What Is Imposter Syndrome — And Why Is It So Destructive for Driven Women?

What Is Imposter Syndrome — And Why Is It So Destructive for Driven Women?

HIGH PERFORMANCE & TRAUMA RESPONSES • June 3, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Three Minutes Before She Takes the Stage

The backstage green room smells like stale coffee and dry-erase markers. Megan is sitting on a folding chair, keynote slides loaded on the laptop resting across her knees, and she’s doing the math again. Forty-two minutes until she walks out in front of four hundred people. Forty-two minutes to figure out whether they’re going to realize the truth: that she has no business being here.

She has fifteen years of clinical data behind her. She was peer-reviewed and vetted and hand-selected by the conference committee. Her preparation was obsessive — three full run-throughs, a color-coded speaker brief, notes memorized cold. None of that is accessible to her right now. What’s accessible is a loop: They’re going to see through me. Someone will ask a question I can’t answer. I’ll say something wrong and the whole room will know I’m a fraud.

Megan is a physician who trained at one of the most competitive programs in the country. She’s published. She leads a department. And right now, in this green room that smells of industrial carpet cleaner, she is completely convinced that tonight is the night her cover gets blown.

This is what imposter syndrome feels like from the inside. It isn’t abstract. It isn’t a passing doubt you shake off before you step up. It’s a physical certainty — chest tight, thoughts narrowed, body braced for exposure — and for many driven women, it doesn’t go away no matter how much evidence accumulates on the other side of the equation.

If you’ve lived inside a version of this scene, you’re not alone. And you’re not broken. But you may be operating under a misunderstanding about what this experience actually is — one that makes it significantly harder to heal.

What Is Imposter Syndrome, Really?

The term entered the clinical conversation in 1978, when psychologists Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, clinical psychologist and professor emerita at Georgia State University, and Suzanne Imes, PhD, psychologist and researcher, published their landmark study on what they called the “imposter phenomenon.” Their research, conducted with 150 women who had been recognized for their academic and professional achievements, found that despite objective evidence of competence, these women attributed their success to luck, timing, charm, or the errors of others — not to their own intelligence or ability. The fear of being “found out” was persistent, even when the evidence of competence was overwhelming.

Clance and Imes originally described the imposter phenomenon as specific to women. Subsequent research, including work by Valerie Young, EdD, researcher and author of The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, has shown that imposter syndrome affects people across genders — but the content, triggers, and consequences differ significantly depending on gender and race. The specific way it manifests in driven women, and the degree to which it’s reinforced by external systems, gives it a particular weight that deserves its own clinical attention.

What the research also makes clear is that imposter syndrome isn’t primarily a cognitive distortion you can correct through positive self-talk. It’s a felt sense of fraudulence that persists despite evidence to the contrary. You can know, intellectually, that you were qualified for the promotion — and still feel, in your nervous system, like a lie that hasn’t been caught yet. That gap between knowing and feeling is one of the hallmarks of a trauma response, not a thinking problem. It’s a pattern that gets encoded in the body and the implicit memory system, and it requires a different kind of intervention than “just believe in yourself.”

In my work with clients, I see this distinction misunderstood constantly. Women arrive having already read every confidence-building book, having already done the affirmations, having already tried to logic themselves out of the feeling. The feeling is still there. That’s because they’ve been treating a wound as if it were a software error.

The Childhood Roots: Where This Actually Begins

Imposter syndrome doesn’t appear out of nowhere in adulthood. In my clinical experience, it is almost always traceable to specific early relational dynamics — and the two most common are childhood emotional neglect and conditional love.

Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist and author of Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, describes childhood emotional neglect as the failure of parents to respond adequately to a child’s emotional needs — not because they were overtly abusive, but because their own limitations, trauma, or emotional unavailability meant the child’s inner life was consistently overlooked. The child learns, through thousands of small moments, that their feelings aren’t reliable guides, that their needs are invisible or burdensome, and that the way to stay safe is to perform rather than to be.

This is the soil in which imposter syndrome grows.

