When "Fake It Till You Make It" Doesn't Work

"Imposter syndrome", like most labels, can capture the vague texture of an experience, but it often misses what is most painful for the people who use it.

In this piece:

• Why "imposter syndrome" as a label can miss what is most painful for the people who use it about themselves

• What the cultural picture of imposter syndrome captures correctly, and what it leaves out

• Why the standard advice (back yourself, fake it till you make it, challenge the unhelpful thought) lands for some people and falls flat for others

• The two very different structures that walk through the consulting room wearing the same label, and what they share underneath

• Why what shifts the imposter feeling is not another technique, and what the change actually involves

  
  

More and more, professionals are arriving in therapy and describing themselves as imposters. The phrases come with them, already framed. I think I have imposter syndrome. I'm just winging it. Any minute now they'll find out. 

I have learned, over time, to slow labels like this down and to ask, what does that mean to you?

Not because I doubt them. But because the label, on its own, tells me almost nothing.

Words like imposter syndrome, like burnout, like dysphoria, mean something to the people who use them. They are usually trying to name something true. But they are rough containers. They flatten experiences that, underneath, look nothing alike. And in my experience, if I take the label at face value, I will end up offering the wrong response to the person sitting in front of me.

When we hear someone describe themselves as feeling like an imposter, most of us fill in the gaps in a particular way. We assume they mean: I feel I don't really belong here. I feel suspicious that someone is going to find out. I feel I lack the skills the role requires. We are quick, as people, to give one another the benefit of the doubt. We hear the word imposter, picture a slightly anxious overachiever who needs a bit of reassurance, and reach for the standard kit. Back yourself. Fake it till you make it. List your achievements. Challenge the unhelpful thought.

For some people, that does shift things. But the patients who come to see me are usually not the people who can be reassured out of it. They have tried that already. They have been quite good at it. They have degrees. They have decades of experience. They have evidence. They can recite, on demand, why they should not feel like an imposter. None of it moves the internal experience.

That is the moment I get curious. Because what sits under the word imposter turns out to be at least two very different things. They look similar from the outside. Underneath, they are organised completely differently, and they need completely different kinds of attention.

The first kind

The first kind of patient is one I want to describe carefully, because we don't talk about them very often. From the outside, they often present as anxious, contrite, modest. They downplay their successes. They describe themselves as a fraud. On paper, they have all the markers of someone who needs gentle reassurance.

But there is something else going on underneath, and if you sit with them long enough, you start to feel it. Somewhere, quite deep down, they are enjoying it. The fooling. The pulling-something-off. The feeling of cleverness, of being in on a joke that no-one else can see. They have a sense, often unspoken, that the world is divided into people who exploit and people who get exploited, and they are working very hard to stay in the first category. The imposter feeling, for them, is not really about lack. It is about getting away with something.

This is harder to spot because it usually arrives wrapped in apparent humility. The patient looks worried about being found out. Underneath, the worry has a different texture from fear. It has a kind of pleasure in it. A satisfaction that the others have been fooled.

And here is the part that can be harder to see. The same patient is also, very often, deeply afraid. If you live in a world where everyone is either exploiting or being exploited, you tend to assume everyone else is doing what you are doing. You feel powerful when you are getting away with something, and you feel hunted when you suspect others are getting away with something at your expense. The pleasure in the deception and the fear of being deceived are the same self. They are two faces of one organisation.

That patient is not failing to back themselves. They are organised around exploitation in both directions. Telling them to fake it till they make it lands as faintly ridiculous to them, because they already are. The faking is the win.

The second kind

The second kind of patient is the one most readers will recognise as having real imposter syndrome. They are not enjoying any of it.

They walk in already collapsed. I just got lucky. I'm out of my depth. I have no idea what I'm doing. They cannot hold their competence. At any given moment, they are in contact only with the part of themselves that doesn't know, that hasn't done enough, that isn't ready. They cannot feel both at once. Either they are competent or they are not. There is no middle ground. They live in an all-or-nothing world, and at any given moment they are aware only of what is missing.

