Imposter Syndrome Isn’t the Problem. The Room Is.
Why Cognitive Dysmorphia Forms in Crooked Rooms
Jessica M. Oladapo, LPC
December 24, 2025
Most people who feel like imposters don’t lack ability. They lack a room that reflects them accurately.
If you have ever looked at a body of evidence that clearly says you are capable, qualified, and contributing, yet still felt off balance, unsure, or undeserving, the problem may not be your confidence. It may not even be your thinking. It may be the environment you are standing in. When rooms are crooked, when systems are tilted but treated as neutral, people learn to question themselves rather than the structure around them.
We often call this experience imposter syndrome and rush to fix it with mindset shifts, affirmations, or resilience strategies. But what if that name gets it wrong? What if the persistent sense of being “less than,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is not a psychological flaw but a distorted self-appraisal shaped by systemic conditions? This piece introduces cognitive dysmorphia, a framework for understanding how capable people come to misperceive themselves after prolonged exposure to crooked rooms, and why the solution is not standing straighter, but finally leveling the floor.
Imposter Syndrome Isn’t the Problem. The Room Is.
Why Cognitive Dysmorphia Forms in Crooked Rooms
“I set the intention. I belong in every room I am in…” - Affirmation to self, 2025
I was recently having a conversation with a client. As she described what was happening for her in relation to her internal critic, I found myself thinking: this feels very dysmorphic.
We tend to think of dysmorphia primarily in terms of body dysmorphia, of seeing ourselves as more flawed or more idealized than we actually are. We look in the mirror, and the reflection we see does not align with reality. The image is distorted. What we perceive is not an accurate representation of what is there.
Melissa Harris-Perry offers a powerful metaphor for understanding this kind of distortion. She describes what she calls a “crooked room,” a space in which the walls, floors, and furniture are tilted. When people stand inside that room, they often adjust their bodies rather than question the room itself. Even when they feel disoriented, they assume the problem lies within them. Over time, the crooked room comes to feel normal.
As I listened to my client, it became clear that what she was describing was not simply negative self-talk. It was a persistent mismatch between reality and self-appraisal. Her cognitive appraisal of herself did not align with the evidence of her competence or contribution. And that misalignment felt dysmorphic. She was attempting to stand upright in a crooked room and wondering why she felt off balance.
Cognitive appraisal, after all, is not formed in isolation. It is shaped over time by feedback, expectations, stereotypes, and repeated social cues about who belongs and under what conditions. When those cues are distorted, the appraisal will be distorted as well.
I work with several clients who are women of color who present with a remarkably similar cognitive appraisal, the internal process through which we interpret our experiences and decide what they mean about our worth, our competence, our safety, and our belonging. This appraisal is not simply about confidence or self-esteem. It is the meaning-making mechanism that determines how we understand ourselves in relation to the spaces we occupy. And that appraisal is always shaped by the room we are standing in.
Often, clients name this experience imposter syndrome and come into therapy hoping to do something about it. But the way imposter syndrome is typically described places responsibility on the individual’s thinking, as though the problem lies in a faulty internal process rather than in the social conditions shaping that process. In this framing, cognitive appraisal is treated as personal error instead of contextual adaptation. In other words, the crooked room goes unnamed, and the individual is asked to stand straighter.
Understanding dysmorphia, however, allows us to see how cognitive appraisal is not created in isolation. It is shaped over time by feedback, expectations, stereotypes, and repeated social cues. When those cues come from a crooked room, the resulting appraisal will reflect the tilt.
As I was speaking with this client, I said out loud, almost reflexively:
“I don’t know if there’s a term for this, but this feels very much like cognitive dysmorphia, similar to body dysmorphia. The way we are experiencing ourselves is a reflection of larger social forces. And those forces have led us to believe that we are less capable, less intelligent, less deserving, less worthy, less than what is actually accurate.”
In a crooked room, leaning becomes adaptive, even when it feels exhausting.
