It made sense at the time. It was the language people seemed to use. Therapists talk about it in supervision, in peer groups, and think about it before a workshop begins.

But something didn't quite sit right with me every time I said it.

And it's the word syndrome.

It contradicted almost everything else that was in the course. The more I wrote, the more I researched, the more I listened to therapists describe their experience, the clearer it became that what we were calling a syndrome wasn't really a syndrome at all.

A syndrome belongs inside a person. It implies something dysfunctional. Something to be diagnosed, reduced, treated. Something that, ideally, you wouldn't have.

That perspective puts a heavy weight on therapists, many of whom believe that language shapes experience and use this belief to help their clients.

If you call your self-doubt a syndrome, you put the problem inside yourself.

You become the thing that needs fixing.

And the wider context of society, the therapy industry, the white, middle-class, neurotypical normative training experience, the low-pay culture - these are the external factors that predominantly drive self-doubt. If the therapist is the problem, then all this disappears from view. We blame ourselves and then have no agency in challenging the very problematic status quo.

When I examined therapists' imposter experiences carefully, including my own, the internal factors were real but perhaps not as significant as most of us recognise. And it certainly wasn't pathological. It was the ordinary stuff of being a person who cares.

Sensitivity. A capacity for self-questioning. Old family scripts about not being enough. The kind of perfectionism that is often the reason people start therapy training in the first place. And in many cases, the wiring of a neurodivergent mind meeting a profession that has certainly not caught up with it.

These aren't symptoms. They describe what it means to be a thinking, feeling human who has chosen to do relational work.

And the other drivers of self-doubt and imposter feelings, the majority, seem to be those external factors: the environment, the society, the context of therapeutic work.

None of that is a syndrome. It's a context. And it's a context that would produce self-doubt in almost anyone with a heartbeat and a conscience.

When we call this a syndrome, two things happen.

The first is that therapists carry the weight of it alone. The diagnosis-shaped language puts the problem firmly inside the individual, and the individual goes looking for the cure inside themselves.

The second is that the actual causes stay invisible. The training cultures, the comparison, the structural biases, the image pressure - none of these are named, and none of it gets challenged.

So the therapist works harder on themselves. And the conditions that produced the doubt remain untouched. That's not just inaccurate. It's actually harmful. Harmful in the same way that turning a blind eye to bias or prejudice is harmful.

So the course is now called The Myth of the Confident Therapist.

The previous name didn't match the content. The content was already about shifting the focus from a thing supposedly wrong with the therapist to a thing that's not quite true about the profession.

The myth being that somewhere out there is a fully confident therapist; that you should be one; that not being one means something is wrong with you.

The course still helps with that inner experience. The self-questioning, the comparison, the drive to sound like a real therapist.

I'm still attending to my wounds. I still have my quirks and quirbles! This inner work is still important for me to be the best therapist I can be, with the added bonus of self-awareness, self-acceptance and purpose for my own life.

But this work sits inside a different perspective. I don't have a syndrome. The likelihood is you don't have a syndrome either. You are a thoughtful human doing emotionally demanding work in a professional culture that often makes self-doubt almost inevitable.

Let's look at what's yours, what's the context's, and what becomes possible when you can tell the difference.

If you've been carrying your imposter feelings as evidence of some private dysfunction, I'd offer this.

You are a person, with a history, doing work that asks you to keep meeting other people's pain with your own genuine humanity. Some of what you feel is yours to work with. Some of it belongs to the room, the training culture, the profession, the wider conditions. Most of it is not a problem to be cured. It's information.

The important thing is being able to tell which is which.

That's the work.