Rebecca told me how the impostor complex ‘means somebody who is successful who feels that they are only pretending, that they are going to be found out eventually, that people will discover they’re not as bright or as worthwhile as they’re meant to be. I just worry that I will eventually reach a level where people will just decide that I’m not doing as well as I think I am, or that I’m not as bright as I think I am, or other people said I am. The more time goes on, the more intense this feeling seems to be, the more I seem to accomplish, the more intense the feelings seem to be. I guess it’s just the natural fear of not being as successful as I want to be.
‘Why is it important to you to be successful?’
‘To make myself feel that what I’m doing is worthwhile, that I’m making some contribution, and to make my parents proud of me. To feel that I’m the equal of people around me. I think a lot of it has to do with low self-esteem. I think that people maybe will like me better if I have accomplished all these things.’
‘Why is it important that people like you?’
‘It makes me feel good. It makes me feel unhappy if I think people don’t like me.’
Later in our conversation Rebecca said to me, ‘I don’t feel that I am intellectually all that gifted. I think that (work very hard and I think I am successful because I work hard, and I think I should be proud of it. If I was very gifted and I could learn French or Latin because I had a gift for languages, I’d have no right to be proud of it, but because I work very hard at it I feel entitled to feel proud.’
This comment arose from our discussion about the fundamentalist religion in which Rebecca had been raised. In explaining how many of us grow up with the belief that we have to earn the right to exist, I said, ‘Some of us are taught quite actively that we don’t have the right to exist. There’s a lot of Christian teaching which says that we have to be grateful to God for giving us the gift of life.’
‘That’s how I was brought up. It was that you were nothing and humans were wicked and you were totally unworthwhile. You were supposed to think of yourself as absolutely dead last and everybody else was more important than you were. You had to achieve for the glory of God. What you do is not for your own glory. You don’t even do what you do. God allows you to do it. He gives you the strength to do it. If things were taken away from you this was something the Devil did, or it was God allowing you to be tested. Anything bad happening to you is probably your own fault.’
I commented, ‘You’re describing how, for all you’ve achieved, you haven’t achieved it at all. It’s simply that God’s allowed you to achieve it, and that makes you a kind of impostor.’
However, Rebecca’s Uncertainty about what she had a right to claim for herself was rooted not just in her early upbringing but in how she experienced herself. She said, ‘I feel that a lot of my concern about what other people feel about me, is that I feel I need to know what other people think of me so as to see what I’m really like, that I’m not capable of making an accurate judgement of what I’m really like, that it’s other people’s cumulative judgement that decides what a person is like, what I am like. I just don’t trust my own judgement. I always think that my judgement is going to be skewed because I can’t see how I act. I can’t see how I appear to other people. I worry that I do things not meaning to insult people, but I just act so that they feel insulted and so they don’t like me. I worry that my own perception of reality is not the correct one.’
‘Do you worry about your perception of external reality?’
‘Not too much, no. I can have very definite opinions about what other people are like and make judgements about them, and feel certain that I’m right, but about myself I’m tentative, I guess. I’d like to see how I looked from the outside, because the way you perceive yourself can be quite different from the way that other people perceive you, and I really would like to know how I come across to other people.’
Earlier in our conversation I had asked Rebecca, ‘Suppose you weren’t able to achieve anything and you found that everybody disliked you, what would happen to you?’
‘I think I would get very depressed. When I get depressed I quit eating, I get real lethargic, I sleep a lot, I just sort of break into tears, I wouldn’t be able to function, and I think I would be an unpleasant person to be around. I think many people who know that people don’t like them are unpleasant people to be around. If I became convinced on a long-term basis that I was useless and that nobody liked me, I suppose I could become one of those people who just sort of has a job and doesn’t talk to anybody and has no friends and lives with her cats. If it went on I think I would want to go to sleep and not wake up.’
Now Rebecca said, ‘I don’t know that I felt I never had the right to exist. It was more like, there was no point to existence. It was more like a very empty existence, where nobody cared about you.’
I have written extensively about the different ways in which extraverts and introverts perceive themselves and their world, and I have lectured about this frequently, but, no matter how clear I try to be, I am never dear enough, for quite a few people still say to me, ‘I don’t know whether I am an introvert or an extravert’. (Equally, quite a few people have told me that they know precisely which of my descriptions apply to them.)
Part of the problem is a misunderstanding. I am not talking about types of people, but about different kinds of reasons. Extraverts and introverts can all act in much the same way, but they differ in the reasons for their actions.
For example, some introverts and some extraverts might all dislike being away from home. However, the reason introverts dislike being away from home is that in a new place they do not have the control and organization which they have at home, and the reason extraverts dislike being away from home is that in unfamiliar surroundings, where they have few connections with other people, they are driven into themselves, and this can be disturbing. (This problem with unfamiliar places was pointed out to me by my friend Jo, an extravert, who was about to set out on a journey through Botswana.)
Extraverts and introverts might all want to achieve but extraverts need for achievement is in terms of other people (‘If I achieve other people will not reject me’), and introverts need for achievement is in terms of ‘that’s what life is about’. Introverts and extraverts all want to have good relationships with other people, but introverts need other people to keep them in touch with external reality, while extraverts need other people because ‘that’s what life is about’.
Another reason why some people are confused as to how they experience their sense of existence and perceive the threat of annihilation is that they have difficulty distinguishing what they do feel from what they ought to feel.
My friend Candida described this to me in a letter:
I have just finished reading The Successful Self and want to tell you that I found your book inspiring and challenging but, unlike your others, frustrating too. Frustrating because I found myself lurching from introvert to extravert characteristics! So much of what you said made sense: the expectations of others, for example. My birthday is at the beginning of August and ever since I can remember my mother has told me: ‘You’re a Leo. Leo’s are warm and loving, and such extraverts!’ Or ‘Nonsense, you’re just being silly – Leo’s are full of self confidence’. Can you imagine how I felt at eight, eighteen, or even twenty-eight? Crippled by shyness in the centre of a crowd, but knowing I was supposed to be the centre of attention, I invariably said something stupid and made a fool of myself. If that was being the centre of attention, I didn’t like it! Similarly, I have always been told that I am not musical (my mother, again): ‘We’re not a musical family and you’re tone deaf.’ Hence, no singing lessons or piano lessons at school and whenever I sang at home – in the bath, in my room – my parents clapped their hands over their ears in mock horror. My lack of singing ability is still a family joke. And still, many years on, I wonder whether I can really be as tone deaf as they