Imposters Welcome

I asked ChatGPT to create a hilarious joke about therapists and this is what it came up with:

Why don't therapists ever play hide and seek?

Because good luck hiding when they can see right through you, even when you're in the closet!

Not bad ChatGpt.

It got me thinking about several clients that have asked me to (in client’s words), call them out on their bullshit. Often the arrangement in life is:

I’ll buy your bullshit, if you buy mine.

This is a false-self alliance, or protector-relating, and it creates a very bad taste in the mouth.

If we live in this identity, we start to complain that we feel like an…

Fancy and well decorated but without foundation.

As imposters we are disconnected and distant from our feelings. We do what is expected of us or will get us ahead.

If we succeed in playing that game, then we incur a winners curse, the prize is not worth having.

Deep down we really don’t want our phoney or protective self to be accepted.

What we want from others is their help in finding our true voice. When our expressive parts are speaking rather than our protective parts.

I define real success in life as:

The amount of true self that you are able to accept and have accepted by others.

This is the kind of success I want for myself.

So, what can we do to overcome imposter syndrome and get to this real success?

A good start is to learn to love the imposter, even if others don’t yet. It is an intelligent and helpful part of us that we created for a reason—to protect our true self that at some point couldn’t be accepted.

When we accept the imposter, we become allies with it. Sometimes it is useful and we employ it consciously. Other times, we can ask it to step down and experiment with revealing more of our true self. We get new feedback and, if it’s positive, we can update our public identity.

Our imposter was formed at a young age, and if you haven’t noticed this already, kids can be MEAN. It doesn’t usually work out as a child to be too different, weird, emo, feminine, complicated, eccentric, etc.

In adults these things are often no big deal. It is likely that much more of you can be accepted now,

A client recently asked me how often I feel authentic. I had to pause, and then I said,

I’m always finding it again.

That’s because we’re never done with authenticity. Every sentence is a new experiment that gives us more feedback.

And there’s always another layer waiting to be peeled.