When a child is praised for performance — for grades, achievements, compliance, being impressive — and receives little response to their actual emotional reality, they internalize a critical equation: I am valued for what I produce, not for who I am. That equation follows them into the boardroom, the operating theater, the keynote stage. It whispers that the praise they receive is always contingent, always provisional, always one bad quarter away from being revoked.

Lindsay Gibson, PsyD, therapist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, notes that children of emotionally immature parents often develop a profound sense of role reversal — they learn to be attuned to the parent’s needs and moods while their own emotional world goes unwitnessed. These children become expert performers of what others need from them. They become very good at reading rooms, adapting, producing. They often become, by any external measure, extraordinarily successful. And they carry, alongside that success, the chronic low-grade terror of being seen as insufficient.

Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who developed the concept of the true self and false self, wrote extensively about what happens when a child must suppress their authentic experience to remain attached to a caregiver. The false self — the performed, adapted, acceptable self — develops as a protective structure. It’s brilliant and functional and it gets results. But it also means that the woman who walks onto the stage isn’t fully sure, at a deep internal level, whether the “real” her — the one who isn’t performing — would survive exposure. The dread of being found out is, at its core, the dread that the true self isn’t enough. (PMID: 13785877)

Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma researcher and author of When the Body Says No, argues that many of the psychological patterns we identify in adulthood as “personality” are actually adaptations to early environments that didn’t feel safe. Imposter syndrome, understood through this lens, isn’t a character flaw. It’s an intelligent response to an environment where being genuinely yourself carried real relational risk.

This reframe matters enormously — not because it removes responsibility for doing the work, but because it shifts the locus of the problem from “I’m fundamentally defective” to “I developed this pattern for good reasons, and I can develop something different.” That shift is the beginning of real healing. You can explore what that healing might look like through trauma-informed therapy or through executive coaching designed specifically for driven women navigating exactly this terrain.

Why Driven Women Are Specifically Vulnerable

Not everyone who encounters conditional love or emotional neglect in childhood develops imposter syndrome to the same degree. So why are driven, ambitious women so disproportionately represented in the clinical picture?

The first answer is structural. Valerie Young, EdD, identifies five “competence types” in her framework for imposter syndrome: the Perfectionist, the Expert, the Natural Genius, the Soloist, and the Superwoman. What these types share is an implicitly high internal standard against which actual performance is perpetually measured — and found wanting. Driven women, by nature and often by early training, hold exceptionally high internal standards. The higher the bar, the larger the gap between achievement and the internal sense of deserving that achievement.

The second answer is relational. Women who were raised in environments where their value was tied to their performance — particularly intellectual performance — are especially vulnerable to the imposter loop. Every promotion, every recognition, every admiring introduction at a conference doesn’t build security. It raises the stakes. If you’ve built your entire relational safety on the premise of being the impressive one, then being impressive starts to feel like a condition of survival rather than a natural expression of who you are.

What I see consistently in my work is this: driven women don’t develop imposter syndrome despite their ambition. They develop it because of the particular way their ambition was recruited early in life. Achievement became the currency of belonging. And you can’t stop fearing you’ll run out of a currency you’re convinced you never legitimately had.

Meet Casey. She’s a forty-one-year-old partner at a management consulting firm, the kind of woman who walks into a room and shifts its gravitational center. She’s the first in her family to hold a graduate degree, a woman who built her career through fourteen-hour days and a stubborn refusal to quit. She called me because she’d been offered a seat on the board of a Fortune 500 company — and her first response, before excitement or gratitude, was a wave of cold panic. They’ve made a mistake. When they figure out who I actually am, they’ll rescind it.

Casey didn’t have a broken brain. She had a wound that no number of board seats was ever going to touch. Her worth had been organized around proving herself since she was eight years old, when her father made it clear that the only version of her he had patience for was the version that was achieving something. The board seat wasn’t evidence that she belonged. In the logic of her nervous system, it was just a higher place from which to fall.

Alice Miller, psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, described this dynamic with devastating precision: children who are instrumentalized for their achievements — whose gifts are treated as the property of the parent, not the expression of the child — learn to achieve without ever internalizing the achievement as their own. The applause goes out but it doesn’t come in. That’s what Casey was living. And it’s what drives the particular cruelty of imposter syndrome: the more you achieve, the louder the fear gets, because there’s more to lose.