For women of color, who carry the weight of racism and sexism, often compounded by implied classism, the messages we receive from broader social structures are not an accurate reflection of our actual contributions to society. When our contributions and our rewards are misaligned, focusing on the rewards alone diminishes the value of the contributions themselves.
As I was talking with this client, I became aware of how this shows up for me as well. I shared with her that one of the most persistent messages from my own internal critic is: you don’t complete things.
She looked at me, cocked her head, and said,
“But don’t you have four degrees and you’re working on another? Aren’t you a licensed therapist and a professor of ten years? Aren’t you a mother of four, with one attending an Ivy League college? What is it that you haven’t completed?”
I laughed. And then I said something that felt both grounding and unsettling:
“There is actually no evidence of my lack of completion. All the evidence points to the opposite.”
In that moment, I realized that I was standing in the mirror of a crooked room. What I perceived was very different from what was being reflected back to me. That is not imposter syndrome. I am not misplaced. The room is misaligned. It was not impostership, but a distorted cognitive appraisal. I was accurately seeing the mirror, but inaccurately interpreting what it meant. My internal meaning-making system had been trained to discount evidence of completion and competence, despite overwhelming proof to the contrary.
That is not simply imposter syndrome.
The idea of imposter syndrome assumes that I am somewhere I do not belong. But Harris-Perry’s crooked room offers a different explanation: people may be exactly where they belong yet still feel disoriented because the environment refuses to acknowledge them as upright unless they contort.
My cognitive appraisal did not match reality. It matched the tilt.
In fact, I am not an imposter at all. The idea of imposter syndrome assumes that I am somewhere I am not meant to be. But the truth may be closer to the opposite. I may be overqualified for where I am. And yet my self-appraisal, my cognitive appraisal, does not fully align with reality.
Now, one could argue that this is related to cognitive distortions, anxiety, neurodiversity, religious trauma, or complex PTSD. All of those are possible and valid frameworks. However, when a large population of people report the same experience, and when that population is made up primarily of a specific demographic group, in this case women of color, we have to ask a different question.
It cannot be that women of color, Black women, and Latina women are biologically predisposed to inaccurately perceive themselves as less than. It must be that something within the broader social structure is shaping this flawed cognitive appraisal. It must be that they are navigating crooked rooms that have been normalized as neutral.
This is where my sociological training becomes impossible to ignore. Cognitive appraisal does not occur outside of structure. It is shaped within what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, or the intersection of biography and history. Our internal evaluations are formed while we are busy living inside our personal orbits, rarely given the space to examine how broader social forces are shaping what we come to believe about ourselves.
As a sociologist, I often think through the lens of the sociological imagination, a concept introduced by C. Wright Mills. Mills argued that our personal biographies cannot be separated from the broader social structures in which we live. He suggested that it is difficult to see how these structures impact us because we are caught up in what he called our “personal orbits,” the mundane, day-to-day activities that consume our attention.
When women of color experience discomfort in their cognitive appraisal, the response is rarely withdrawal. Instead, the crooked room teaches overfunctioning. We work harder, take on more responsibility, accumulate more credentials, believing that if we lean just a little differently, the imbalance will resolve.
This mirrors my experience with body dysmorphia. When the mirror lied, I worked harder. When my perception was distorted, effort intensified the distortion. In a crooked room, striving does not straighten the space. It deepens the lean.
When I teach, I often give this example.
I wake up around 5:00 a.m. I work out for an hour to an hour and a half. I get the kids up, feed the dog, take the dog out, get dressed, get my son to school. I drive an hour and a half to teach. I teach. I drive an hour and a half back. I see therapy clients until about 8:00 p.m. I pick up my dancer from dance. I get home around 9:00. I go through the nighttime routine: letting the dog out again, setting things up for the next day, finishing therapy notes, preparing lectures, making sure I’ve connected with my partner, my kids, my parents, and my siblings. If I’m lucky, by 10:00 p.m., I am spent.
