I Think I Have Impostor Syndrome

[eTorro]

Sometimes I'm feeling self-conscious, especially when I'm talking to people — I have the impression that what I'm saying is wrong or weird.

Or when my girlfriend calls me, I'm at a loss for words due to the awful feeling of self-consciousness; I just don't know what to say or how to get out of that tense situation.

Although I'm confident enough because I've been meditating for the past four years, I have egoic leftovers that are pretty strong when they get triggered or activated. I've done my homework in terms of consciousness work. I'm aware of anything that happens inside my own mind or aware of the feelings that I'm experiencing at a particular moment.

In the past, I've had severe social anxiety, but right now I'm pretty much okay — the only thing that I need to overcome is my self-consciousness and my slightly awkward moments when I talk to people.

To offer some context, I grew up in a dysfunctional family — my father was absent, violent and an alcoholic and my mother was depressed and emotionally distant. I grew up in poverty.

I really wanna fix my impostor syndrome issue.

Do you have any tips for that?

Edited June 23, 2022 by eTorro
To delete a word.

[Osaid]

Working in customer service has helped, but very slowly. I'm still in the process of unravelling it. I still feel like people are secretly angry or annoyed by me when I talk with them or do some tiny thing wrong.

I think when it comes to irrational fears like this, the problem is lack of experience. Your mind tries to make up for that lack of experience through its imagination, it imagines what the experience could possibly be, and imagination can be very faulty and fantastical, which leads to irrational fears. Not to mention, your imagination also likes to cherry-pick past situations, so be careful of that. I guess the key is to stop delegating experience to imagination, and to start creating the actual experience. So in a less-wordy way, exposure therapy.

When you gain experience you start to realize that no one really cares, and also that the people you compare yourself to also have their demons in the closet as well. You will often run into a situation where you're like "OMG that guy totally hates me" but then he does something completely opposite to that, betraying your imagination, those are the moments to cherish and be aware of, because they break the illusion.

In general, you should prioritize your emotional well-being above all. If you're having thoughts which are causing anxiety, you should immediately ground yourself and alleviate it. Do a body check, are you being attacked by someone? Is there a fire occurring somewhere in your experience? Then where is the anxiety coming from? There is no possible situation where having anxiety is necessarily beneficial or practical, it's just extra suffering on top of the experience.

Overall it seems to come down to projections and lack of experience. Become aware of how you project in social situations. Someone won't even say anything, yet you'll already assume they're thinking bad of you. Can you see how exhausting this is in the long-term, thinking of all these elaborate scenarios when you meet people? Just drop it, be open-minded, don't assume, live in that moment and in that interaction. It is also possible to become non-reactive to the elaborate scenarios that you imagine, this happens when you realize them to simply be thoughts and not reality, this is probably the best way to go about it. Notice that, in actuality, you have never experienced someone thinking badly of you outside of your imagination. That experience is always imagined, unless you somehow entered someone's head. That's how powerful your imagination is, become aware of it.

[Razard86]

1. Majority of your thoughts are Bull Shit. Understand that. You have mostly been taught Bull Shit. It sucks that this is the case but its something we all have to contend with. This is why mental illness and all other issues exist. You have been conditioned to think small of yourself so you don't realize your genius and creativity.

2. So ignore the Bullshit that comes to mind because its there to turn you into whatever random Bull Shit you have picked up.

Now that I got that out of the way.....Please give yourself the love you deserve. Because you are the only one who can.

[flowboy]

On 23/06/2022 at 9:33 PM, eTorro said:

In the past, I've had severe social anxiety, but right now I'm pretty much okay — the only thing that I need to overcome is my self-consciousness and my slightly awkward moments when I talk to people.

To offer some context, I grew up in a dysfunctional family — my father was absent, violent and an alcoholic and my mother was depressed and emotionally distant. I grew up in poverty.

Meditation will help, but not fix that.

It works like this: self-consciousness is a protection mechanism

With a violent father around, a child has to learn to watch what they say or do, in order to not set them off.

This mechanism starts to lead a life of its own when you are all grown up, even though you don't need it anymore.

So now it's active and making you watch yourself in social interaction. It's called hypervigilance and is common with CPTSD.

As long as the pain of being a child with an unsafe and violent or absent father, is still somewhere hidden, outside of your conscious awareness, your defense mechanism will be active.

The only thing that will help is to dig up some of the unfelt past pain, feel it, process it, and show the inner child that it's not relevant today anymore. That it is safe now.

Expect to spend many hours crying spread out over several sessions, to have your problem fixed.

But... it really works!

As I have seen time and time again.

[eTorro]

9 hours ago, flowboy said:

It works like this: self-consciousness is a protection mechanism

With a violent father around, a child has to learn to watch what they say or do, in order to not set them off.

This mechanism starts to lead a life of its own when you are all grown up, even though you don't need it anymore.

So now it's active and making you watch yourself in social interaction. It's called hypervigilance and is common with CPTSD.

Thank you!

It makes sense, and now I have a clear understanding of my self-consciousness issue.

Why didn't I know this?

And my social anxiety issue. Can you help me understand it?

[flowboy]

@eTorro  Anxiety is an alarm bell for old unconscious pain that is about to be felt again.

So one feels anxiety, consciously, and starts to project all kinds of thinking patterns and logic about what is scary about it, but that's all nonsense.

The anxiety just says: "if we stay here, we might feel the pain again. The pain that was too big and overwhelming for us last time"

That pain has something to do with a variant of feeling unloved.

Unaccepted, maybe. Not good enough, maybe.

Maybe a sense of hopelessness, a knowing that you can't just be yourself and express yourself just as you are, and be loved.

As a child one of your primary needs is to be loved unconditionally: without having to behave in any particular way for it, and able to express anything and still be loved.

There will be many moments where you can learn that this actually is not the case.

Moments in your family system, moments in a peer group at school.

Probably both.

That pain is too big for a young person to handle. You are probably not aware of it right now.

That means you need anxiety to warn you, to never get into situations again where you might be reminded of it.