What is Imposter Syndrome?
Impostor syndrome is a persistent feeling that you’re not as capable as others believe, even when your accomplishments show otherwise. You may attribute your success to luck, timing, or being in the right place at the right time rather than recognizing your own abilities.
I support many high-achieving women of color and adult children of immigrants, who in private feel like a fraud. Despite your experience and hard work, you may struggle to believe you deserve success. You are riddled with self-doubt, rather than seeing the evidence of how far you’ve come.
Thoughts such as: “I only got the promotion because someone else left.” “I just got lucky.” “Sooner or later someone will realize that I am not as capable as they think I am…”
Over time, self-doubt can take a toll on both your mind and body. You might clench your jaw, tense your shoulders, struggle with resting, or feel your heart racing before and after a meeting or presentation.
Many achieve great things and still struggle with self-doubt. You don’t have to navigate these feelings alone.
For many adult children of immigrants, racial stereotypes, cultural expectations, family responsibilities, and environments where belonging feels conditional altogether can complicate feelings of imposter syndrome.
Common beliefs and behaviors of imposter syndrome:
- In order to deserve recognition, you feel like you must be perfect.
- You overprepare for meetings, presentations, or important conversations.
- Believing you must constantly prove yourself, you overwork and feel stressed most of the time.
- You struggle to accept compliments, or acknowledge your strengths.
- Comparing yourself to others, you view yourself as less than.
- You feel anxious when receiving praise, promotions or new opportunities.
You may be accustomed to contorting yourself to fit external standards, or be palatable to others. In some moments, such shape-shifting is a helpful survival strategy. Those of us of the Global Majority often do so, and feel exhausted as a result.
Many multi-faceted individuals have had to learn to both code-switch and mask.
Bottom line, many of us code-switch and mask to some degree. We often adapt different parts of ourselves to survive, navigate social expectations, and foster connection and community.
People originally used the term code-switching to describe how Black Americans shift their language depending on the social context. Today, many multicultural and multifaceted individuals code-switch. This behavior requires flexibility and social awareness, allowing people to move between different aspects of their identities and navigate a range of settings. Code-switching can feel natural and fluid, helping us connect with others while expressing different parts of ourselves.
Masking, by contrast, describes how neurodivergent individuals may adopt behaviors that align with neurotypical expectations. However, people beyond the neurodivergent community also mask. When we mask, we often adopt behaviors that feel unnatural or disconnected from who we are to meet others’ expectations and keep them comfortable. This effort demands significant mental energy and often requires constant vigilance and self-monitoring.
How Somatic Therapy can help with Imposter Syndrome
In Somatic Therapy, you can explore how code-switching and masking affect your energy levels, sense of self, and sense of belonging. By tuning into your body, you can begin to recognize when these behaviors support connection and when they leave you feeling depleted or disconnected from yourself.
While traditional talk therapy may emphasize understanding and changing thought patterns, a Somatic Therapist will also invite you to notice what happens in your body as you encounter stress, uncertainty, or emotional discomfort.
Imagine your manager asks you to lead an important project.
Before you have time to consider whether you are qualified, your stomach tightens. Your breathing becomes shallow. Your mind starts generating reasons you might fail.
You immediately agree to the project but spend the next several days overpreparing.
Somatic awareness invites you to pause and notice this sequence.
- What sensations arise when you imagine being evaluated?
- Where do you notice tension, pressure, warmth, or restlessness?
- What happens to your breathing when you anticipate making a mistake?
- Do you feel an impulse to withdraw, overperform, please someone, or defend yourself?
You will become more familiar with your reactions. Before they automatically shape your decisions, you will start learning to interrupt old patterns and identify alternatives.
When you feel compelled to prove yourself, your responses may seem automatic.
You volunteer for extra work, agree to unreasonable deadlines, or rehearse conversations repeatedly. Saying no, or tolerating uncertainty feels uncomfortable and distressing.
Somatic Therapy can help you slow down in such moments.
With appropriate support, you may experiment with noticing your feet on the floor, orienting to your surroundings, adjusting your posture, or observing your breath without forcing it to change.