Within that personal orbit, there is very little time or space to reflect on the broader forces shaping my life.
Mills also distinguished between personal troubles and structural issues. Personal troubles affect individuals in isolation and are rooted in personal choices. Structural issues, on the other hand, affect large numbers of people, are not caused by individual choices, and are embedded in the way society is organized. Mills argued that most of what people experience in industrialized societies are structural issues, not personal failures.
When I wear both my therapeutic hat and my sociological hat, I am struck by how often women of color experiencing imposter syndrome ask: What am I doing wrong? How can I work harder? How can I achieve more so I stop feeling this way?
In doing so, we expand our personal orbit. We take on more responsibility. We strive harder. And in the process, it becomes even more difficult to see how our self-appraisal is shaped by broader social forces.
My own internal critic telling me I “haven’t completed anything” pushes me to take on more roles, more responsibilities, more proof of worth. From a mental health standpoint, this mirrors how body dysmorphia operates.
In my twenties, I struggled with an eating disorder and body dysmorphic disorder. I was in graduate school and working overnight shifts. I would get off work, nap briefly, and then spend three hours at the gym: lifting weights, doing cardio, swimming, taking kickboxing. I wanted my body fat percentage to be as low as possible while still technically “healthy.”
I looked in the mirror and saw flaws that were not there. I took diuretics so my muscles would show, and still I saw bloating. What I perceived did not match reality. So I worked harder. I exercised longer. I pushed more.
It wasn’t until I got married and had children that I was able to see not only myself more clearly, but also how distorted my self-appraisal had been. To be honest, even twenty years later, body dysmorphia still shows up for me.
As a society, we now recognize that body dysmorphic disorder is not simply an individual flaw. We understand it as a result of complex, gendered, structural messaging. We treat eating disorders as diseases, not character failures. We are beginning to treat obesity as a medical condition rather than a moral one.
This is progress.
And yet, from a cognitive and mental health standpoint, we have not made the same shift. We fail to see how racism, sexism, classism, nativism, colonialism, and normative systems shape our internal worlds in the same way they shape our bodies. These forces show up as inflammation, elevated cortisol, striving, workaholism, and eventual burnout. And still, we treat these outcomes as personal shortcomings. When women of color experience discomfort in their cognitive appraisal, when they feel perpetually behind, undeserving, or unfinished, the response is rarely withdrawal. Instead, the appraisal drives increased striving. More work. More credentials. More responsibility. The distorted appraisal does not reduce effort; it intensifies it.
In this way, cognitive appraisal becomes the engine of overfunctioning.
Consider this: women of color, despite experiencing multiple layers of marginalization, are among the most highly educated groups, the most likely to start businesses, the most likely to purchase homes, and the least likely to struggle with addiction. And yet they are also the most likely to experience burnout, imposter syndrome, and to die in childbirth.
The response to imposter syndrome is often cognitive behavioral therapy, with the assumption that changing thoughts will change behavior. Burnout is met with advice to “rest more” or “practice mindfulness.” Once again, responsibility is placed on the individual. Cognitive behavioral approaches often assume that if we change the appraisal, the behavior will follow. But this assumes the appraisal is irrational. What if the appraisal is a rational response to an irrational system? What if the problem is not how women of color are thinking, but what they have been consistently shown about their worth and belonging?
In effect, we are saying: change the way you think, and the problem will go away.
But it cannot just be that.
Women of color exist in systems that were not designed for them to succeed. And yet, somehow, they do. Still, they are told they are not doing enough. They are gaslit about their parenting, criticized for having children or for not having them. Told to achieve, but not too much. To be assertive, but not too assertive. To carry movements, elections, and social change, while remaining palatable.
We tell women to rest and then give them more responsibility. We say “Black women will save us” while tying their hands.
So when women look in the mirror and see something inaccurate, we cannot tell them it is imposter syndrome and expect them to simply think differently. What they are seeing is a reflection of society, not a personal defect.
