On Thursday, Lupita Martinez, a part-time mental health clinician at Student Health Services, held a workshop that discussed building self-esteem. The workshop started at 1:00 p.m. and lasted for one hour.
Martinez opened the workshop with a pre-workshop survey. Afterwards, she discussed imposter syndrome.
“Imposter syndrome is the inability to believe that you are actually deserving of accomplishments that you’ve made,” Martinez said.
In brief, people with imposter syndrome constantly doubt themselves. However, they are usually high-achieving people capable of achieving their goals. It is a common type of social phenomenon.
Some students shared some of their own personal experiences about dealing with self-doubt.
One student spoke of his experience, saying how he used to struggle with self-doubt. He reinforced the fact that he no longer doubts himself, and continues to persevere through life’s challenges.
One LBCC student, Lena Hopkins, said she has sometimes experienced self-doubt.
Hopkins has experienced a loss of a loved one, which spiraled her into depression. Because of this, she often feels some responsibility and guilt as well.
“I doubted myself so much that it led me into a mental breakdown. It was more of having a lot of death around me, and losing self-confidence in who I was, and just a loss of control when it came to my behavior, because I was depressed,” said Hopkins.
“I was never introduced to therapy to get the help that I needed. So that was something I did that helped a lot.”
Martinez explained the first common symptom, which is labeling.
Martinez said, “This is an extreme form of distorted thinking, basically calling yourself names. They’re actually pretty irrational. You may not necessarily be a failure, it just means that you actually failed at that thing that you were really upset about.”
Most of the time, labelling is exaggerated and often happens because of one’s own temper.
Another symptom of imposter syndrome is “discounting the positives.” Martinez said that rejecting positive experiences actually dismisses the beneficial outcome of the situation, and only creates negative energy within oneself and among others.
“You feel unrewarded, first of all, and inadequate as well. Sometimes, discounting the positives sucks the fun out of it,” Martinez said.
Recognizing the underlying problems is key to finding a solution to this issue.
“Making sure that you recognize the real reason why you didn’t do a good job. The real reason that you actually got to where you are,” said Martinez.