These small practices can create an opportunity to notice what you are experiencing and consider your options.
Over time, more flexible responses will be available to you: working hard without overworking, receiving feedback without immediately interpreting it as rejection, and setting boundaries without automatically assuming you have disappointed someone.
Rather than seeing perfectionism as a personal flaw, you may get curious about what it might be trying to do for you.
Perhaps you learned to be exceptionally prepared to avoid criticism. Maybe saying yes to others and being agreeable helped you maintain important relationships. Possibly staying busy gave you a sense of control when other parts of life felt uncertain. These patterns may have helped you navigate difficult experiences, and there are good reasons you learned to rely on them.
In therapy, you can begin to explore what these patterns have helped you manage or protect yourself from, how they affect you now, and what other ways of responding might feel possible. Together, you can get to know your inner critic, the expectations you carry, and the different parts of you that may want or need different things. With greater understanding, you can begin to make room for new possibilities.
The goal isn’t to give up your ambition. You may not stop caring about what others think. You can embrace more choice in how you move through the world, so you can respond with greater flexibility and self-trust rather than feeling driven by fear alone.
Many get stuck believing that they must feel confident before taking action.
Yet confidence may not feel accessible, particularly when you are entering unfamiliar environments, taking new risks, or challenging long-standing expectations.
Self-trust offers another starting point.
Self-trust means learning that you can respond to challenges, acknowledge uncertainty, seek support, and recover from mistakes without making your entire identity depend on the outcome.
Somatic Therapy will guide you to experience more trust in yourself. First, you may explore how you feel speaking up for your perspective, receiving appreciation, expressing a preference. You may need to practice taking up space without immediately correcting or minimizing yourself. These experiences provide opportunities to experience yourself in new ways and relating to others.
Healing is not about achieving a permanently calm nervous system or never experiencing self-doubt again. It is about developing more flexibility in how you face challenging moments.
We cannot fully understand imposter syndrome without considering the effects of racism, exclusion, discrimination and intergenerational stress.
Repeated experiences of being overlooked, stereotyped, or treated as less competent can shape how you anticipate interactions, navigate relationships, and assess your environment.
I keep these realities at the forefront while working with you. My particular trauma-informed approaches recognize how racial stress, oppression, and accumulated experiences of discrimination impact your well-being. Together, we explore how these experiences shape your present-day reactions, while also highlighting your resources, strengths and resilience.
The process is not about convincing yourself to become more resilient, or to place the burden of change on you. Instead, the focus is on your well-being, while acknowledging the environments and systems in which we all live and work. Imposter syndrome does not develop in a vacuum. When systems center white norms and privilege certain ways of communicating, behaving, and demonstrating competence, they foster self-doubt and a sense of not belonging in People of the Global Majority. We can explore how systemic racism contributes to such feelings without treating your responses to inequity as personal shortcomings.
Somatic Therapist Michele L. Kong offers a body-oriented approach to exploring imposter syndrome, building self-trust, and developing self-worth.
You Do Not Have to Earn Your Right to Belong
Imposter syndrome can leave you feeling as though you have to get everything right to earn your place in the world.
For many people of color and adult children of immigrants I support, these feelings may be shaped not only by self-doubt, but also by lived experiences of exclusion, family expectations, and the pressure to continually prove their worth and competence.
Healing doesn’t mean minimizing what you’ve been through or forcing yourself to feel confident before you’re ready. We will begin with making space for your experiences, honor the ways you’ve learned to navigate challenging environments, and gently explore what it might feel like to move through the world with greater ease.
Somatic therapy can help you notice how self-doubt lives in your body, deepen your understanding of the protective strategies you’ve developed, and build a more compassionate relationship with yourself. Over time, you can begin to create more space for choice, connection, and trust in your own worth.
Your achievements matter, but you are so much more than what you accomplish. You are allowed to learn, make mistakes, receive support, and take up space without having to prove that you belong. Here, you are welcomed, valued, and at invited to feel at home in the spaces you choose to be.