A Crooked Room in Practice
I was once speaking with a thirty-something-year-old Black professional woman who came to therapy expressing sadness, frustration, and clear depressive symptoms. She had been at her job for several years and had entered the organization alongside two similarly aged, similarly experienced white women. Over time, both of those women had been promoted. She had not.
She told me that she could not identify any substantial difference in the quality or scope of the work they were producing compared to her own. In fact, she shared that her managers regularly congratulated her, praised her performance, and encouraged her to keep doing what she was doing. One manager had even told her that they hesitated to promote her because she added so much value in her current role.
She said this quietly, almost as if it made sense.
I affirmed her frustration and then asked a simple question:
“What do you think it would take for you to be promoted?”
She paused. Her shoulders dropped. After a moment, she said,
“I think I need to work harder. I need to show them just how valuable I am. Maybe I should create something new.”
As she spoke, I felt my own chest tighten.
I asked her, gently but directly:
“Do you think that by working harder and creating something new, they will promote you after they have already told you they don’t want to lose the value you bring in your current role? Do you think your value lies in what you produce?”
She slowly shook her head no.
Then she asked, almost in a whisper,
“But what can I do?”
The answer was already there, even if neither of us wanted it to be.
The room is tilted.
This story is not unique. It is the story of many people who are marginalized within their workplaces. There are real structural barriers that limit upward mobility, even in organizations that claim to be supportive, inclusive, and merit-based. Sometimes especially in those organizations.
We talked about what I often call the trappings of competence. When marginalized people demonstrate high levels of competence, that competence becomes a reason to keep them exactly where they are. Their value is extracted, stabilized, relied upon, while mobility is deferred. Meanwhile, others with similar experience are promoted under the guise of “potential,” “fit,” or “leadership trajectory.”
In this environment, the crooked room does its quiet work.
Her cognitive appraisal began to shift inward. Instead of asking Why is the system structured this way? she asked What am I doing wrong? Instead of questioning the room, she questioned herself. Her body responded accordingly: stress, sadness, exhaustion, a creeping sense of inadequacy. Cognitive dysmorphia took hold not because she misread reality, but because reality refused to name itself honestly.
She was not lacking ambition. She was not lacking effort. She was not lacking value.
She was standing in a crooked room that rewarded her competence by trapping it.
And like so many others, she was being invited to solve a structural problem with personal overfunctioning.
The room is tilted.
Why This Example Matters Organizationally
This is how imposter syndrome gets misdiagnosed. What looks like self-doubt is often a rational cognitive appraisal formed in response to structural contradiction. The nervous system picks up what organizational language obscures. Bodies know when advancement is constrained, even when praise is plentiful.
This is not an individual confidence issue. It is an equity issue. It is a design issue. It is a rightful presence issue.
And no amount of working harder will level a crooked room.
For this reason, I suggest that imposter syndrome is a misnomer. A more accurate term is cognitive dysmorphia, which I define as an altered cognitive self-appraisal shaped by systemic and structural messaging that is both demanding and diminishing, leading to anxiety, depression, lowered self-worth, heightened responsibility, and physiological consequences such as increased cortisol and inflammation. Cognitive dysmorphia, then, can be understood as a persistent distortion in self-appraisal that emerges from systemic and structural messaging. It is characterized by a chronic underestimation of one’s competence and worth, paired with an exaggerated sense of responsibility and accountability. Unlike imposter syndrome, it does not imply that one is in a place they do not belong. It reflects the internalization of environments that demand excellence while withholding affirmation, protection, and proportional reward.
Body dysmorphia taught me that distorted appraisal does not correct itself through effort. In fact, effort often deepens the distortion. The harder I worked to change my body, the less accurately I could see it. Cognitive dysmorphia operates the same way. Increased striving does not resolve the misalignment between perception and reality. It often reinforces it.
Racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, and normativity shape the mind just as they shape the body. They show up as inflammation, elevated cortisol, burnout, and overwork. And still, we tell people to think differently instead of asking why the room is crooked.
