TEL AVIV
Therapy for Imposter Syndrome, Insecurity & Self Doubt
Move toward inner confidence
Do you struggle with persistent feelings of insecurity?
You criticize yourself constantly. You doubt yourself, feel like a failure, or are afraid people will find out the truth about you.
Performance fears come in many forms. You may feel a constant pressure to perform perfectly. Or you may have trouble getting started on tasks because you feel that they need to be outstanding. You find yourself alternating between working really hard to the point that you forget to enjoy life, and having trouble getting anything done at all.
Some people experience imposter syndrome, which is when you are objectively doing well, but you feel like a failure inside. Your sense of success is fragile. You are constantly afraid that you will be exposed and your entire career will collapse.
Or you may constantly have a voice inside you that criticizes everything you do. Before you do it, while you do it, after you do it, you are constantly noticing what was wrong with what you did and how you could have and should have done it better.
Feeling this way is common, and completely transformable.
You can feel confident in yourself, have more compassion and patience for your mistakes, and feel more motivated and successful throughout life.
What Therapy Looks Like
The first thing we do in therapy is figure out the type of self doubt you are struggling with. First we want to understand if you are genuinely underperforming, or if you are successfully performing and yet feeling very bad about it. Treatment is slightly different for each of these.
Once we have a picture of what is going on on the outside, we want to build a picture of what is happening on the inside. What thoughts are tripping you up? Why are they there?
Self doubt and self criticism come from many different sources. You may have grown up around highly successful parents or siblings, and feel you can never measure up to them. You may have experienced criticism that left you feeling that you aren’t successful and won’t be. You may be - as so many of us are - deeply afraid of failure. So afraid that you freeze in place and can’t seem to motivate yourself to do what you really want to do.
After we have figured out what is happening inside you, we can begin to intervene. Interestingly, most of my clients tell me that the process of figuring out really clearly what is causing their self-doubt tends to improve it significantly.
The next part of therapy is learning to lessen the fears and find success. This means learning to build flexibility in your view of life, being able to make progress while being afraid of failure. It means learning that it is ok to mess up, that it is ok to not be perfect. We’ll learn how to handle judgment from other people, and how to lessen the judgmental voice inside of yourself.
And if you are someone who has had trouble reaching your goals, we will also work on practical steps to accomplish them. If you have ADHD, or your creativity tends to pull you all over the place, we will organize and structure your goals so you can reach them in a focused manner. I’ll be both a practical coach and cheerleader as you learn to confidently handle both success and failure without losing your confidence and energy.
Therapy can help you
Stop doubting yourself
Accomplish your goals without procrastinating
Feeling less pressured to perform perfectly
Feel less ashamed
FAQs
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You’ve come to the right place. Most of my clients work in high intensity professions. High performance careers strengthen our own insecurities and tendencies to be workaholics. And for good reason. There’s something you love about success, about the field you are in. We will talk about how you can stay in this field without losing your internal sanity and confidence.
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Many of us have learned to motivate ourselves through criticism. This works well in the short term but tends to harm us in the long term. In therapy we will learn additional ways to motivate yourself that have better long term outcomes (and are less painful in the short term as well!)
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Sex is a microcosm of our emotional worlds. If you are afraid of failing and letting others down, or if you are anxious and unsure that you are good enough, it can easily impact your sex life. Learning the emotional tools to manage these feelings will often help address sexual performance issues. If there is additional medical consultation needed or you are better supported by working with a sex therapist, I will help you find the best referral for you.
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Many of my clients come to therapy not quite sure what is missing from their life. As you said so well, they are feeling a general feeling of not performing their best in life, of wanting more. Part of therapy is figuring out what you want to do and what will help you get there successfully.