Journey & Discover With Me: My Inner Imposter

Exploration
Written By Chris Read

The answer? Probably more questions—but they’ll be good ones.

How can I transform self-doubt into grace and compassion?

 3 Key Takeaways:

  • Cultivating the skill of grace is paramount in overcoming violent self-talk

  • How you frame events (positively or negatively) shapes your perception of reality

  • Compassion is superior to sympathy or empathy for creating traction in your actions

“Our inner imposter comes down to the denigration of our own capabilities, whispering cruel things in our ears in the voices of others from our own perspective.”

Everyone feels like an imposter at some point in their lives. Those who claim not to are likely delusional, as this feeling is normal and very human and very likely to have happened at some point. It is probably not hard to think of times when this will have been the case in your own life. Upon reflection you may remember experiences where you were the most junior person or person of minority in the room, or potentially circumstances when you won something or gained an opportunity for which you considered others to be more deserving. This gnawing feeling and the subsequent, often violent, self-talk are what we consider the feeling of our inner imposter. This article will be centred around what you can do personally to moderate these feelings, however, I do want to call out that for many people these circumstances are due to cultural practices of discrimination. Although I will centre the article on what we can do personally, this does not mean it is only our responsibility to make the spaces and forums in which we operate secure and safe to allow for feelings of belonging with that out of the way lets dig in.

Our inner imposter comes down to the denigration of our own capabilities, whispering cruel things in our ears in the voices of others from our own perspective. For many, this is instilled in our youth as part of our family life, through schooling, further education, or other extracurricular activities we undertake. Despite its violence, I think this voice holds a very important role in our lives as it keeps us alive physically and socially especially when there is an existential threat of feeling like we do not belong. There are multitudinous ways in which this manifests internally, but most likely it is an internal monologue of hateful things this voice says about your work or attacks it places on your own personal character, mainly, calling out all your flaws.  

If you think that I (Chris) am impenetrable because I am writing on this subject, you would be mistaken. I have suffered deeply from the pains provided by my own mind, one of the most recent examples being that not 1 hour after hitting publish on my website I felt this pit in my stomach and the horribly negative self-talk creep in – “who would even want to read what you say? Isn’t this going to hurt someone? Who are you to offer your ‘wisdoms’? “ (among many, many, many more). This is not isolated; I feel this with every post, even thoughts about the types of articles I might post. Talk about a sucker for punishment. My point is that, unless you are Buddhist levels of enlightenment or have a pathological issue like narcissistic personality disorder (by its truest definition in the DSM - delusion of specialness, fantasy of unlimited personal success, and a lack of empathy for others) you will be encountering some magnitude of these thoughts and feelings.

This internal monologue is something that I want to explore, as the inner critic is a powerful force of the mind which can help or hinder us. Without the curiosity to explore inner criticism it takes on the characteristic of ego-centric violent outbursts that can be unhelpful and damaging. On the other hand, if distance can be cultivated, this critical voice can be used for amazingly clear insight. Effective co-existing with this voice is an artform and brings into play two things I have struggled with learning over my many years. Giving yourself grace and acting with self-compassion. I will do my best to describe my experience of them and convey it in a useful way, however, if you are finding all this too difficult to figure out try your best to read on and hopefully it will help. I want you to know that internally understanding what these two things mean is a messy process, and I hope to that by the end of this you will have some nugget of clarity to unblur how to interact with these pieces of yourself.

Cultivating Calm Amid Chaos

“Achieving skill with grace is a difficult process as it requires you to sit in the incredibly uncomfortable shame, guilt, and a complex concoction of other emotions that make up whatever circumstance you are in.”

Let’s start with the concept of grace. Grace is the calming space that you provide yourself emotionally and spiritually when action is taken by yourself or another, regardless of outcome. In simple terms, grace is an acknowledgement that a stimulus or outcome does not define your existence or identity and that in fact those things are separate from you as they are outside of your control. It is the skill of non-reactiveness and metered choosing. When we are unskilled with grace, it is easy to find ourselves counterintuitively attempting to control things that are outside of our control, then using this as proof of our own “uselessness”, feeding out inner imposter. Wild.