Women of color are among the most highly educated, the most entrepreneurial, and the least likely to struggle with addiction. And yet they are the most likely to experience burnout and what we label imposter syndrome. This is not coincidence. It is the psychological cost of prolonged exposure to a crooked room.
Imposter syndrome assumes misplacement. Cognitive dysmorphia names something else entirely. It names the internalization of structural distortion.
Cognitive dysmorphia is an altered cognitive self-appraisal shaped by systemic messaging that is both demanding and diminishing. It leads to heightened responsibility, diminished self-assessment, anxiety, depression, and physiological stress. It is what happens when cognitive appraisal is formed inside a crooked room and treated as personal failure.
And yet, even as I name this, I am cautious.
White Supremacy Culture as a Cognitive Environment
Use caution. That caution does not come from doubt about the validity of these experiences, but from an awareness of how easily naming can slide into pathologizing. As a therapist, I am deeply concerned with how even well-intentioned frameworks can unintentionally reproduce harm if they individualize what is fundamentally structural.
An understanding of Tema Okun’s concept of the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture is essential as we grapple with naming this experience.
Okun defines white supremacy culture not as individual acts of hate or extremist ideology, but as a set of normalized norms, values, and ways of operating that shape institutions, organizations, and professional spaces. These characteristics are often invisible precisely because they are treated as neutral, rational, or “just the way things are done.” They include, among others, the worship of the written word, objectivity, perfectionism, and either/or thinking.
What makes Okun’s framework particularly relevant here is that these characteristics do not only shape policy and practice. They shape how people are taught to interpret themselves.
In other words, white supremacy culture functions as a cognitive environment.
Worship of the Written Word
The worship of the written word suggests that something is only real, valid, or legitimate if it can be named, documented, formalized, and rendered in standardized language. Experience alone is insufficient. Lived knowledge must be translated into institutional language to count.
In the context of cognitive dysmorphia, this means that people are taught to distrust their own embodied knowing. If harm cannot be clearly articulated, cited, or proven, it is treated as subjective or suspect. This mirrors a common cognitive distortion in which individuals invalidate their own perceptions, telling themselves, “I’m probably overreacting,” or “If it were really a problem, I could explain it better.”
The crooked room becomes harder to name precisely because the rules of the room insist on a kind of proof that distorted environments are designed not to produce.
Objectivity
Objectivity, as Okun describes it, elevates detachment, emotional distance, and neutrality as superior ways of knowing. Feelings, intuition, and embodied responses are framed as bias rather than data.
Within this framework, stress responses, anxiety, or exhaustion are interpreted as personal weakness rather than information about the environment. This aligns with cognitive distortions such as emotional reasoning being dismissed outright, not because emotions are inaccurate, but because they are deemed illegitimate sources of knowledge.
In the presence of objectivity as a dominant norm, people learn to override what their nervous systems are signaling. The body says this is unsafe, but the culture says prove it. Over time, individuals stop trusting their internal signals and instead assume the problem lies within them.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism frames mistakes as personal failures rather than expected aspects of growth. It creates an environment in which worth is contingent on flawlessness, and where errors carry disproportionate consequences.
For marginalized people, perfectionism is not evenly applied. It interacts with stereotype threat, meaning mistakes are more likely to be read as evidence of incompetence rather than circumstance. Cognitively, this maps onto distortions such as catastrophizing and overgeneralization: one mistake means I am not capable, any misstep confirms I do not belong.
Perfectionism fuels cognitive dysmorphia by narrowing the margin for error so severely that no amount of competence ever feels sufficient. The room tilts further each time excellence is met with higher expectations rather than mobility or rest.
Either/Or Thinking
Either/or thinking reduces complex realities into false binaries: competent or incompetent, confident or insecure, successful or failing, objective or biased.
This directly mirrors the cognitive distortion of black-and-white thinking. Within such a framework, it becomes impossible to hold nuance, such as being highly capable and harmed, successful and exhausted, accomplished and impacted by structural barriers.
