I spent most of my career with Imposter Syndrome — feeling inadequate in my field of work, despite my success. I felt a strange mix of advantage and disadvantage due to my experiences in school with my choices of practicum and internship sites. Instead of the typical office setting, I opted to get my early counseling training at a hospice and hospital doing oncology counseling. Why? I’m not too sure. I think I always felt a calling to Death Anxiety before I ever heard of the term.
As amazing as both experiences were, they did not involve sitting across from a client for 50-minute sessions. Instead, I visited people in their rooms and talked with them about their lives, diagnoses, and support systems. I also assisted in oncology support groups and a children’s grief group, where we helped them process loss through crafts, stories, and fun activities.
I started to write in detail about my work experience after receiving my Master’s in Counseling and then realized it sounded too much like a resume and seemed unnecessary. If you want to know the list of programs I worked, you can checkout my bare bones LinkedIn profile.
The gist: I spent the next several years doing in-home therapy as I worked towards my independent license.
Doing in-home counseling in two different programs for the first several years of my career left me feeling like I didn’t really know what a true therapy session was like, still. While these appointments were longer than my interactions in the hospice and hospital, ranging from 50-90 minutes, I was still left feeling like maybe I wasn’t doing real therapy. In-home counseling is a completely different experience from in-office work.
It’s a very intimate thing to meet someone “where they are at” (a phrase we often use in therapy) literally where they are at — in their home. Meeting someone for therapy sessions in their home lends itself to a more relaxed and less sterile, clinical feel — which I much prefer. I eventually became comfortable in my work with these in-home clients.
In order to be part of the NHSC Loan Repayment Program once I received my independent license, I had to move into a clinic setting. This reignited my Imposter Syndrome. I knew how to handle sessions in someone’s home and became comfortable with the rapport building and the information you can gather from someone who feels safe in their environment. But now I had to sit face-to-face with someone in an office, where neither of us felt particularly comfortable. I did my best to create a calming ambiance in my office by using lamps instead of overhead lights and filled it with paintings and photos of nature and my travels.
It was the stereotypical therapy session — sit in stiff chairs for 50 minutes to address specific goals. Clients’ issues felt more intense in that office and that’s because sometimes they were. Sometimes the clients that came through the office were in crisis or needed a higher level of care. Handling crises in the office was overwhelming at first but later became a great skill, as I learned to quickly de-escalate situations.
I finally started to gain some confidence in my therapeutic skills when I became a Clinical Manager during the last bit of my tenure there. It was a brief stint before stepping down due to stress and honestly, not wanting to play the politics game. However, meeting with other clinicians for their clinical supervision was really eye opening, as I learned that I knew what the hell I was talking about after all!
I felt the Imposter Syndrome wanting to sneak back in when I made the leap into full-time private practice. I started questioning myself, my abilities, and the value of my work:
- Am I good enough to charge people X amount of dollars for therapy?
- Am I good enough to make this work full-time?
- Am I good enough, period?
Guess what? I remembered that I am!
I think it can be really natural to question your abilities and your worth, especially if you are a recovering perfectionist (like me!). And like any new business, it takes time to grow. So when I felt the anxiety and those negative beliefs creeping up, I remembered that I’m a damn good therapist!
Even if my early therapeutic experiences were out of the norm, they taught me some of the most important lessons that have helped to make me the successful therapist that I am today. The most important aspect of therapy isn’t the style, skills, or theoretical orientation — it’s the therapeutic relationship. My early experiences taught me how to quickly build rapport with a stranger.
In both the hospice and hospital settings, you didn’t know if the patient you were visiting would be there the next day. This made it even more important to gain their trust and respect as soon as you walked in the room. I learned how to approach people from a place of genuine care and concern.
Those early clinical experiences taught me how to set aside my own anxiety to be fully present with the person in front of me. I learned how to approach others with warmth, understanding, and curiosity.
Honestly, it’s a skill I’ve used in my personal life as well. I am an introvert at heart and can find social gatherings to be a bit anxiety provoking. I’ve learned to take a deep breath, set the anxiety aside, and focus on one person at a time. I choose to be fully present with them — asking about their work, life, etc. A former partner would tease me about this because I would end up having such deep conversations with someone who had been a stranger and when I would meet them again later, they would remember me fondly (and sometimes I would forget their names, oops!).
Since being in business for myself, I have come to realize how Imposter Syndrome was hurting me and my business. It kept me from wanting to network with others and made me uncomfortable to promote myself. Eventually, I came to appreciate my unique clinical experience and recognized how I benefit from it. It took reminding myself of my awesome attributes and how I bring those to my therapy sessions, to step into my confidence. Now I feel unstoppable — I want to build a network of Latinx Therapists, I want to become a positive fixture in our local mental health community, and I want to inspire others to seek their own personal growth.
How is Imposter Syndrome hindering you? And how do you want to set it aside to step into your most confident self?
