Feel Like an Imposter? The Fear of Not Being Enough
There are sessions after which even the most experienced counsellors feel lost, wondering whether they even helped at all.
Perhaps the client disclosed something unexpected and we struggled to find the right words. Perhaps a reflection did not land as we hoped or the client may have left distressed, remained stuck or asked a question we could not answer. Later, we replay the session and imagine all the ways another counsellor might have handled it better.
Sometimes the thought becomes more personal: Who am I to be doing this work?
Having taught and supervised many of them, I can assure you that feeling is commonly associated with students and early career counsellors, and I can also assure you that experience doesn’t offer complete immunity! I have been a counsellor, supervisor and educator for years. I have accumulated training, knowledge and some evidence that I can do this work and there are still plenty of moments when I wonder whether I am enough for what a particular client needs.
Research with experienced therapists suggests that I am in good company. Thériault and Gazzola (2005) interviewed therapists with at least ten years of experience and found that feelings of inadequacy and incompetence remained part of their private professional experience. Experience may change the nature of our self-doubt but doesn’t remove it entirely.
What are impostor feelings?
Clance and Imes (1978) introduced the term impostor phenomenon to describe people who struggle to internalise evidence of their competence and fear that others will eventually discover they are less capable than they appear. Success is attributed to luck, effort, good timing, low expectations or somehow having convinced other people of abilities they do not truly possess.
Praise slides off but mistakes stick. Sound familiar?
The academic literature generally favours impostor phenomenon or impostor feelings (Clance & Imes, 1978). The popular phrase imposter syndrome can make a common psychological experience sound like a formal diagnosis, missing from the DSM. Impostor feelings exist across a spectrum and can arise temporarily in response to a new role, a difficult clinical encounter or a period of professional strain.
Feelings of professional insufficiency can also have several different sources. A counsellor may have encountered an actual learning deficit. They may be working near the limits of their scope of practice or they could be tired, isolated or carrying too much clinical work. There are those that have received poor supervision or worked in an environment where uncertainty was treated as weakness. And sometimes the counsellor is practising competently but remains unable to let the evidence of that competence fully register. They don’t feel it.
These possibilities deserve careful exploration. “I feel incompetent” is a strong and absolute emotional conclusion, although it tells us very little about what actually happened.
Why doing counselling can make us feel this way
Counselling asks us to meet another person in their distress without a script or any guarantee about the outcome. We draw on theory, ethics, clinical judgement, the therapeutic relationship and the client’s own preferences. We make hundreds of small decisions during a session then we somehow have to live with the fact that we may never know the full effect of them.
A counsellor can be skilful and still lose their words. A careful intervention can be met with silence, and a client may deteriorate for reasons that have little to do with the quality of the counselling while another client may improve suddenly, mystifying both parties.
There is also very little opportunity to observe the ordinary uncertainty of other practitioners. We hear a colleague present a completed case formulation and compare it with our own messy, unfinished thinking. We attend training led by someone who has spent twenty years developing expertise in one area and wonder why the work does not come as naturally to us. Social media adds an especially strange layer, giving us regular access to therapists who appear to move through every clinical encounter with righteous certainty and a delightfully arranged, colour-coordinated bookshelf.
Beginning practice brings its own vulnerability. Knowledge acquired through study has not yet settled into the body as clinical experience. Early career counsellors are learning how to think while listening, respond while uncertain and remain emotionally present while monitoring ethics, risk, time and the therapeutic process. Feelings of incompetence are a significant part of professional identity development for many novice therapists (Thériault et al., 2009).
One study of 281 counsellors-in-training found that 65.1% reported frequent-to-intense impostor feelings. Greater impostor feelings were associated with higher psychological distress and lower counselling self-efficacy (Clarke et al., 2025). While these figures come from one American training context and shouldn’t be treated as a universal prevalence estimate, they do tell us that this experience is far from unusual.
The caring part within the fear
The research does not allow us to claim that impostor feelings prove someone is conscientious or ethically responsible. Persistent impostor feelings are associated with perfectionism, difficulty internalising success, distress and fear of negative evaluation (a schema of unrelenting standards, anyone?). They can become exhausting.
Still, the fear often gathers around something that matters a lot.
The counsellor who worries about being good enough may be painfully and acutely aware of the trust the client has placed in them. They understand that therapeutic work has consequences and they may want to avoid becoming complacent, overly confident or careless with another person’s vulnerability.
Tewfik (2022) found that employees experiencing workplace impostor thoughts tended to become more focussed on other people and were consequently rated as more interpersonally effective. In one part of the research, physicians-in-training with greater impostor thoughts showed more attentive interpersonal behaviour without any reduction in diagnostic accuracy.
That finding offers a useful possibility for counsellors. Some professional uncertainty may keep us attentive, relationally responsive and willing to examine ourselves. It may prompt us to prepare carefully, seek consultation or notice that we need further training.
The part of us that fears being inadequate may be trying, in its own way, to protect the client and our professional identity. While that protective impulse deserves respect, it may also require a slightly less loud voice. Instead, it can become a thoughtful internal consultant and be relieved of its prosecutorial duties!
When a clinical question becomes a judgement of the self
Professional doubt becomes more painful when it moves from a specific concern into a global conclusion.
I am unsure how to work with this presentation becomes I should already know this.
That intervention did not help becomes I never know what I am doing.
I made a mistake becomes I have deceived everyone into believing I am competent. They’ll find out soon!
A specific concern has edges that can be examined, discussed and addressed. Global inadequacy has no edges. It follows the counsellor from one case to another and can make every ordinary difficulty feel like further evidence for the prosecution.