This is also why relational trauma and imposter syndrome so frequently co-occur. When early attachment relationships were contingent on performance, the nervous system learns to treat authentic self-expression as dangerous. Showing up fully — with both competence and uncertainty, both strength and need — feels, at a body level, like an existential risk. The result is a woman who performs brilliance compulsively, who can’t rest inside her accomplishments, and who experiences the admiration of others as a pressure to maintain rather than a warmth to receive.

When Evidence Never Feels Like Enough: The Perfectionism Connection

One of the most frustrating experiences my clients describe is this: they know the evidence says they’re capable. They’ve read it over, organized it, reminded themselves of it on the bad days. And it doesn’t land. The feeling of fraudulence persists. Why?

The answer lies partly in the relationship between imposter syndrome and perfectionism — and that relationship is not incidental. It’s structural.

Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author of Daring Greatly, describes perfectionism not as a high standard for excellence but as a shield: a belief that if I do everything perfectly, I can avoid the pain of shame and judgment. Perfectionism isn’t about quality. It’s about protection. And the same is true for imposter syndrome: the relentless overpreparation, the compulsive checking, the inability to say “I don’t know” in a meeting — these aren’t expressions of conscientiousness. They’re attempts to prevent exposure.

Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst and author of Addiction to Perfection, wrote that perfectionism in women is often an addiction to a particular self-image — the self who is always performing, always capable, always impressive. Underneath that self-image is a terror: that without the performance, there is nothing worth loving. This is why evidence never feels like enough. Evidence speaks to the performance. The wound is underneath it.

The perfectionism-imposter loop works like this: The fear of being found out drives overpreparation and overperformance. The overperformance produces results. But because the results were achieved through extra effort — not through relaxed, natural competence — they become further evidence that real competence is absent. Of course I succeeded. I worked twice as hard as anyone else in the room. That’s not talent. That’s compensation. The bar rises. The cycle continues.

Valerie Young, EdD, describes this as a “competence rule” — a privately held, often unconscious definition of what it would mean to be genuinely competent. For many driven women, that rule is impossibly demanding: to be truly competent means to know everything, to get it right immediately, to never need help, to never feel uncertain. Every departure from that standard reads as proof of fraudulence — not as evidence of the normal learning curve that everyone experiences.

Kristin Neff, PhD, pioneer of self-compassion research, offers a crucial reframe here. In her work, she distinguishes between self-compassion and self-esteem: self-esteem requires being above average to feel okay about yourself, while self-compassion allows you to be a flawed, uncertain human and still treat yourself with basic kindness. The imposter syndrome cycle is, in part, a self-esteem economy operating in permanent deficit. Self-compassion, as a practice, starts to interrupt that loop — not by convincing you that you’re excellent, but by uncoupling your worth from the verdict. (PMID: 35961039)

This is also where the internal links to foundational healing work become relevant. The imposter loop isn’t primarily a cognitive problem — it’s a relational wound, and it heals relationally. That means working not just with the thoughts that accompany imposter syndrome, but with the felt sense of safety in your own body, the internal experience of being enough without proving it, and the early relational dynamics that organized the whole system in the first place.

Both/And: You Can Be Competent and Still Feel Like a Fraud

Here’s the both/and reality that I find myself returning to again and again with clients: imposter syndrome doesn’t mean you’re incompetent. It means you’ve been wired to distrust your own competence. Those are not the same thing.

The culture around imposter syndrome — particularly in professional development circles — tends to frame it as a confidence problem with a confidence solution. Lean in. Own your power. Act as if. This framing is understandable, and sometimes those behavioral shifts are genuinely useful as a starting point. But they miss the clinical reality. You can absolutely be both highly skilled and genuinely suffering from a pervasive felt sense of fraudulence. Both of those things are true simultaneously. One doesn’t negate the other.

What the both/and framing allows is this: you don’t have to argue yourself into believing you’re brilliant in order to start loosening the grip of imposter syndrome. You can acknowledge the uncertainty — I don’t know if I belong here — and act anyway. Not because the doubt is wrong, but because you’re choosing to be in relationship with your own uncertainty rather than enslaved by it. That’s a meaningfully different internal stance, and it’s one that’s accessible even when the feeling of fraudulence is at its most intense.