This is different from ordinary self-doubt, which most people experience and most people can metabolise. This patient cannot metabolise it. They have a felt sense of internal inadequacy that no external evidence touches. You can show them their CV. They can recite it back to you. It does not move the feeling.

Underneath this collapse there is often a particular kind of inner voice. Not just self-doubt, but something harsher and more relentless. A merciless internal critic that runs without pause and is not subject to ordinary evidence. It does not respond to facts. It does not weigh things fairly. It judges constantly, and it uses an idiom of attack that is older and more primitive than anything the patient would say out loud. Often the patient is so used to it that they no longer notice it. It is what they live with.

And because that critic feels merciless from the inside, the patient comes to expect mercilessness from the outside too. They walk into rooms expecting to be judged with the same harsh eye that judges them from within. They read every silence as disapproval. They hear every email as veiled criticism. The aggression that lives inside them is projected outward, so the world starts to look populated by critics who, for the most part, are nothing like as severe as the version the patient is meeting in their own head. This is part of why external evidence does not move the feeling. The judge they are most afraid of is not in the boardroom or on LinkedIn. It is inside them, and it has been there a long time.

Beneath all of this, the self is organised around shame. There is a kind of internal blueprint, set very early, that says: I am not good enough at the level of who I am. Anything I appear to do well must be performed. Any skill I happen to have cannot really be mine, because it cannot be reconciled with what I know to be true about myself. So the achievement floats on the surface. It does not sink in. It cannot become part of how the person experiences themselves.

This is the structural floor underneath what the world calls imposter syndrome at its most painful end. And in my experience, it is what continues to drive many of the established professionals who arrive in my room saying they are burnt out, that they cannot enjoy their success, that they feel hollow at the centre.

What both have in common

Despite looking very different, both of these patients share something underneath. Neither of them can hold competence and incompetence at the same time.

The first cannot tolerate the felt experience of not knowing in any area. To admit it would feel like collapse. So they manage incompetence by hiding it inside a clever performance, and the performance has to be kept up.

The second cannot tolerate the felt experience of being competent. To take it in would feel false, dishonest, like claiming something that is not really theirs. So they manage competence by disowning it, and the disowning has to be kept up.

In both cases, something has to be kept up. There is no version of the self that can quietly hold both, I am good at some things and I am not good at others, and that is okay, without one part of the picture collapsing.

What does it look like when someone can hold both? It looks remarkably ordinary. The person knows roughly what they bring. They know what they don't. They can absorb a piece of feedback without it threatening their whole sense of self. They can take pleasure in learning a new skill, because they understand they are building something, not impersonating someone. The phrase fake it till you make it makes sense to them, because they hear it the way it is meant. You are not faking who you are. You are temporarily acting as if you have a particular skill while you build it. There is even pleasure in the not-yet-knowing.

Most ordinary, functional adult life depends on this ability. Most of the standard advice for imposter syndrome assumes the person already has it. That is why the advice works for some people and not for others. It is not a failure of the technique. It is a mismatch with the structure.

Why the usual advice doesn't move it

I want to be careful here, because I do not want to be read as dismissing approaches that help a lot of people. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, in particular, is useful for many people. Looking at a thought from different angles, asking whether it is fair, building evidence against it, are skills that most functional adults use daily. Learning them is part of what it means to grow up. They are part of how a person arrives at the kind of mind that can hold both competence and incompetence in the first place.

But for the patient whose self is not yet organised that way, those interventions do something different. They become another stage on which the underlying dynamic plays out.

The patient who is organised around exploitation will perform CBT brilliantly for the therapist, and feel privately clever about having done so. The patient who is organised around shame will fail at CBT and take the failure as further evidence that they are defective, that even therapy cannot fix them, that they are the rare patient for whom nothing works. In both cases, the technique has been quietly recruited into the existing structure rather than challenging it.

This is why, with this kind of patient, words alone tend not to move very much. They have heard the words. They can produce the words. The words remain on the surface. What the patient needs, more than another technique, is an experience.

Where it comes from

The imposter feeling, in its more painful form, has a story underneath it. Not always a dramatic one. Often quite a quiet one.