Either/or thinking erases the possibility that someone can be doing extraordinarily well and still be responding appropriately to inequitable conditions. Cognitive dysmorphia thrives in this binary because any discomfort is interpreted as evidence of inadequacy rather than context.
Why This Matters for Cognitive Dysmorphia
Taken together, these characteristics create environments where distorted cognitive appraisal is not only likely, but logical.
White supremacy culture trains people to:
• Distrust embodied knowledge
• Override nervous system cues
• Internalize structural contradiction
• Seek personal correction for systemic problems
Under these conditions, cognitive dysmorphia is not a malfunction. It is an adaptation.
And this is where the conundrum that I have named becomes unavoidable.
If we frame cognitive dysmorphia solely as a mental health diagnosis, we risk reinforcing the very norms Okun warns against. We privilege objectivity over experience. We locate the problem in individuals. We offer tools for self-correction rather than demanding structural accountability. We attempt to meditate, reframe, or medicate away responses that are rooted in reality.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. And yet, refusing language altogether leaves harm unnamed and unaddressed.
So the task is not to abandon frameworks, but to use them carefully. To ensure that naming does not become neutralizing. To ensure that clarity does not come at the cost of accountability.
Cognitive dysmorphia, as you define it here, is not a failure of thinking. It is what happens when people are asked to make sense of themselves inside systems that deny their full humanity while demanding their full labor.
The work, then, is not simply to help individuals think differently.
It is to interrogate the cognitive environments we have normalized, to challenge the values we have mistaken for neutrality, and to ask whether the rooms we call professional, objective, and merit-based are in fact profoundly tilted.
Only then does healing become possible without requiring people to disappear parts of themselves in order to belong.
Common Cognitive Distortions in Crooked Rooms
Cognitive distortions are patterns of thinking that shape how people interpret themselves, others, and the world. In clinical psychology, they are often treated as internal errors in reasoning. But when viewed through a sociological and equity lens, many so-called distortions are better understood as learned adaptations to distorted environments.
In crooked rooms, certain cognitive distortions are not only common, they are predictable.
Black-and-White Thinking (Either/Or Thinking)
This distortion frames experience in extremes: success or failure, competence or incompetence, belonging or exclusion. There is little room for nuance or complexity.
In environments shaped by either/or thinking, people learn that they must be exceptional to justify their presence. Anything short of perfection is interpreted as evidence of inadequacy. This mirrors the organizational logic that leaves no space for people to be both capable and impacted, successful and harmed.
For women of color, this distortion is reinforced by racialized and gendered expectations that narrow the acceptable range of performance. Cognitive dysmorphia thrives here because reality cannot be held in its full complexity.
Discounting the Positive
Discounting the positive involves minimizing accomplishments, praise, or evidence of competence. Achievements are explained away as luck, timing, or lowered standards rather than skill or effort.
In systems that withhold proportional recognition and reward, discounting the positive becomes a rational response. When praise does not lead to mobility, power, or protection, it teaches people not to trust affirmation. Over time, individuals learn to downplay their success because success has not translated into safety or advancement.
This distortion aligns closely with imposter syndrome narratives and deepens cognitive dysmorphia by severing the link between evidence and self-appraisal.
Catastrophizing
Catastrophizing involves anticipating the worst possible outcome, often from small or ambiguous cues. A minor mistake becomes a threat to legitimacy. A question becomes a sign of exposure.
In environments where mistakes carry disproportionate consequences for marginalized people, catastrophizing is not irrational. It reflects an accurate reading of unequal risk. The nervous system learns that the cost of error is high, and it responds accordingly.
This distortion fuels chronic vigilance and keeps the stress response activated even in the absence of immediate threat.
Emotional Reasoning
Emotional reasoning occurs when feelings are treated as facts: I feel like I don’t belong, therefore I must not belong.
