One of the most common issues people are getting counselling for today is the feeling of inferiority from comparing themselves to other people. When you look at someone else’s Instagram photos, how many Likes or Followers they have on Facebook, or compare what kind of job, home, car, or tech they have it’s easy to feel bad because what you have doesn’t look as great, or isn’t as much, or as big, as powerful, as new, or whatever the difference is. You may start to think “They’re better than I am.” But that’s only a feeling. Whereas facts are facts. The fact is that what gives you true value is found in whether you show kindness for other people and balance that with decent treatment of yourself.
That “I’m just not good enough” feeling that brings many people to counseling is one of the features of what’s known as Impostor Syndrome. It’s characterized by persistent feelings of self-doubt, self-criticism, and anticipation of failure in the future. Some social scientists estimate that it will affect 70 percent of us at some point. When people have it, even if they succeed, they may think they don’t deserve it and that sooner or later they’ll be exposed as a fraud or failure.
To combat Impostor Syndrome, you must recognize the destructive form of thinking known as “Disqualifying the Positive” in which people evaluate their accomplishments as minimal to none, which is something that no good parent would ever teach their children. We teach children to value their strengths and accomplishments in order to encourage future progress, so we need to do the same with ourselves as adults.
To follow up on our additional ways to combat Impostor Syndrome, we can recognize that there’s also a destructive thought pattern involved which is known as “Labeling”, in which people use negative, one or two word, terms (like failure or fraud) to describe themselves. We can overcome this by recognizing that this is inherently irrational because human beings are, by nature, multifaceted and require many different words to describe them accurately (like tall, anxious, mother, good cook, experienced carpenter).
Again, we don’t teach our children to use single negative words to describe themselves and likewise we need to remember that the way we think of ourselves has great power to injure us or to heal and encourage us. When we choose to describe ourselves more accurately and include our strengths and accomplishments, we can more easily discard the “impostor” label and feel better about ourselves as human beings with value and potential to help others.