It comes from very early experiences of not being seen accurately. The child who is praised for performance but not really known. The child who learns that being loved depends on being a particular kind of impressive. The child whose parent needed them to be exceptional, or talented, or unlike other children, in order for the parent to feel okay about themselves. The child who could not work out who they were, because the people around them needed them to be something specific, and the something specific was the price of being kept close.

And often there is a second piece. The parent who needed them to be exceptional was also, often, harsh with them. Withholding approval. Quick to criticise. Cold when the child fell short. That harshness gets internalised. It becomes the patient's own inner voice. By adulthood the parent may be long gone, or softened with age, or far away geographically, but the harsh voice is still in the room. It speaks with the same merciless register it spoke with when the patient was eight years old. And the patient has been negotiating with it ever since.

That child grows up and becomes very good at performing competence. They have to. The performed self is the self that gets seen. The self underneath, the one that does not know yet, the one that is uncertain, the one that has ordinary limits, never gets met. So it stays small and unformed. As adult achievements pile up, the gap between what people see and what the person feels grows wider. The achievements belong to the performed self. The unmet self stays where it always was. The imposter feeling is the gap between them.

This is why telling such a patient to back themselves lands so flat. There is no consolidated self behind the achievements to back. The achievements were made by a part of them that has always known it was performing, and the rest of them has never been mirrored back as a whole person. You cannot argue someone into a self they have not yet been allowed to develop.

What does shift it

What does move something for this patient is harder to describe in a sentence, partly because it is not a technique. It is a register.

It begins with the same move I started with. Asking the patient what they mean by the word. And then, gently, asking the same kind of question in the other direction. What does competent mean to you? What would it look like? Who are you imagining when you imagine someone who has it?

The answer is often surprising. It is vague. It is an undescribed ideal. It is an image the patient has never examined. They have been measuring themselves against a fantasy. Once the fantasy is looked at directly, it loosens, because it cannot survive being described.

From there, what helps takes time. It involves the slow consolidation of a more honest sense of who the patient is. Their strengths. Their limitations. The particular shape of what they bring into a room. Most of these patients have not really thought about this. They have either inflated themselves to avoid the felt sense of inadequacy, or they have collapsed into it and refused to take in the evidence that contradicts it. Neither move requires them to look at themselves honestly.

A small example that comes up often. A senior professional tells me they cannot really be competent in their job, because they do not understand the technical details of the product their company makes. They are the chief financial officer. The competence the role calls for is the ability to run a finance team, manage people, hold a strategic view of the business. The product knowledge is incidental. They have built their imposter feeling on a definition of competence that has nothing to do with the job they do well. Looking at this directly, slowly, often for the first time, is itself part of how things start to shift.

The therapist, with this kind of patient, has to be a different presence than they are used to. Not a judge, who confirms whether they are competent or not. Not a flatterer, who reassures them. Someone who can see them accurately, including the parts they are ashamed of, and not flinch. Someone steady enough that, over time, the patient takes the steadiness in. The patient gradually develops the experience of being seen as a whole person, ordinary limits and all, and not falling apart in the seeing.

Alongside this, attention to what is already reaching toward something more honest in the patient. The fact that they came. The fact that they are willing to ask the question. The small moments where they catch themselves doing the old thing. None of these are insignificant. They are early signs of a self that wants to be more integrated than it currently is. Recognising those signs, and not letting them pass unnoticed, matters as much as anything else.

I am not going to close this with a complete theory, because there isn't one. Change of this kind is slow. It is uncomfortable. It does not produce the clean before-and-after that the original imposter syndrome framing implies, where you simply update the false belief and move on.

But what it does produce, when it lands, is a different kind of person. Someone who can hold both. Who can be fairly competent at some things and quite mediocre at others, and find that bearable. Who can take in feedback without disintegrating. Who can take pleasure in learning, because the learning is no longer a referendum on whether they deserve to exist.

That, for me, is what it actually means to no longer feel like an imposter. Not the absence of doubt. The presence of a self that can hold both.

Written by Kirstan Lloyd, Clinical Psychologist

Kirstan Lloyd is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. She works with expats, internationally mobile adults and people navigating identity transition. This article was written by Kirstan with the support of AI research tools and is grounded in literature from psychology, neuroscience, and trauma-informed care.