Life in academia: When imposter syndrome triggers a trauma response
I’ve been on sabbatical for almost three months now. I started with an intentionally unstructured process with three main goals for each day: go outside, read, and write. I have a reading list and a broad topic (women in policing). Other than that, I promised myself I’d follow my interests and passions without worrying about where they’d lead. Until a week or two ago, this process worked very well for me. I actually felt myself having fun in my work and looking forward to the discoveries, connections, and ideas each new day would bring.
Yet, lately, as my fun, wandering work has begun to coalesce into tangible products, my motivation has disappeared. I’ve found that when I write or read with a specific purpose, I just don’t want to do it as much any more. I’ve identified the cause as a shift in my intrinsic motivation and perceived audience. These two elements give shape to my personal manifestation of imposter syndrome, which for me invokes reactions similar to trauma responses of fight, flight, and freeze. I decided to tell my story so that other people, especially women and other people in marginalized groups in academia, may see that they’re not alone and may begin to recognize some of the mechanisms by which imposter syndrome impacts our work and our lives.
At the start of my sabbatical, I followed my creative energies and interests because they sounded fun. My gut instincts led me all around my topic of interest, and the process felt creative and freeing and wonderful. My only audience was my inner guide, and, sometimes, whoever might read my blog posts or listen to my sabbatical presentation. Mostly, my audience was me and the creative world that I channeled into my daily work.
Sometimes, my creative instincts and knowledge-generating process boiled over into a few pages of writing in a Word document. The document had no specific purpose except to get my ideas down, see what they looked like when put into words, and deepen their complexity by making new connections. During these times, writing was a learning process. It also served as a frame (similar to putting together the outside pieces of a jigsaw puzzle) into which I could fit pieces of articles and books and other material that I’d been reading into my broader ideas. Sometimes, I had to change the frame in light of new evidence; sometimes, I had to set specific pieces aside because they don’t go with this particular puzzle or I wasn’t not sure yet where they fit. That’s when writing and reading and thinking were fun. The sense of excitement and enjoyment motivated me to continue each day.
Lately, my writing appears to be turning into a rough sketch of a book. All of a sudden, I find myself writing for an audience. The audience lives in my head as the masculine voices of critics who encounter my work with pre-existing skepticism. They’re out to discredit me, weaken or shatter my ideas, and fling the puzzle off the table as useless, uninspired, and flat-out wrong. They boo and hiss as I write. They force me to justify, justify, justify each idea through references or more meticulous, detailed steps in my logic. They see no worth or value in what I’m writing. It’s all just silly, pedantic, unimportant, and just rehashing what everyone else already knows.
From this perspective, my process has led me to discover only what everyone else already knows and has known for years. I’m exposing the limits of my knowledge and expertise by getting it all wrong. They boo and hiss me right out of the room and off the page. I don’t want to continue my journey. Writing and thinking have become tedious and dangerous. My intrinsic motivation has shifted toward getting it right: constructing a fool-proof argument that these imaginary critics can’t deny or discard; that they must listen to. I must convince them or else I have failed. Or else I’m not a real scholar who deserves to be heard and respected as an expert in my field. In this new imagined context, writing becomes a fight for my life as a scholar.
At this point in writing this story, my inner audience popped into my head. It emerged after a brief thought popped into my head that I could turn my story into an article on Medium. My sense of writing shifted dramatically for a second there. I felt the need to get the wording just right. My internal tone shifted from introspective dialogue in my journal to formalized description as if I were in a classroom or giving a presentation.
During the past couple of years, I’ve been learning a lot about our physiological responses to perceptions of danger. Fight, flight, or freeze responses take over to keep us safe from a perceived threat.
I’ve just spent lots of time getting the wording of the previous two sentences just right…something I didn’t do with any of the sentences before that. For me, that’s a sign that the critics have begun filtering into my imaginary room; they look over my shoulder, through my eyes, and into my thoughts as I write. I try to write the rest of the article with less attention to finding just the “right” way to tell my story.