Achieving skill with grace is a difficult process as it requires you to sit in the incredibly uncomfortable shame, guilt, and a complex concoction of other emotions that make up whatever circumstance you are in. Pain in these circumstances is common and can be amplified by trauma (big or little T), previous experience, and whether you frame things positively (optimistically) or negatively (pessimistically). These are by no means an exhaustive list of amplifiers; however, you can see how all voices in your head and the emotions in your body screaming at you will make it almost impossible to focus on creating a calm space to propagate and utilise grace.

Despite its elusiveness, it is possible to cultivate this garden. One such major vegie patch that needs cultivating is our capabilities surrounding narrative framing of occurrences and opportunities, as this is a common amplifier. Personally, this is one of the biggest hurdles having grown up in a very pessimistic and results-driven environment. The belief that my survival does not rely on reaction to a stimulus, at times feels unrealistic or near impossible. However, even if I am bad at it, that doesn't mean that practice doesn’t make me (or us) better relative to our starting position. Martin Seligman in his books Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness (Amazon) defines some core tenants of the field of positive psychology that may help us. Before you go screaming to the hills or slump your shoulders in defeat about yet another person talking about “positivity” hear me out, as this is certainly not that. Before I read these books, that too was what I thought.

I want to describe what “framing” is, because for a long time I didn’t quite get it. Framing is, in effect, the lenses of the sunglasses we use to view the world (no, not literal sunglasses 😑, but..well.. sort of), they colour everything we see including the processes by which we ascribe meaning to people, objects, locations, and events. In a physical sense this is easier to understand because when your physical reality is changed it is objectively more obvious. For example, if your leg was amputated your understanding that you lack a leg is obvious and clear. The more insidious and difficult to comprehend frames are belief-based problems where our figurative reality is changed. Using the same example as above, there are 2 ways someone could see their figurative reality post-amputation – I can/can’t play soccer because I have 1 fewer leg. Obvious this is very contextual and highly nuanced, but if someone frames problems as though they are capable or incapable it changes the way in which they approach things in their lives. This could mean they feel defiantly challenged or utterly defeated at the prospect of doing something, for argument sake, a game of soccer.

One of the many powerful levers in Martin Seligman’s books that underpins a large part of the pessimist-optimist dichotomy is the 3P’s – permanence, pervasiveness, and personalisation. Permanence describes whether we see an event as temporary or permanent e.g. I can never walk again. Pervasiveness refers to how many areas of your life it effects e.g. I can’t do anything right. Then finally personalisation is where we ascribe the issue to our own control (or lack thereof) rather than the occurrence of an event or something beyond our control e.g. I didn’t get the job because I’m useless. Now it is important to state that in each example above I have used a negative frame, if you invert each of the statements above e.g. “I can do anything” you reach the positive frame. At a base level, seeing this patterning can help us understand why we think the way we do and, by extension, why learned helplessness and depression (a solid correlatory to a negative frame) gets such an insidious foothold on our actions.

So that you can create a non-judgemental space for grace you need to actively cultivate more helpful framing. You can apply the 3Ps to our discussion on grace by trying to notice when and how you ascribe meaning to things. Often negative framing can constrict how much space we feel like we have to manoeuvre and therefore compress feelings that we are unworthy. Importantly, for each event in life there are 3 separate times when you can notice and cultivate better framing: before (medium difficulty), during (hardest), and after (easiest). If you are new to exploring your own grace, then I would say start with after the fact as it is easier to stuff it up and then know it’s happened. Although after the fact sucks the most as we have to experience the bad thing, it is invariably where we must start. Most people lead with regret and shame here, and that is perfectly normal. Try your best to view this as an additive process where, instead of trying to supplant or replace what you are doing, just add it on as a step. The goal with good framing is to first gain momentum, then utilise that momentum to bring awareness earlier and earlier in the process, until eventually it helps to you change the way you see things. This is not toxic positivity, so don’t deny how shit you feel or any of that, tack it on to the end as a bonus extra and before long you will find it almost a game to see it differently, even if out of spite. I will say, people often vilify spite as a motive, but it is bloody useful. Tell me I cannot do something, although I might not look excited to solve the problem, my seething internal critic will see to it I get my productive revenge. As you become more and more aware and capable of working with framing, the new perspective will assist in reducing the volume of noise. Making grace easier to find. If you try to positivity wash things however, you will find your mind violently reject it like a blood transfusion gone wrong.