At greater intensity, impostor feelings may lead counsellors to overprepare, work beyond reasonable limits, avoid unfamiliar clinical work, defer excessively to others or conceal their uncertainty. Among mental health professionals, impostor feelings have been associated with greater burnout and compassion fatigue and lower compassion satisfaction (Clark et al., 2022).
This is one reason compassionate attention is so important. Shame rarely helps us assess our competence accurately. Instead, it narrows attention around our perceived failures and makes it harder to recognise what we did well, what remained outside our control and what we can learn.
Self-compassion as part of professional practice
Self-compassion supports a more balanced appraisal of our work. Neff (2023) describes self-compassion through self-kindness, recognition of common humanity and mindful awareness of painful experience. Applied to counselling practice, these elements allow us to acknowledge difficulty without turning away from it or becoming consumed by it.
Self-compassion might sound like:
That session was difficult, and I feel unsettled by it. Other capable counsellors also encounter moments when they do not know what to do. I can examine what happened, seek help and respond responsibly without attacking myself. May I hold myself in kindness.
This approach retains professional standards and helps us stay emotionally available enough to reflect, repair and learn.
In Clarke et al.’s (2025) study, self-compassion statistically mediated the relationship between impostor feelings and counselling self-efficacy. A randomised controlled study with university students also found that a brief online self-compassion intervention reduced impostor feelings and maladaptive perfectionism (Liu et al., 2023). While research on interventions remains developing, self-compassion, psychoeducation, group support, coaching and supervision all show promise (Para et al., 2024).
A useful self-compassion practice can be very simple:
Name the experience accurately. “This is a moment of professional self-doubt.”
Remember the shared humanity of it. “Counsellors at every career stage encounter uncertainty.”
Ask what care and responsibility require now. This may involve reflection, rest, consultation, further training, repair with the client or a referral.
Compassion helps us respond wisely to the situation in front of us.
Bringing impostor feelings into supervision
Impostor feelings often become stronger in isolation. Supervision gives us another - hopefully kinder! - mind with which to examine them.
A supervisee may need reassurance, although reassurance alone is easily absorbed into the impostor story: My supervisor only thinks I am competent because they have not seen how bad I really am. Specific feedback is harder to dismiss. A supervisor can identify what the counsellor noticed, how they responded, where they exercised sound judgement and what they might develop next.
Helpful questions include:
What happened in the session, as distinct from what you fear it says about you?
What evidence are you using to evaluate your work?
What evidence of competence are you discounting?
Is there a specific knowledge or skill gap that we can address?
Were there factors outside your control?
What would you say to a respected colleague who brought this concern to you?
What support would help you respond appropriately?
Normalisation can reduce shame, provided it does not end the conversation. “Everyone feels this way” may be true, yet the supervisee still needs their particular fear to be understood.
Supervision also needs room for honest appraisal. At times, a counsellor does need further training, consultation, a reduced workload or a referral. But these conclusions can be reached with dignity. A clearly identified learning need is far more manageable than the belief that one is fundamentally unsuited to the profession.
Supervision literature has begun to explore relational, narrative and experiential approaches to impostor feelings. DeCandia Vitoria (2021), for example, describes using narrative therapy and interpersonal neurobiology within supervision to help a therapist examine internalised fraudulence, reduce shame and develop greater self-empathy. The published account is a case study rather than strong outcome evidence, but its relational emphasis is valuable. Impostor feelings are frequently maintained through secrecy and isolation, so they often need to be worked through in relationship.
Letting all the evidence into the room
Good counselling practice asks us to work within our competence, remain open to feedback, use supervision, recognise our limits and repair when something goes wrong. These expectations leave room for being human.
We will sometimes leave sessions uncertain. We will meet clients whose experiences exceed our current knowledge. We will make interventions we later reconsider. We will occasionally listen to another practitioner and wonder whether they received a secret therapist instruction manual that we somehow missed in our inbox.
When the fear of not being enough appears, we can begin with a gentler and more useful question:
What is this fear trying to protect, and what do I actually need?
The answer may be reassurance or it may be supervision, learning, rest, consultation or a decision about scope of practice. Whatever the answer, the feeling itself does not deserve contempt.
Your uncertainty is one part of you. Your training, experience, attentiveness, ethical commitment, capacity for repair and willingness to seek supervision are also present. Let all of the evidence into the room.
Our early career counsellor group is open for bookings! Find out more here.
References
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006
Clark, P., Holden, C., Russell, M., & Downs, H. (2022). The impostor phenomenon in mental health professionals: Relationships among compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Contemporary Family Therapy, 44(2), 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-021-09580-y
Clarke, B. J., Hartley, M. T., & Button, C. (2025). Impostor phenomenon and counselor development: The critical role of self-compassion. Journal of Counseling & Development, 103(2), 149–160. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12544
DeCandia Vitoria, A. (2021). Experiential supervision: Healing impostor phenomenon from the inside out. The Clinical Supervisor, 40(2), 200–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/07325223.2020.1830215
Liu, S., Wei, M., & Russell, D. (2023). Effects of a brief self-compassion intervention for college students with impostor phenomenon. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 70(6), 711–724. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000703
Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 193–218. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047
Para, E., Dubreuil, P., Miquelon, P., & Martin-Krumm, C. (2024). Interventions addressing the impostor phenomenon: A scoping review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1360540. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1360540
Tewfik, B. A. (2022). The impostor phenomenon revisited: Examining the relationship between workplace impostor thoughts and interpersonal effectiveness at work. Academy of Management Journal, 65(3), 988–1018. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2020.1627
Thériault, A., & Gazzola, N. (2005). Feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and incompetence among experienced therapists. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 5(1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733140512331343840
Thériault, A., Gazzola, N., & Richardson, B. (2009). Feelings of incompetence in novice therapists: Consequences, coping, and correctives. Canadian Journal of Counselling, 43(2), 105–119.