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• I am writing this soon after my return from a welcome Christmas break, revived and shattered, excited and flattened. This is a familiar, annual state of flux, resulting from an intense period of family gatherings, over-excitement (mine) and myriad modes of travel. As is usual after a break, I’m struggling to find my rhythm again, especially with my client work.
  
  Unlike the other parts of my working week, my practice offers no welcome distractions – the blogosphere, the kettle, a natter with a colleague. I have little other than my own resources to help ease my journey back into the intensity of another person’s troubled world, and they are threatening to abandon me. I’ve felt a panicked sense that I’m in the wrong job entirely.
  
  As I sit with my clients again, I know I want to be there with them, and I do all that I usually do to attune to their worlds. I listen to the content and shape of their stories, I track body language, I notice what’s going on inside my own body and emotional world. I concentrate on two minds and two bodies in the room. But, despite all this hard work, my mind is able to intrude with some very uneasy chatter. Who says it’s OK for me to be in the care of someone’s mental health like this? What the hell am I actually doing here? Am I really a psychotherapist? Surely I need to do much more training to be doing this work?
  
  My impostor syndrome isn’t new to me, and colleagues have told me that they, similarly, experience an aching doubt about their clinical abilities.
  
  Remembering this helps, so I’m hoping that, by the time I read this in print, I will have returned safely to a healthier mistrust of my competence. One of my first supervisors suggested the importance of remaining doubtful of both a client’s story and one’s own clinical flair – a piece of advice to which I often return. Indeed, I find supervision is always helpful to explore any feelings aroused in my work, and offers the nearest to objective feedback our profession can give. It can be very difficult to know when I’m doing OK.
  
  Many moons ago, when I was a reluctant lawyer, I had a software programme on my desktop that busied itself clocking the time that I could charge to clients. Time converted to money that, in turn, converted to promotion. I still remember the humiliation, the relief and (rarely) the joy those numbers could bring at each weekly team meeting. But they were, at the very least, an approximate marker of productivity and usefulness in my professional life – for my boss, my team, my clients and for me. Others could see for themselves if I was doing a good or bad job; nothing could be disguised by my own spin on events. I also couldn’t explain away any sense of inadequacy by wondering if these feelings weren’t all ‘mine’ but were, perhaps, someone else’s in my orbit. I didn’t know about those possibilities then.
  
  Because, of course, we can all suffer from feeling like an impostor. I frequently hear clients talk about ‘feeling like a fraud’ or their terror of ‘being found out’ for not really being the success that others think they are. We may also work with the impact that others’ hidden selves have on our clients – the devoted husband walking out, the ‘squeaky clean’ child turning out to be on drugs, the online fantasist. People can act in unfathomable ways. Last week’s news included the tragic story of a cab driver who killed his wife, sister-in-law and niece before turning the gun on himself. His boss, quoted in the media, was clearly struggling to make sense of how such a quiet and affable man could commit such horrific acts.
  
  It may be that much of our work involves integrating these parts of selves (of our own or those of others) that don’t fit easily, that we don’t like or that we know so little about. And whether it’s my own professional lapse of confidence triggered by a break, or my clients’ projections, I try to make this experience enriching.
  
  I think about Richard Burton. He is reputed to have said, near the end of his life: ‘I always felt inside just a poor boy from a Welsh mining town, and that I never deserved all my fame.’ Perhaps that was what helped make him so good at what he did, which is something to which to aspire.
  

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  Details have been changed to protect identities.