As a loving aside to any readers who are suffering or sufferers from/of depression, please know you are not alone. Let me be the first to say, fuck depression – truly middle finger to the sky, fuck you. If you are suffering from this bitch of a thing, know this was my reality for what seemed like an eternity. Everything seemed hopeless, bleak, unrelenting and uniquely shit for “just me”. By picking up on the patterns above, it will not “fix” you. When I was practicing noticing this stuff, I started to realise that I was never broken in the first place and that I have a skill that few people seemed to have – the ability to survive severe pain, in spite of any shitty reality laid out in front of me. Lean into this prime skill that your depression ruthlessly provides, and it can give you power to change whatever you want to change, after all, it is only pain. 

Other methods that help me find grace include things like meditation, journaling, and emotional awareness practices. Each of these provides their own assistance, depending on the flavour of suffering you are going through and I think specific strategies may be better explored in future posts. I will note that you cannot always determine the flavour of suffering while you are in it. Although, the more versed you are in passing through the state of suffering to get to grace, the more you come to understand how your particular flavours taste (don’t make it weird). Think of it sort of like physical pain, there is a difference between how hard exercise feels vs. smashing your toe on the corner of the bed. Part of this is surprise and expectation and the other is the meaning behind the pain.

Compassion - Empathy in Action

“Compassion, on the other hand, is where you feel the emotions of the other person deeply, perhaps you’ve been through similar suffering yourself. You understand the pain and suffering they are going through, and you offer them the tenderness and warmth to help soothe it.”

We will now move to compassion as the second weapon on our Batman style utility belt. However, before describing compassion, I feel it necessary to first describe the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is where, almost with pity, you keep your emotions separate from another when trying to comfort them – a sympathetic response is one where you do not feel what the other person is going through and instead hold it at a distance such that it does not affect you ,sometimes aggressively so. Responses like "damn, that sounds bad, at least you are not starving", before shrugging and leaving the person to their own feelings or sitting awkwardly in the hope they will either talk themselves out or stop talking about it, are prime examples of sympathy. In essence, it is a performance to seem like you care. Issues that arise with sympathy can be those of a disingenuous interaction, and lower levels of interpersonal emotional connection. This in most cases causes more problems than it solves, especially as it relates to feeling like an imposter as it can turn into a habit of saying "this isn't that bad, you can do it". On the surface it seems kind, however underneath it does not acknowledge the underlying feelings of "imposter-y-ness" that you might be feeling. Which is not all that helpful.

Empathy, on the other hand, is where you sit with the other person's emotions by feeling them yourself. Think of it as a reflective resonance, where you match the vibration/vibes/feelings coming from another person and you let them know they are not alone. The comfort you provide is a manifestation of emotionally understanding how they feel in this moment. It becomes not about you but about them. You might say things like "I know your boyfriend just broke up with you, I am sure you are feeling horrible, tell me how you are feeling". The important feature of empathy is the ability to sit as the listener in the discomfort of other people's feelings without offering advice. Creating a grace-like space that exists for someone else. Issues that arise with empathy are those of taking on too many of other people’s emotions, which can lead to compassion fatigue. It can also lead to outrage or even the feeling that you are responsible for another person's emotions – which is dangerous and could see you entering the Drama Triangle. When turned onto the topic of the imposter, you can sometimes find yourself deep in the throws of your own negative feelings, sitting with them while not actually addressing the root beliefs or problems that caused them in the first place, leading to overwhelm and sometimes horribly depressive spirals.

As we can see, that while both sympathy and empathy involve responding to other people's emotions, they differ in their focus. Empathy is characterised by an awareness of other people's emotional experiences and an attempt to feel those same emotions from their perspective. While sympathy is purely a superficial acknowledgement that “a thing is happening” without personal investment. Now enter compassion, like a flashy drag queen covered in sequins with a flamboyant twirl and explosions made of rainbows and a superhero landing (don’t judge me, it’s epic).

