Impostor syndrome
By Lídia Algar Roldán · 28 octubre 2024
Doubting one's own abilities can prevent internalizing achievements and generating intense psychological distress.
Impostor syndrome was described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. It relates to feeling an "intellectual fraud", believing that it does not deserve success and fearing that others will discover a supposed incompetence, even when there is a real track record of achievements.
It is related to what the person thinks about himself and to the self-assessment he performs before a task and its results.
Factors that may favour it
Disadaptative perfectionism: excessive expectations that make any result seem insufficient.
Family atmosphere and dynamics: comparisons, lack of support, difficulty expressing emotions, overprotection or very high expectations.
Self-esteem: lower self-esteem can increase the vulnerability to interpret success as undeserved.
Self-sabotage: working until exhaustion to prevent others from discovering an incompetence that the person himself imagines.
Early experiences can create a strong need to please and adapt to other people's expectations. These patterns can be maintained during adolescence and adulthood.
Associated issues
Different studies relate the phenomenon to anxiety, stress, depressive symptoms, exhaustion, reduced performance and dissatisfaction. Sometimes these problems act as a background and sometimes they appear as a consequence.
The central feature is not the lack of capacity, but the difficulty in recognizing it as its own. Working on self-assessment, expectations and how to attribute achievements can help to get out of that cycle.
References
Clance e Imes (1978); Bussotti (1990); Chae et al. (1995); Sakulku and Alexander (2011); Hutchins and Rainbolt (2016), among other investigations cited in the original article.