In cultures that elevate objectivity and dismiss emotion as bias, people are taught to distrust their feelings. Paradoxically, those same feelings are then internalized as evidence of personal deficiency. The individual feels unsafe, but cannot name the environment as unsafe, so the conclusion becomes something is wrong with me.
This distortion illustrates how objectivity as a cultural norm disconnects people from embodied knowledge while still allowing emotion to shape appraisal silently.
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization takes a single experience and turns it into a global truth: This didn’t work once, so it never will. I wasn’t promoted, so I’m not promotable.
In organizations where patterns of exclusion are rarely named, individuals are left to interpret repeated setbacks alone. Over time, these experiences harden into internal narratives that feel personal but are structurally patterned.
Overgeneralization reinforces cognitive dysmorphia by collapsing complex systems into simplified self-blame.
Reframing Cognitive Distortions Structurally
When cognitive distortions appear in isolation, clinical intervention may be sufficient. But when the same distortions show up repeatedly within specific populations, across similar environments, and in predictable ways, they are no longer merely cognitive errors.
They are signals.
They signal environments that:
• Demand perfection without offering protection
• Praise competence while restricting mobility
• Require emotional suppression while increasing stress
• Insist on individual explanation for collective patterns
Seen this way, cognitive distortions are not proof of faulty thinking. They are evidence of prolonged exposure to crooked rooms.
Addressing cognitive dysmorphia, then, requires more than helping individuals challenge their thoughts. It requires changing the conditions that make those thoughts reasonable in the first place.
Until those conditions shift, cognitive distortions will continue to appear not as anomalies, but as adaptations to systems that ask people to carry contradiction inside their own minds and bodies.
Closing: Leveling the Room
This project began with a question that sounds deceptively simple: Why do so many capable, accomplished women of color see themselves as less than? What emerges, layer by layer, is that this is not a failure of confidence, cognition, or resilience. It is a failure of environment.
Imposter syndrome, as it is commonly named, mislocates the problem. It asks individuals to interrogate their thoughts while leaving untouched the systems that produce those thoughts. It assumes misplacement, when what is actually present is misalignment. People are not standing in spaces where they do not belong. They are standing in crooked rooms and being told to adjust their posture.
When we look closely, we see that distorted self-appraisal does not arise in isolation. It is formed through repeated cognitive appraisals in environments that question legitimacy, extract competence without reward, and confuse excellence with containment. Over time, those appraisals recruit the body. They activate stress responses. They alter cortisol rhythms. They embed vigilance into muscle memory. What we label as insecurity becomes chronic physiological strain.
This is why belonging and rightful presence cannot remain abstract ideals. They are not soft concepts. They are regulatory conditions. When belonging is real, the nervous system stands down. When rightful presence is granted, bodies no longer have to brace themselves for erasure or exposure. When the room is level, people do not need to convince themselves they deserve to stand upright. They simply do.
The stories shared here, both personal and clinical, make something unmistakably clear: many organizations, institutions, and systems continue to reward overfunctioning while denying mobility, to praise value while withholding power, and to name inclusion without practicing equity. In these spaces, cognitive dysmorphia is not an anomaly. It is a predictable outcome.
The work, then, is not to teach individuals how to lean differently. It is to repair the room.
That repair requires more than language. It requires structural accountability, aligned rewards, transparent pathways, protection from harm, and an honest reckoning with how power is distributed. It requires moving beyond resilience as a substitute for justice and mindfulness as a response to chronic inequity. It requires institutions willing to ask not only Who is here? but Who is allowed to rise, rest, and remain whole?
To name cognitive dysmorphia is not to pathologize survival. It is to refuse the lie that harm is happening only in people’s heads. It is to insist that what shows up in minds and bodies is deeply connected to what is happening in policies, practices, and cultures.
The invitation at the end of this work is both personal and collective. Individually, we can learn to question the mirror and ask whether it has been warped by the room around us. Collectively, we must decide whether we are willing to level the spaces we ask people to inhabit.