Compassion is exactly the same as empathy, however, it adds the statement “and I want to help". It is about sitting with the emotions of another person, taking them on into a grace-like space and then explicitly asking yourself or the person you are sitting with “how can I best help right now?”. The difficulty with compassion, is that it is not advice giving but instead an offer towards forward action. This offer can be in the form of supporting action, review and reflection, accountability or even as sounding board while someone else tries (or doesn’t) to come to grips with their circumstances. Importantly this is only done at their behest. There are also circumstances when the correct answer is to softly challenge the person’s beliefs, although it is best not to lead with this, as timing is everything and I can tell you from experience, it is difficult not to follow it up with advice. Like a friend of mine says “any unsolicited advice is criticism”, so be careful, as people do not like to be criticised and it is the antithesis of what you are looking to achieve.

Now, all this talk of sympathy, empathy and compassion is leading to the point about our inner imposter. How this relates is, as you can imagine, instead of doing this for another person, we do it for ourselves. Otherwise known as self-compassion. It has taken me the last 4-5 years of hard work to figure out what it feels like for me and, importantly, everyone is different. Before you go getting defeated, just know that that feeling of defeat is the part of you that needs the most compassion and the defeating feeling is self-sympathy. This is not a judgement of you, because I don’t know you (nor do I proport to), but I know me and what I went through and this is the affliction I suffered and occasionally still do.

How can you use all this? Good question, I am glad you asked. I will start with some mildly useless advice that is out there “talk to yourself like you would talk to a friend” (bleh). I don’t know about you, but to me this felt/feels sort of toxically positive. Personally, in my deepest states of despair, my head is a swirling hurricane of “the world can’t be changed” pessimistic thinking and my inner self talk is as toxically negative as I think you can get. To tell me to “talk to myself like a friend” is flawed as it assumes that I see myself as a friend rather than the enemy. This all culminates in a hard block of “but I don’t deserve it”, in essence rendering the advice useless. The best and most helpful strategy I found is talking to myself in the third person as a way of noticing the dialog that exists in my own head. For example, I’d stuff something up and say something like “Chris, you fucking dunce, how could you get this wrong again, you are useless”.

Why is this helpful? Because the more you are able to make this “Chris” character someone external to you, the better the chances of helping them. I transitioned from there to journalling out these thoughts and violent comments. Over time, I began to understand the patterns that this critic would shout and realised they stemmed from a deeply scared part of me, desperate to survive at all costs. What that part of me was screaming violently at the top of its lungs was not preaching the same message as I actually wanted or wished for in my life. This mismatch was what was holding me down under the water and making me feel less than. Once I got a sense of its patterns, this horrible inner voice eventually gave way to stillness. Not some elated positive voice who thinks “I am top shit”, just
silence. This silence is a strength that those who have lived their whole life from a positive frame may find extremely difficult to comprehend as valuable. The moment when your own voice stops cutting you, twisting the knife, and talking you down to the grave becomes the moment when you look down at your scars as artwork, the resilience to pain, and a hunger to move mountains. All very poetic, but I assure you, entirely possible. Even if there is a 1% chance you are not an imposter, it is better a chance taken to see if that reality is possible than the eternal suffering that comes through inaction. I leave this section with a quote I saw somewhere from Fred Kofman that reads: “Wisdom without compassion is ruthlessness and compassion without wisdom is folly”. Think on this, it will reveal more about you than you think.

So, between grace, the ability to provide yourself calm space, and compassion, the ability to be with and empower yourself, you are able to combat the feeling of being an imposter. This challenge is not an easy one, and you will fail often (as I do). But I can guarantee that a habitual undertaking of steering into the emotional pain and appreciating how to use it for the next right step, becomes the path to a more enriching life with yourself and others. Best of luck as you go on your journey, as understanding yourself and other people is one of the real gifts of life.

 Reflection Questions:

  • If I was an external judge passing sentence on my own ability to cultivate grace what would I score (1-10)? Now again for Compassion. What small thing can you do that sets you up for success the next time you need either of these two things from yourself or others?

  • Imagine that you were the chillest and most relaxed version of you who doesn’t flinch or react to other people’s rudeness. What would that version of you give you as advice about how to proceed?

Songs That Embodies This For Me:

Resources You Could Explore:

Other Creations:

Chris Read
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