Why You Feel Like a Fraud (Even When You're Successful): Impostor Syndrome and Early Shame
You've worked hard to get where you are. Your CV looks impressive, colleagues respect you, and by any objective measure, you're successful. Yet you walk into meetings convinced that today will be the day everyone discovers you don't actually know what you're doing.
You attribute your achievements to luck, timing, or "fooling people." When you receive praise, you deflect it. When you make mistakes, you spiral into shame, convinced you've been exposed as the fraud you believe yourself to be.
This is impostor syndrome, and if you're experiencing it, you're not alone—and you're definitely not actually an impostor.
What Impostor Syndrome Really Is
Impostor syndrome is the persistent feeling that you're not as competent as others perceive you to be, coupled with a fear of being discovered as a fraud. Despite evidence of your abilities and achievements, you remain convinced that you've somehow tricked people into thinking you're capable.
Common thoughts include:
"I don't deserve to be here"
"I got lucky" or "I was in the right place at the right time"
"They'll figure out I don't know what I'm doing"
"Everyone else is smarter/more qualified than me"
"My success is just good timing"
Here's what's important to understand: these feelings aren't based on reality. They're based on deeply held beliefs about yourself that likely formed much earlier than your current success.
The Childhood Roots of Feeling Like a Fraud
Impostor syndrome doesn't develop in a vacuum. It typically stems from early experiences that taught you to doubt your inherent worth and capabilities:
Conditional approval: You received praise only for achievements or being "perfect," leading you to believe your worth depends entirely on performance rather than who you are as a person.
Impossible standards: Nothing you did was ever quite good enough. Even your successes were met with criticism about how you could have done better, leaving you feeling like you never truly achieved anything worthwhile.
Comparisons to others: You were frequently compared to siblings, classmates, or other children in ways that made you feel inadequate or "less than," even when you were doing well.
Minimising your achievements: When you did succeed, your accomplishments were downplayed, attributed to luck, or overshadowed by what you still needed to improve.
Shaming mistakes: Errors were treated as character flaws rather than learning opportunities, creating a deep fear of being imperfect or not knowing something.
Family dynamics: You might have grown up in a family where your role was to be the "achiever" or "perfect child," but this praise felt hollow because it wasn't based on knowing your authentic self.
How Impostor Syndrome Shows Up in Adult Life
If you developed these beliefs in childhood, here's how they might be affecting you now:
You over-prepare for everything. You spend hours preparing for meetings or presentations that should take much less time, driven by terror that you'll be "found out."
You struggle to accept compliments. When someone praises your work, you immediately deflect, minimise, or redirect credit to others, unable to simply say "thank you."
You attribute success to external factors. Your achievements are always due to luck, good timing, help from others, or easy circumstances—never your actual competence.
You fear asking questions. Asking for clarification or help feels dangerous because it might reveal that you don't know everything you think you should.
You procrastinate on important tasks. Sometimes the fear of not doing something perfectly leads to avoiding it altogether, which then creates more anxiety and self-doubt.
You downplay your expertise. Even in areas where you genuinely have significant knowledge and experience, you hesitate to position yourself as knowledgeable or give advice.
You experience anxiety before achievements. Rather than feeling excited about promotions, recognition, or new opportunities, you feel anxious about increased scrutiny and higher expectations.
The Exhausting Internal Experience
Living with impostor syndrome is genuinely exhausting. You're constantly:
Scanning for evidence that you don't belong
Working twice as hard as necessary to "prove" yourself
Anticipating the moment you'll be "exposed"
Minimising your achievements to avoid "getting too big for your boots"
Feeling like you're performing rather than just being yourself
This hypervigilance takes enormous emotional and mental energy, often leading to burnout, anxiety, and a persistent sense of inadequacy despite external success.
Why Traditional "Confidence Building" Doesn't Work
You've probably been told to "fake it till you make it" or "believe in yourself more." But here's the problem: impostor syndrome isn't actually about confidence. It's about shame.
Confidence is about your abilities. Shame is about your worth as a person.
When you feel like an impostor, you're not just doubting your skills—you're operating from a belief that you're fundamentally not the kind of person who deserves success, belonging, or recognition.
Surface-level confidence techniques can't address these deeper wounds about your inherent value.
The Real Work: Healing Underlying Shame
Overcoming impostor syndrome involves addressing the core beliefs that fuel it:
Separating worth from achievement. Learning that you have value as a person independent of what you accomplish or how perfectly you perform.
Recognising your actual competence. Developing the ability to accurately assess your skills and achievements without minimising them or attributing them to external factors.
Accepting imperfection as human. Understanding that making mistakes or not knowing things doesn't mean you're a fraud—it means you're a person who's still learning and growing.
Challenging the inner critic. Learning to identify and question the voice that tells you you're not good enough, recognising it as an old message rather than current truth.
Building authentic self-worth. Developing a sense of value that's based on who you are rather than what you achieve.
How Therapy Can Help
Schema Therapy is particularly effective for impostor syndrome because it addresses the underlying schemas (core beliefs) that drive these feelings:
Defectiveness: The belief that you're fundamentally flawed or inadequate
Failure: The belief that you're destined to fail or that you can't meet expectations
Unrelenting Standards: The belief that you must be perfect to be acceptable
Through therapy, we work to heal these deep beliefs and develop a more realistic, compassionate relationship with yourself and your achievements.
You Deserve to Be Where You Are
Here's what I want you to know: you're not an impostor. The fact that you worry about being fraudulent actually suggests the opposite—real frauds don't typically experience this level of self-doubt.
Your achievements are real. Your skills are real. Your right to be where you are is real.
The voice telling you otherwise isn't giving you accurate information—it's replaying old messages from a time when your worth felt conditional and uncertain.
You don't have to keep exhausting yourself trying to prove you belong. You can learn to trust that you do belong, exactly as you are.
If you're tired of feeling like a fraud despite your success and ready to explore how early experiences might be fueling these beliefs, I offer a 15-minute consultation to discuss whether trauma-informed therapy could help you develop genuine, sustainable confidence.