04/17/2026
Registration is now open!! 🔗 https://www.innovationbhs.com/registration
Join TedX speaker, Dr. Nellie Tran and earn your ethics CEs!
This 3-hour continuing education workshop examines the use of imposter syndrome and imposter phenomenon within psychological research and practice, with attention to both their empirical foundations (e.g., Clance & Imes, 1978; Bravata et al., 2020) and their limitations. While these constructs are often used to explain persistent self-doubt among high-achieving individuals, this workshop situates such experiences within broader sociocultural and structural contexts. Drawing from peer-reviewed scholarship on double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903), acculturation and assimilation processes (Berry, 1997), microaggressions and environmental microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007; Sue et al., 2019), learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975), self-fulfilling prophecies (Merton, 1948), racial battle fatigue (Smith et al., 2007), and burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), participants will examine how “imposter” experiences may reflect adaptive responses to chronic exposure to exclusion, surveillance, and inequity rather than individual pathology.
Critically, this workshop addresses how imposter-related frameworks have often been applied in ways that produce individual, collective, and organizational harm. Research and critical scholarship have documented how overreliance on individual-level explanations can obscure systemic contributors to distress, including discrimination, underrepresentation, and environmental microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007; Cokley et al., 2017). In practice, this has led to patterns of misattribution, where clients’ accurate perceptions of bias are reframed as cognitive distortions, as well as subtle forms of victim-blaming that place the burden of adaptation on individuals rather than systems.
These misapplications raise ethical concerns related to beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice, particularly when clinicians unintentionally reinforce inequitable conditions or minimize the psychological impact of structural harm.
Full description and references on site*
