Hypnotherapy · Charlotte, NC
Why Does Imposter Syndrome Come and Go?
You already know it isn’t constant. So why does imposter syndrome come and go, quiet enough to forget about for weeks, then sharp again before one meeting, or around one person in particular?
You may already recognize the general shape of it: doubting results that other people don’t doubt, waiting to be caught out despite real evidence otherwise. What’s harder to explain is why it doesn’t show up evenly. Some weeks it barely registers. Other times, one presentation, one conversation, or one particular person brings it back at full strength.
That unevenness isn’t a sign you’re overstating it on the harder days. It’s closer to how researchers actually describe the experience.
It was never actually constant
The instinct is to treat imposter syndrome as something you either have or don’t: a fixed trait sitting underneath everything you do. A 2020 perspective article in Frontiers in Psychology complicates that. The authors argue the experience is substantially shaped by context: by the specific setting, the specific institution, and how a person is actually being treated in the room, not only by something internal and constant (Feenstra et al., 2020).
Psychology Today’s overview makes a related point directly, describing the feeling as something that “can be transient,” meaning you can feel fraudulent about one task, in one moment, without that meaning anything has changed about your baseline competence.
Put together, the coming and going isn’t a flaw in how you’re experiencing this. It may be closer to how the experience actually behaves.
It flaring up around one meeting and going quiet the rest of the month is not inconsistency. It may be the pattern working exactly as described.
What tends to activate a specific episode
A few conditions show up often in the research and in practice. Recognition itself is one: an award, a promotion, praise delivered in front of others, being asked to lead. The moment that should confirm competence is often exactly when the doubt sharpens, because now there’s more that could turn out to be undeserved.
Failure that follows a success is another. A strong stretch and then one missed deadline, one weak presentation, doesn’t register as an isolated mistake. It can reopen doubt about everything that came before it, as though the earlier wins need re-litigating.
Underrepresentation is a third. The Frontiers article notes that people can feel like imposters specifically in settings that signal, directly or subtly, that they don’t quite belong there: a room, a title, a level of visibility they haven’t seen many people like them hold.
Why one person sets it off and another doesn’t
Cleveland Clinic psychologist Dr. Susan Albers describes imposter syndrome showing up inside close relationships too, a version of the same fear redirected: feeling undeserving of a partner’s regard, or bracing for the moment they discover something disqualifying, sometimes to the point of ending things before that discovery can happen.
It rarely applies evenly across every relationship. It tends to concentrate around specific people: someone whose opinion carries unusual weight, someone you’ve decided is watching more closely, someone in front of whom the stakes of being found out feel highest. Everyone else in the room may not register at all.
That’s consistent with the same context-dependence from the first section. It isn’t that the feeling is general and then happens to encounter people. Specific people, and the specific weight you’ve assigned them, are often the actual trigger.
Working with what keeps getting activated
None of this makes the feeling less real while it’s active, and understanding the pattern intellectually doesn’t always stop it from firing the next time the same conditions show up. Hypnotherapy can be used to work directly with what a specific setting, or a specific person, has come to mean: the association that activates before you’ve had a chance to reason your way past it.
The dedicated hypnotherapy for imposter syndrome service page goes further into how that work is structured for the version centered on achievement and competence. When the sharper version is relational, tied to specific people rather than specific tasks, it also connects to sense of self and identity work.
The aim either way isn’t to convince you the feeling is unfounded. It’s to change what keeps getting activated by the same conditions.
Where does it actually concentrate for you?
Notice where it’s sharpest. Is it tied to a type of situation: being evaluated, being asked to lead, being praised in front of others? Or does it concentrate around specific people, regardless of what situation you’re in with them?
Notice the timing too. Does it build in advance, or does it arrive only once you’re already in the room? Does it fade once the moment passes, or does it linger and color how you read the next similar one?
Those distinctions don’t resolve anything on their own, but they’re useful to bring into a consultation. They help clarify whether the direction is closer to the achievement pattern, the relational one, or both at once.
The fact that it comes and goes doesn’t mean it isn’t real when it’s active.
A consultation is a place to look at where it actually concentrates for you: which settings, which people, which moments, and whether hypnotherapy fits the part that keeps getting activated.
Complimentary consultation by phone or Zoom only. Working sessions are available in person in Cornelius and online, by appointment.