As I was saying, fight, flight, and/or freeze responses take over when our bodies perceive a threat. In the first months of sabbatical, when I felt free and excited and exhilarated by the process of research and learning and discovery, I perceived no threat. I simply reveled in each moment of discovery. Then, a shift. When I now feel stunted, afraid, and defensive of my ideas, I perceive a threat. Really, it’s the other way around: perceiving the threat has triggered “danger” in my brain, which can lead to trauma responses. Instead of reveling in the magical moments of mystery, creativity, and knowledge-generation, my body leads me to dread the awful moments of justifying my ideas, proving myself, and insisting on my worth and right to be here. The fight response kicks in when I sit down to write: justify, justify, justify. The flight response kicks in when I avoid my work entirely. The freeze response kicks in when I just can’t read a new article or book because it’s too daunting to think about how I must incorporate it into my work lest someone call me out for overlooking this idea or that one. Thus, I continue to write (sometimes) in a physical state of panic. I don’t feel it exactly like panic, but perhaps that’s what’s happening in my body. My body panics as I try to type my way out of or avoid the perceived threat to my very worth and existence as a scholar.
At first, I started to analyze how I got here. Some events in my past have surely contributed to constantly feeling like I have to defend myself and prove my worth. These are particular to my individual life experiences, and also to my gender identity as a woman in a patriarchal society. As a woman, I constantly have to prove myself as equally skilled as my peers who identify as men. (This is also a common theme in my research on the historical and contemporary narratives of women in policing.) Hearing men’s voices in my head indicates how gender plays into all of this. Another part is likely the constant perception that some of the male-identified colleagues with whom I interact fairly regularly (when I’m not on sabbatical) don’t respect me as a colleague, or, perhaps more accurately, as at least equally qualified as they are. Around them, I feel constantly required to don my armor before and during our interactions.
After a brief jaunt down the road of searching for a cause, I realized that for now, the sources matter less than realizing and acknowledging what’s happening. Even writing this today, I’ve learned some things about what others might call procrastination, laziness, or lack of productivity.
In one interpretation, it’s all in my head so I should just get over it. It’s imaginary. In another (the one I identify more with), it is all in my head, but that imaginary world invokes instinctual, reasonable, and automatic physiological responses that I cannot control. I want to qualify this second interpretation by reiterating that while the critical voices I hear as I write are imaginary, this takes place within a context in which women scholars are devalued as not “real experts”; our ideas are held in lower esteem; and our work in academia tends to matter less than men’s work. So, there are sound structural reasons why, for example, the critics in my head are men and I feel the need to prove myself. In other words, the story I’ve created in my brain about my work may be particular to my experiences and thoughts, but it’s also rooted in real gender inequalities forged through social interactions and structures that keep women subordinate to men.
So, realizing and acknowledging the trauma that arises when I write and research and discover for others rather than for myself helps me identify when my avoidance and focus on productivity (in the form of number of words or pages or articles read) reflects physiological responses to perceived danger. Sometimes, avoidance just means that my ideas need longer to simmer before they boil over onto the page. When that happens, writing is a fun, exciting process, and I can’t wait for the soup to be done so I can see how it turns out when I sit down at my computer. Other times, avoidance means that I’ve been silenced by the critics in my head who have threatened my life if I even so much as begin writing a sentence. When that happens, writing is an excruciating, unfulfilling slog full of editing and qualifying almost every word of what I write. I push forward because I believe I must; I believe it’s the only way to silence those critics, to prove to them once and for all that my work is so interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking that they can’t ignore it. For me to prove myself, my work must be lauded as a major success and influence the entire field for decades to come. Under this pressure, I keep writing because I must. If I don’t, then I’ve failed and my work and career mean nothing.
This is what my imposter syndrome looks like. Naming it will, I hope, help me develop strategies for countering the trauma response. Recognizing why I sit down to write and visualizing a caring, supportive audience of my closest allies may help when I recognize that I’m operating out of a place of trauma and danger rather than a place of creative energy and freedom. When those critical voices begin to populate my audience, I can recognize how my inner writer starts to edit and justify and revise my words to death. Then, I can stop writing, take a deep breath (or two or three), and replace their voices with images and sounds of my unconditional allies. They elevate and empower me to speak my truth. They help me get down my ideas, play with them on the page, and put together the puzzle. After all, the very act of creating gives meaning to my work. It may not turn out the way I envision it, but I know that it will represent my understanding and unique perspective on the world. That perspective matters regardless of what the critics say.
Just after finishing this post, I wrote down the names of the women whom I consider my unconditional allies in academia and posted them in front of my desk. Then, I put their pictures at the top of the journal entry from which this post emerged. After taking those small actions, I felt a sense of relief and a small spark of excitement to begin my next writing session with the image of these allies forming a protective circle in which I can safely and expertly play with my ideas.