Megan — the physician in the green room before her keynote — found a version of this in the work she did in therapy. She didn’t arrive at a place where she felt quietly confident before every major presentation. What she arrived at was this: she could notice the loop starting, name it as a familiar pattern rather than a reliable report on reality, and step into the room anyway. The feeling didn’t disappear. It lost its authority.

That distinction — between the feeling losing its intensity versus losing its authority — is crucial. Healing from imposter syndrome, as a trauma response, doesn’t mean you become someone who never doubts herself. It means you develop enough internal ground to be uncertain without being demolished by the uncertainty. It means you can hold “I might not get this exactly right” and “I still belong in this room” at the same time.

This is the both/and. And it’s far more honest than the confidence-culture version, which often leaves driven women feeling doubly fraudulent — not just uncertain about their work, but failing at being confident in the prescribed way.

The Systemic Lens: Imposter Syndrome Is Also a Structural Problem

Any honest clinical conversation about imposter syndrome has to grapple with this: not all of it is internal. Some of it is an accurate response to a system that was not designed for you.

Kevin Cokley, PhD, professor and director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent years researching imposter syndrome in marginalized groups — particularly Black students and professionals. His findings are important and often overlooked in mainstream conversations: for people from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, imposter syndrome frequently coexists with actual experiences of bias, exclusion, and systemic disadvantage. The “I don’t belong here” feeling, in those contexts, isn’t purely the product of internal distortion. It’s also a response to environments that have communicated, in explicit and implicit ways, that you weren’t expected and aren’t fully welcome.

This is a place where the purely psychological framing of imposter syndrome does real harm. When we treat it only as a cognitive distortion, we implicitly tell women — and particularly women of color — that the problem is located entirely inside them. We ask them to correct a perception when the environment they’re perceiving has genuinely offered them good reason for the perception. That’s not therapeutic. That’s gaslighting dressed in clinical language.

The systemic lens doesn’t mean that internal work isn’t warranted. It means the internal work has to happen alongside a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the structural context. Audre Lorde put it precisely:

For women navigating institutions that were not designed for them — whether that’s a corporate boardroom, a surgical training program, a venture capital pitch room — imposter syndrome is not simply a psychological malfunction. It’s a predictable response to an environment that communicates, through its structures and its norms and sometimes through its people, that the default here is someone else. Healing, for these women, means developing the internal capacity to stay grounded in who they are even when the environment is pulling hard toward self-doubt. And it means recognizing that the system’s implicit verdict about who belongs is not the truth about them.

Harriet Lerner, PhD, psychologist and author of The Dance of Anger, notes that women have historically been socialized to manage their ambition quietly — to be capable without being threatening, to lead without appearing to dominate, to know without appearing to know too much. This socialization creates a double bind: the same woman who would be admired for her knowledge and confidence if she were a man may be penalized for it in certain environments. The imposter syndrome that drives her to over-qualify every statement, to couch every opinion in uncertainty, to work twice as hard to establish credibility — that syndrome didn’t form in a vacuum. It formed in a world that told her, with regularity, that her confidence was presumptuous.

All of this means that when we talk about imposter syndrome as a trauma response, we’re talking about something that operates on multiple levels simultaneously: the personal level of childhood wounds and attachment injuries, and the collective level of systems and structures that replicate those injuries in adult professional life. Effective coaching and therapy for driven women has to be able to hold all of that.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

I want to be careful here, because I’ve seen the imposter syndrome conversation get hijacked by a particular kind of toxic positivity: the “just believe in yourself” school of thought, which leaves driven women feeling like failures at self-confidence on top of everything else they’re already managing. Healing from imposter syndrome, when it’s rooted in early relational wounding, doesn’t work that way.

What it actually looks like — in my clinical experience and in the research — is several things happening in parallel.

