome often feel like frauds—despite being smart, skilled, capable professionals who actually deserve whatever commendations and praise they're given. Rather than celebrating their accomplishments, they worry that they've somehow tricked people into thinking they're good enough. As a result, they live in fear of being "found out" or "exposed."
Related terms
Imposter Phenomenon (IP), imposter syndrome, imposterism, imposter fears are alternative terms pointing to the same phenomenon. The term “Imposter” refers to someone who experiences imposter syndrome. Going forwards, this post will use the abbreviation IP for Imposter Phenomenon.
Factors associated with IP
One can have IP in one context in their life while not having it in others. It can be caused by different factors, such that two Imposters might have different primary causes. Where IP is present, research highlights some of the potential contributing factors:
Perfectionism
Family environment, especially during childhood
Low self-esteem and attachment style5
Being underprivileged, discriminated against, or a minority in the context of gender, ethnicity, immigration status, or work environment
Being in a certain professional or academic setting
Being in a certain culture
Co-morbidities, some being caused by IP (especially anxiety, depression)
Traditional view of “the problem”
I think that existing literature correctly identifies perfectionism and issues with self-esteem as a core factors present in IP. However, I have reservations about a co-existing traditional view about Imposters and the way they downplay their competence. “When someone has impostor syndrome, they experience repeated feelings or thoughts that they are incompetent or not good enough, despite objective evidence to the contrary.” Sometimes this kind of description borders on an underlying narrative that Imposters simply can’t or won’t face up to the objective facts of their competence, and an assumption that this is where the problem lies. If only we could make them accept the facts, they wouldn’t feel the way that they do.
I believe this narrative is naive, ignorant, and harmful. It comes from a privileged and ableist interpretation of how people should or shouldn’t feel, an intolerance for the actual internal experiences that people have. This pathologizing undertone is widespread throughout western psychology and often equates experiences that are inconvenient as being fundamentally problematic.
I’m not saying that being an Imposter is rational, but I am going to argue that many of the internal experiences of being an Imposter might actually make a ton of sense in a way that refutes the notion that it can be cured on objective grounds or through “better thinking”.
Rational irrationality
As an analogy, suppose you invite a friend to a walk in the park, and they say “No, not there, I want to avoid dogs at all costs.” You enquire further with curiosity and eventually they explain that at age 5 they were attacked and severely injured by a dog in a park, and ever since they’ve had to protect themselves from encountering dogs. Is their behavior/preference rational or irrational?
We could split hairs on this, but I’m inclined to say that their preference is unconditionally valid, somewhat rational, and probably healthy (unless you find out that they never leave the house and pay $100k a year for a private anti-canine bodyguard, then in that case it might not be healthy). I will split hairs subjectively anyway just to give a clearer picture:
“I believe with 100% certainty that if I go to the park, I’ll get attacked and maimed by a dog.” Irrational belief.
“Even if we went to the park at a time where there’s guaranteed to be no dogs, I’d still be afraid of getting attacked by one.” If they are competent at recognizing their emotions, then this is a fact of their internal experience of fear. It’s not rational or irrational, it’s an observation. It would be illogical for you to try and dismiss this outright (unless you believe this friend is lying/exaggerating, or under some other epistemic exceptions).
“I don’t want to go to the park even if there won’t be any dogs.” Valid preference.
“I choose to never go to parks even though I know they’re safe and nice to go to.” A valid boundary which is likely to be rational when considering further context of their internal experience that you aren’t privy to. For example, their sympathetic nervous system might have been automatically triggered every time they even walked past a park, and these incidences tangibly affected their stress, sleep, or digestion, and they either consciously or subconscious decided it’s not a risk worth incurring just to visit a park.
“Even if a free session of exposure therapy could magically cure me of my fear around dogs and parks, I still wouldn’t choose to do it.” Arguably not an optimal stance in terms of cost-benefit trade-off, but it’s their life and a valid choice nonetheless.
In short, people’s fears are not centered around objective facts, therefore they cannot be resolved through facts alone. In any case, it would probably be unhelpful (euphemism here) if you were to try to do so by framing their internal experience as irrational even if it were irrational by your personal standards.
Trauma-informed perspective
People do not behave rationally when feeling unsafe, as the sympathetic nervous system activates one of the five stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn) along with coping mechanisms designed to help us survive a real or perceived threat. Many of the factors identified in relation to IP can be explained in the context of nervous system dysregulation. For example, trauma responses may well be readily triggered within a perfectionist in response to certain types of vulnerability that are ever possible at work. And if we were to measure the perfectionist’s allostatic load, we may well observe that their nervous system is consistently stressed even though they’re used to their life being that way.
The importance of trauma awareness with regard to the nervous system is simple. It is harmful to hold people to normative standards of self-perception or comparative assessment when their body is reacting to something equivalent to coming across a tiger in the jungle. Unfortunately, this is somewhat common in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is currently the most common modality of therapy in the world. CBT is not trauma-informed and I suspect that some of the harmful aspects of CBT have been somewhat normalized in society.
IP is also associated with systemic risk factors. For example, IP may be more common among women in male-dominated fields, BIPOC populations, neurodivergent/gifted adults, and in certain professions such as software engineering. It is important to note the role of intersectional disprivilege at play. If we take an “extreme” example which is probably not uncommon at all, it’s plausible that a child with ADHD will have received 20,000 corrective or negative comments by age 10, during school time alone6. If anything, this is likely to be a significant underestimate in some cases. When someone has received hundreds of thousands of corrective/negative comments by their 20s, I would propose that most people, neurotypical or otherwise, will have internalized some forms of nervous system distress and cognitive distortion. That seems normal to me, that our bodies and brains react in defensive ways in order to survive psychologically unsafe environments. I see no benefit to pathologizing people who have experienced this form of disprivilege or promoting the idea that we need to “fix” what is a completely normal physiological adaptation, a part of how our bodies fundamentally operate.
Overthinking can be accurate
One of the unfortunate themes is that overthinking creates perceived problems and because these problems are inconvenient to deal with, people and therapists who don’t overthink tend to dismiss the overthinking as irrational. However, there is a risk of this communication pattern being neglectful and even abusive. This can come from a failure of empathy, some of which is natural. For example, I read a ton of content about knowledge and experiences of living with ADHD, but I will never be able to truly fathom what it’s like to live a lifetime with ADHD, no matter how hard I try. The best I can do is listen earnestly when people try to convey their internal experiences with me. But there will always be considerations that make sense to them that don’t make sense to me, because I am not an expert on their internal experience. In this regard, neurodivergent and gifted people often identify legitimate and relevant concerns that other people can’t comprehend because of their privilege of not being adversely affected by the same things. I am adversely affected by the sound of electrical noises that most people cannot hear. But it can seem sensible to others to react with “humans can’t hear electricity, maybe you’re just imagining it”7. It costs them nothing to take that stance (other than my respect).
Even the idea that “everyone thinks I’m competent but they’re mistaken and when they find out they’ll hate me and reject me” can come from some real basis in past experience. This has never happened to Bob, so when Alice shares this with him, Bob thinks Alice is out of touch with reality. However, this archetypal scenario has played out at least once, if not several times in Alice’s life. Maybe it wasn’t at a job, but with a parent, a teacher, an ex, a friend group, and so on, where she tried hard to be accepted, her concerns were not taken seriously, and then later her concerns that were brought up were used against her retrospectively. Bob’s ideal would be to feel secure and adequate about his participation in a social environment, regardless of or oblivious to the objective reality of his abilities and relative merits. Alice’s body-brain has adapted to scan for the threat of being rejected from a group based on her past experiences, and is trying to keep Alice aware of the perceived danger. And sometimes that perceived danger is real after all.
When “[Imposters] not only discount positive feedback and objective evidence of success but also focus on evidence or develop arguments to prove that they do not deserve praise or credit for particular achievements”8, this can motivate the Imposter to keep pursuing further development and achievements as if to justify or prepare to defend their participation. It’s not the best strategy in most modern contexts, but it does kind of make sense as an attempt, and it may well be an excellent survival adaptation under certain life or death situations from an evolutionary perspective.
Imposterism can be logical
Imposterism can also be somewhat logical in certain ways. For example, let’s say that Alice quits her regular job to found a start-up. She’s suddenly taken on the role of a generalist, handling many tasks and contexts that are new to her, learning on the fly and just doing a “good enough” job of the less critical things while focusing on the higher priorities. Let’s say that Alice’s start-up performs surprisingly well in the first year, she secures enough funding for multiple years and to expand and hire new people and even going on to win local awards for entrepreneurship and other community accolades and be invited as a guest speaker at noteworthy events. Here’s the thing: there’s a highly ambiguous and possibly quite loose relationship between external success and the day-to-day performance that led to that success. Alice’s start-up might have been a failure if she hadn’t had one specific chance encounter that opened up her network early on, or maybe she found the right market to begin with and she would have succeeded even if her skills were mediocre. It’s more or less impossible for humans to accurately back-trace the critical elements of their success in an unbiased way (especially because there’s no way of knowing how counterfactual opportunities play out in chaotic environments), and in fact it’s natural to attribute it to the wrong things. In other words, it’s pretty logical for Alice to have high epistemic uncertainty about her strengths and weaknesses, how good her own performance is, and how well other people are performing in instrumental tasks without externally visible outcomes. After all, how would she know? How does anyone magically know how everyone else is doing in the invisible parts of the success iceberg? It’s sensible for her epistemic range of uncertainties to be extremely high, and to have some probability assigned to the possibility that she isn’t very skilled and just got lucky. Winning awards and recognition maps very poorly onto internal experiences. (The way they’re judged is also often not objective at all, and based on status games.) It just says that something went right, but it’s hard to know what exactly and to what extent. There are also alternative timelines where Alice was even more successful but didn’t get any public recognition whatsoever, or Alice scammed all her investors and won the same awards just before things came crashing down.
In short, when people take chaotic/creative/unconventional paths to success, there are no efficient ways to reduce epistemic uncertainty about one’s capabilities (even more so in a comparative sense). Self-doubt is natural and logical. Cognitive strategies miss the point and do not lead to resolution or acceptance.
Take-home message
From a trauma-informed perspective, it is meaningless and potentially harmful to label the experience of imposterism as being irrational. The associated thoughts and fears are not necessarily any less rational than the supposedly preferable option of not experiencing them. Therefore, aiming for “accurate thinking” does not lead to any physiologically relevant mechanisms for resolving imposterism.
In a later article, I’ll give a bigger picture view of why the existing literature has failed to produce a plausible treatment for imposterism, and how I believe imposterism can be addressed in a sustainable trauma-informed way.
One meta-study, found its prevalence to vary from 9% to 82% across 62 studies of 14,161 participants. Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: a Systematic Review, 2020.
Yes, technically humans cannot hear electric current itself, which does not produce sound, but some of us can hear buzzing from electrical components.
Sakulku, J., & Alexander, J. (2011). The impostor phenomenon. The Journal of Behavioral Science, 6(1), 75-97.