For a good many years of my life, particularly those during graduate school and my first years as a professional (clinical psychologist), I lived with an intermittent but strong sense of fraudulence. This was so despite the fact that my work and my intellectual capacities were well received and well respected, first, by my faculty and my academic peers then later, by my clients and my colleagues.
Generally, I experienced myself as peer or, perhaps more often, as superior in competence, intellectual capacity and general capability to those in my student/colleague cohort. (See Judging Difference for more about this.) While I could be intrigued, interested and excited by the occasional brilliance of some of my mentors, I was rarely overly impressed
Still, I was often beset with the compelling, disturbing sense that I was somehow an imposter: fraudulent, counterfeit, not really the person others (or I) saw/thought me to be. I was plagued by a sense that some dangling loose end in the fabric of my being could be inadvertently snagged at any moment. I was certain that, once that thread were snagged, the whole illusionary garment of my disguise would unravel revealing a much less impressive, naked real self.
It took several years of feeling baffled and perplexed before the mystery of this long-standing sense of precariousness finally resolved for me. Some of the clues to resolving the mystery came from what else had been going on for me while I was in graduate school.
During the years of my graduate and professional training, I had been learning much more than just the subject matter of psychology. By far the more significant education I was getting was about the boys' (patriarchal white male) reality/world. Particularly, I was gaining insight into and gathering some understanding of how the boys' game board operated around the issues of power, respect and status. I watched my professors and my clinical supervisors as they each projected (and supported each other's) images of self-assured, self-contained inviolability, images of solid unflappability.
With my finely tuned emotional Geiger counter (honed in the process of surviving my childhood), I was able to see beneath these Emperor's New Clothes exteriors. I could often see/feel the insecurities, feelings of inadequacy, the uneasiness behind their images. I noticed that the more insecure a professor seemed to me, the more he was likely to be critical, dismissive and humiliating to his students. And, the more insecure he seemed, the more likely he was to require (and be impressed by) slavish regurgitation of his words on the exams he gave. I also came to understand that arrogance was invariably an indication of underlying insecurity. And, that the degree of arrogance was predictably directly proportional to the degree of underlying insecurity.
Still, it was apparent to me that the source of all valuing and respect in this community lay within these essentially unchallenged, projected images. Of the two women on the faculty at my school, one seemed quite unaware of the game board. As a consequence, and despite her obvious scholarship, she was viewed as inconsequential by faulty and students alike (myself regrettably included). The second woman seemed to know how to play the game the way the boys did. She was accorded respect in a measure fairly equal to what the boys accorded each other.
I soon grasped that projecting a similar image of myself was critical to being assured the respect and valuing of my professors. This, in its turn, would assure my success in the program. I became quite adept at this boys' game. All my feelings, anxieties, uncertainties and disquiets were for when I was at home or privately wrestling with the Hatchet Lady. At school I was the epitome of cool, self-assured unflappability.
With this image and with my high level performance in class as well as on tests, I became a rather significant (sometimes somewhat daunting) figure both to other students and to most of the faculty. In my classes I would sometimes play with my professors' image of me by asking questions that, had they been asked by any other student, would have been treated as beneath consideration. I would marvel at the serious consideration that my professors would give these inane questions when I was the one doing the asking. It was a way I could play with the boys' game and explore the edges of its distortions.
During those highly functional, successful school years, my personal emotional life was in constant turmoil. In private and in secret I was, it seemed to me, a complete mess. Depressed and despairing to the point of seriously considering suicide, I finally took what (in that system) seemed rather an enormous risk. I confided in my female faculty mentor (the respected one) in order to get a referral to my first therapist. The dear and wonderful therapist that she recommended helped me to save my life and to learn to live more comfortably with my always-intense emotional life. Our work didn't, however, ever really touch or relieve my recurring sense of fraudulence.