First, it requires identifying the roots. What, specifically, organized this pattern? Was there conditional love — praise only for achievement, not for being? Emotional neglect — a household where your inner world was consistently unmet? Parentification — being recruited to manage your parents’ emotional state rather than being allowed to develop your own? You can’t heal a wound you haven’t located. Trauma-informed therapy is often the most direct path to this, because the wound lives in the body and the relational system, not just in the narrative.

Second, it requires building a different relationship with uncertainty. Imposter syndrome thrives in the gap between “I might be wrong” and “being wrong would prove I’m fraudulent.” Closing that gap — not by becoming certain, but by becoming able to hold uncertainty without it meaning something catastrophic about your fundamental worth — is central to recovery. This is the terrain of self-understanding work, and it takes practice in a relational context, not just reflection in isolation.

Third, it requires reclaiming the capacity to internalize your own success. Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, developed a group intervention specifically for imposter syndrome, and one of its central mechanisms was collective witnessing — women articulating their actual competence out loud in front of others who were also struggling to claim theirs. There is something neurobiologically significant about speaking your competence into a relational field rather than just thinking it privately. The achievement goes in differently when it’s witnessed.

Fourth, it requires externalizing the systemic pieces. If your imposter syndrome is compounded by real experiences of bias, exclusion, or tokenism — if you’re not just battling a childhood wound but also navigating an environment that reinforces it daily — healing means developing the capacity to see that clearly. To say: this part of what I feel is a response to this environment’s actual signals, not just my internal distortion. That distinction doesn’t make the environment okay. But it stops you from organizing your entire self-concept around the environment’s verdict.

Megan, three months into regular therapy sessions, sent me a note after a panel discussion she’d done. She hadn’t been perfect — she’d stumbled on one answer, lost her train of thought briefly, and moved on. And when she got back to her hotel room, instead of the usual three-hour internal post-mortem, she found herself thinking: That went pretty well, actually. I was useful to the people in that room. She was surprised by how ordinary the thought felt. Not euphoric. Not performatively self-congratulatory. Just quiet and grounded and real. That’s what healing looks like — not a sudden acquisition of bulletproof confidence, but a small, durable increase in the capacity to be present with yourself without condempt.

Casey, eighteen months later, did take the board seat. She still has moments of that familiar cold panic. But she’s learned to recognize it as old weather — uncomfortable, not catastrophic. She’s learned to say to herself, in those moments: I know what this is. It isn’t the truth about me. That’s enough. That’s actually a great deal.

If you’re wondering whether what you’re carrying is something that could shift — whether the background hum of not-quite-deserving that you’ve been living with is something that could get quieter — the answer, in my experience, is almost always yes. Not instantly. Not without the kind of relational, trauma-informed support that goes beneath the surface. But yes. I’d encourage you to reach out through a consultation, or to start by exploring the weekly conversation we’re having in Strong & Stable, where these are exactly the kinds of questions we take seriously. You can also learn more about working with me directly to see which format fits where you are right now.

You’ve been performing competence for a very long time. What would it mean to simply be capable — and let that be enough?

Related Reading

• Clance, Pauline Rose, and Suzanne Imes. “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 15, no. 3 (1978): 241–247.
• Young, Valerie. The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It. New York: Crown Business, 2011.
• Cokley, Kevin, Shannon McClain, Alicia Enciso, and Mercedes Martinez. “An Examination of the Impact of Minority Status Stress and Impostor Feelings on the Mental Health of Diverse Ethnic Minority College Students.” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 41, no. 2 (2013): 82–95.
• Webb, Jonice. Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2012.
• Woodman, Marion. Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982.
• Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. New York: William Morrow, 2011.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Neff KD, Bluth K, Tóth-Király I, Davidson O, Knox MC, Williamson Z, et al. Development and Validation of the Self-Compassion Scale for Youth. J Pers Assess. 2021;103(1):92-105. doi:10.1080/00223891.2020.1729774. PMID: 32125190.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
• Gibson, Lindsay C.. Adult children of emotionally immature parents. Tantor Audio, 2015.
• Winnicott, D.W.. Playing and reality. Penguin, 1971.
• Woodman, Marion. Addiction to perfection. Inner City books, 1982.
• Dickinson, Emily. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1960.
• Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Penguin Classics, 1984.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer