The Great Pretender

How Impostor Syndrome affected my life, and how it may affect yours

Image: figure choosing between masks that show different emotions

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write something about Impostor Syndrome, and — more than a little ironically — what’s stopped me up until now was the thought:

“I’m not a qualified psychologist, why would anyone care what I have to say about the subject?”

And when a particular subject or theme reoccurs repeatedly in my client-work and in my own life, I have an idea this means I have something I want to say about it. So here’s what I want to say.

I imagine I’ve been dimly aware of the meaning of ‘Impostor Syndrome’ for most of my adult life, so I surprised myself when I Googled the origin of the term and discovered it was only officially coined in 1978 by Dr Pauline R. Clance in an article she wrote entitled “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention”. Her later book ‘The Impostor Phenomenon’ I judge to be an excellent pragmatic and comprehensive one, full of interesting case studies and examples of interventions she has found helpful. It also includes — at the start — a useful scoring system for figuring out just how badly you yourself might suffer from IS.

According to Dr. Clance: “if the score is between 41 and 60, the respondent has moderate IP experiences; a score between 61 and 80 means the respondent…