LogFAQs > #899657404

It seems like the majority of us on this board have suffered from numerous types of anxiety issues. How about this one?

https://www.fastcompany.com/40421352/the-five-types-of-impostor-syndrome-and-how-to-beat-them

Also, here is an explanation below if you don't want to click the link.

William Somerville has always been a good student. In high school and college, he looked forward to taking tests and writing papers objective measures of success gave him a chance to prove himself.

But as a PhD student in clinical psychology at The New School in New York City, he began to doubt his abilities. Now he wasn't just studying to make the grade, but actually leading therapy sessions with patients in a hospital psychiatric unit.

"I felt, what gives me the right to be here?" he says.

In those moments, he says, he didn't just feel he was lacking certain skills. He wondered whether he belonged there at all. "There's a sense of being thrown into the deep end of the pool and needing to learn to swim," he says. "But I wasn't just questioning whether I could survive. In a fundamental way, I was asking, Am I a swimmer?'"

In retrospect, Somerville realized that he was experiencing typical feelings of the impostor phenomenon. First described by psychologists Suzanne Imes, PhD, and Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, in the 1970s, impostor phenomenon occurs among high achievers who are unable to internalize and accept their success. They often attribute their accomplishments to luck rather than to ability, and fear that others will eventually unmask them as a fraud.

Though the impostor phenomenon isn't an official diagnosis listed in the DSM, psychologists and others acknowledge that it is a very real and specific form of intellectual self-doubt. Impostor feelings are generally accompanied by anxiety and, often, depression.

By definition, most people with impostor feelings suffer in silence, says Imes, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Georgia. "Most people don't talk about it. Part of the experience is that they're afraid they're going to be found out," she says.

With my recent job offer I've been thinking about this again. Every time I've moved up in my career I felt this way for the first few weeks and I've also had this numerous times in the past with really great girlfriends I had.
---

Heck em