That relief and resolution came years later. As I, over the years, worked with many highly competent, highly functional-in-the-male-world women clients, I found that many of them also struggled with feeling out-of-control with what they also saw as the messiness of their secret, private emotional lives. And, many lived uneasily with a similar sense of fraudulence, with fears of being unmasked or revealed as other than or less than what they appeared to be. It was in the work with these women that the “Aha!” finally came to me.
In the boys' world (the dominant paradigm/the patriarchal white male reality) vulnerability, empathy, feelings, emotions (other than anger-which only the boys are allowed to express without penalty), are always read as signs of weakness, softness (as a negative quality), untrustworthiness, undependability. And, they are devalued in a specifically gendered way: “Don't be such a wimp/sissy/girl!” We women who cross into and are successful in that reality have often learned, as I did in graduate school, to garner respect and value by acting just like one of the boys. We learn to leave our vulnerable, feeling selves at home, or (in some cases) to leave them completely.
We learn to gain position and respect (power in their world) by disowning our very natures as emotional, relational, responsive creatures. The price is devastating. No matter how well we learn to suit-up, no matter how effective our external disguises, we do not fool ourselves. We cannot avoid knowing that we do have a feeling life, that under the suit we are still our female, feeling selves.
Colluding with the system by denying the value and presence of a (our) feeling life, we may gain the boys' respect: a sense of having credibility, influence and power (in their terms). Yet, in that very collusion and denial, we repeatedly and simultaneously are giving ourselves the resounding message that who we truly are is not okay, not worthy of respect. (“If they knew how I really am, they wouldn't respect/value/hear me at all!”) This denial, this suppression of our essential natures creates great uneasiness and stress in us. We live feeling vaguely off-center, precarious, with an ongoing (albeit often less than conscious) fearfulness that our true self can at any moment slip out to betray and unmask us.
The sense of precariousness, the sense of being imposter, counterfeit, fraudulent, illegitimate, or, as in my experience, the sense that a snagged thread could at anytime unravel the whole garment of my being-all these arise from our often less than conscious incorporation of the patriarchal white male cultural training to devalue, dismiss and disguise our vulnerable, feeling natures. This was my “Aha!”
With this “Aha!” came the awareness that trying to be powerful in the terms of the patriarchal white male system (dominant paradigm) actually disempowers us on a being level. To be truly empowered has to do with honoring, respecting, authorizing, affirming and living from our true and deepest self, not with denying and suppressing that self.
With this “Aha!” came the decision to stop my own participation in the self-wounding, self-undermining attempt to obliterate my true nature. The first step was consciously re-owning my vulnerability. I began exploring my vulnerability as an ally. I hung out with the possibility that my feelings, emotional states, moods, inner responses to all situations in my life might be sources of important information, knowing and wisdom about those situations as well as about myself.
My acceptance of the value and importance of my vulnerability and my emotional responsiveness grew gradually. As I felt stronger in my own valuing of these aspects of my nature, I slowly began the practice of claiming, naming and sharing them in my in-the-boys'-world interactions. As is the best plan with new practices, I took my first baby step risks in circumstances where a neutral or possibly positive response might be expected.
Each time I took the risk of matter-of-factly speaking for my vulnerability/feelings, my own acceptance of these parts of myself increased. It didn't seem to matter whether I was well heard or well received in the setting. All that mattered was that I spoke out simply, directly, as if I believed that what I said was an honorable, meaningful and worthy sharing. In this act of sharing-with-conviction, I was empowering myself. And, typically, my conviction made what I was sharing quite compelling to those with whom I was sharing it.
One of my favorite tales of this kind of sharing comes from more recent history. At the time of writing this tale, I'd been working for about seven years with a mom-and-pop print shop. They had been doing the production of all the greeting cards and decks of affirmation cards that I've designed and been selling since 1991.
