Mental Health · Primly Community

imposter syndrome after a layoff hits completely differently and nobody warned me

laidoff_lena · 4 replies

i've dealt with imposter syndrome my whole career. the usual flavor: 'i don't deserve to be in this room, they'll figure out i'm a fraud, why did they promote me.'

but the imposter syndrome that showed up after my layoff in February? entirely different animal.

it's not 'i don't belong here.' it's 'i thought i belonged there, and i was wrong about that, so what do i actually know about myself.'

the old imposter syndrome was about not deserving success. this new version is about not trusting your own self-assessment at all. it's destabilizing in a way that the first kind never was.

some specific things that knocked me sideways: interviewing at companies that feel 'below' my previous level and wondering if that makes me desperate or realistic getting positive feedback in interviews but immediately explaining it away ('they were just being polite') looking at my resume and feeling like i'm describing someone else's accomplishments feeling like i have to prove i wasn't one of the 'low performers' in the cut, to interviewers who weren't even at my last company

that last one is the trap. you're auditioning a narrative for an audience that doesn't care and can't verify it.

what's actually helped: writing down specific things i shipped, with dates and numbers, before i get on any call. grounds me in facts when my brain wants to spin into 'but maybe i was bad at my job.'

also, and i don't say this lightly: talking to a therapist who has experience with work-related identity stuff. not a crisis thing, just someone to help me separate 'i got laid off' from 'i am a failure.' those are not the same sentence.

if you're in this spot, the post-layoff imposter spiral is real and it has a name. it's also survivable.

4 replies

market_realist

this is so precise it's painful. the 'proving i wasn't a low performer' one has been ruining interview mornings for me for weeks. like i catch myself over-explaining my last role's context in screens when the interviewer just... doesn't care. they're evaluating me forward, not adjudicating what happened at my last place.

ml_mike

the second flavor is genuinely more destabilizing because it attacks your calibration, not just your confidence. if you can't trust your read on yourself, you can't trust your read on anything. the 'dates and numbers' grounding exercise is good. i'd add: ask a former teammate to tell you one specific thing you did well. external calibration.

laidoff_lena

the external calibration idea is something i actually did and recommend. reached out to three former colleagues asking if they'd be a reference and used the call to ask what they remembered me doing well. three data points that cut through a lot of the noise in my own head.

careerveteran

15 years of hiring here. i can always tell when a candidate is carrying this burden into the room. the ones who overcorrect by being very insistent about how good they were, or the ones who undersell and seem confused about their own accomplishments. both patterns come from the same place. the most effective thing i can tell you is: the loop in your head is not visible to us until you externalize it. you have way more control over the impression than it feels like.