I arrived at the shop at 8:30 one morning after having stayed up all night working both at home and at a 24 hour Kinko's. I'd been doing and redoing layouts and paste-ups for a new set of twelve long postcards. When I came into their shop, soaring with excitement of the project's completion and at the edge of crumbling from exhaustion, John and Sarah (not their real names) were both there. With bubbling delight I handed over the six pages of layouts. John looked at them and, with great irritation, threw them onto the counter.
“These are impossible! You can't expect me to do three-sided bleeds!” he all but shouted at me. My eyes welled with tears at what was, to my exhausted, sensitive, wide-open, full-of-self self, an unexpected verbal and energetic assault. I put my hand up, palm toward him and told him he had to stop talking at me that very minute. I took a few really deep breaths. I then told him, through my tears, that it was absolutely not okay with me for him to blow out his frustrations and anger on me, that it was misplaced, inappropriate and very upsetting to me.
I reminded him that I knew-from his frequent sharings with me-how much it upset him that many of his customers expected him to clean up the messes in their original work without respecting or being ready to pay for the time involved in his doing that. I reminded him that in the seven years of our collaboration-of my learning how to do my preparations so that he could more easily do his job-I had never asked or expected him to do my part of the work and had always paid him for every bit of his time.
Then, as he tried to respond, I picked up my layouts and told him I didn't have the room right then to listen to him about anything other than the information about what exactly was problematic about the work I'd brought. He gave me a calm, concrete explanation of the problem, apologized profusely and then I left.
During the ten-minute drive home, a very simple remedy presented itself to me. After a nap, I made that change in the layouts and went back to the print shop. John took the pages, nodded his head and began to write up the order.
“John,” I said, “wait!” He looked up at me, clearly a bit uncomfortable. “What?” he said.
“Well,” I said “if, when you're teaching me how to work with you, you're going to give me a bad time when I've done something badly, you're going to have to learn how to acknowledge me when I've done something well! You could try saying: Robyn! What a brilliant solution you found! This is great! It makes my job so much easier! Thank you!” I said.
John turned completely scarlet with embarrassment. Sarah said, “That's so right. He's always quick to criticize, but he rarely gives compliments.”
John apologized again and actually found words of his own with which to acknowledge the clever and simple solution I had devised for the 3-bleeds problem.
Through the years of our collaboration (until he retired), I still occasionally had to remind John to remember it was me he was talking to and how he could better communicate with me. Yet, on the whole, he did get it that very day. John and I joked about this dialogue repeatedly as time went on. And, his wife Sarah often teased about how that interchange had impacted his behavior in general.
I've gathered so many similar tales since I've begun bringing the whole of my vulnerable, feeling, empowered self into every situation in my life out in the so-called real world. Often it feels like I'm being a one-woman guerrilla theater. I know that the combination of my forthrightness, my conviction that feelings matter and my conviction that vulnerability openly acknowledged is empowering, is often disconcerting. It's usually so unexpected and so off the ordinary continuum that it winds up being quite disarming. I am heard. It does make a difference, for the moment at least, in business-as-usual.
When people occasionally respond to me with raised eyebrows, disdaining faces/attitudes or other suppressive behaviors, I can now usually address it directly. Often, I just ask “ Is there something-” or, “What is it- about how I'm being/what I'm saying that's making you uncomfortable?” Of course this is still more guerrilla theater, since one is ordinarily expected to respond to such censorious hints by stopping the misbehavior or simply shutting up.
Perhaps the most empowering thing I've discovered about respectfully owning my vulnerability is that when I can choose, matter-of-factly, to reveal that which I've been encouraged to be afraid of having discovered about me, I am at long last well and truly safe. Whenever I have my own permission to be my whole self, I am living from the center of what is so for me. This is an act of power, an act in which I authorize myself to be all of who I am, out-loud as it were.
Consider exploring and claiming the fullness of your vulnerable, feeling self.
[Because the simple message of this card-To be openly vulnerable is an act of power…To be openly empowered is an act of vulnerability-turns out to have such a complex underpinning, this tale reflects only on the first half. The second half of the card has a separate tale. See: The Vulnerability of Power
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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