Because no amount of confidence, effort, or excellence can straighten a crooked room. And healing, real healing, begins not when people finally stand tall, but when the floor beneath them is made just.
Purpose and Invitation
The purpose of this writing is to define and introduce the concept of cognitive dysmorphia and to invite a necessary shift away from the language of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome locates the problem within the individual and assumes misplacement. Cognitive dysmorphia names something more accurate: a distorted self-appraisal formed through prolonged exposure to environments that are structurally misaligned.
By offering this concept, I am not suggesting a new label for the sake of novelty, nor am I proposing a diagnosis meant to individualize harm. Rather, this work seeks to provide language that better reflects lived reality, one that makes visible the relationship between social structure, cognitive appraisal, embodiment, and health. Cognitive dysmorphia names what happens when capable people internalize distorted messages about their worth, not because they are mistaken about themselves, but because the rooms they occupy refuse to reflect them honestly.
The invitation here is both conceptual and practical. It is an invitation to stop asking individuals to correct their thinking in environments that remain unchanged, and instead to interrogate the conditions that make distorted self-appraisal reasonable, predictable, and embodied. Moving away from imposter syndrome toward cognitive dysmorphia is a shift from self-blame to structural awareness, from individual correction to collective accountability, and from asking people to stand straighter to finally asking why the room is crooked in the first place.
Only when we make that shift does the possibility of real belonging, rightful presence, and sustainable well-being come fully into view.
References
Clance, Pauline Rose, & Imes, Suzanne. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high
achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory,
Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.
Harris-Perry, Melissa. (2011). Sister Citizen: Shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America.
Yale University Press.
Lorde, Audre. (1984). Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.
Okun, Tema. (1999). White Supremacy Culture. Dismantling Racism Works.
Wing Sue, Derald. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual
orientation. Wiley.
Visual Map: Cognitive Dysmorphia
A Structural → Cultural → Cognitive → Embodied → Behavioral → Organizational Loop
1. Structural Context: The Crooked Room
(Macro level: society, institutions, history)
At the outermost layer is the room itself.
Racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, normativity
Institutions not designed with women of color, racialized people, or marginalized groups in mind
Systems that extract value without distributing power, safety, or reward
Inclusion without equity; access without protection
Key dynamic:
The room is tilted but presented as neutral.
People entering the room are expected to adjust themselves rather than question the structure.
2. White Supremacy Culture as a Cognitive Environment
(How the room teaches people to think)
Drawing from Tema Okun, the crooked room is organized by normalized cultural logics:
Perfectionism – mistakes are punished, not contextualized
Objectivity – emotion and embodiment are dismissed as bias
Either/Or Thinking – complexity and nuance are flattened
Worship of the Written Word – lived experience must be proven to count
Key dynamic:
These norms do not just shape policy and evaluation.
They shape how people learn to interpret themselves.
White supremacy culture becomes the background operating system for cognitive appraisal.
3. Cognitive Appraisal (Meaning-Making)
(How the individual interprets experience)
Inside this environment, people continuously appraise:
Am I safe here?
Do I belong?
Is my presence legitimate or provisional?
What does this feedback mean about my worth?
Cognitive appraisal is not confidence.
It is the meaning-making process that links experience to identity, belonging, and survival.
Key dynamic:
When the environment sends distorted signals, appraisal absorbs the distortion.
4. Predictable Cognitive Distortions
(Not errors, but adaptations)
Within crooked rooms, certain distortions reliably appear:
Black-and-white thinking
“Either I am exceptional, or I do not belong.”Discounting the positive
“This praise doesn’t count; it didn’t lead anywhere.”Catastrophizing
“One mistake could undo everything.”Overgeneralization
“This happened once; it will always happen.”Emotional reasoning (suppressed)
“I feel unsafe, but I can’t prove it, so it must be me.”
Key dynamic:
These are not irrational thoughts.
They are accurate readings of unequal risk inside the room.
5. Cognitive Dysmorphia (Core Misalignment)
(Where distortion consolidates)
Cognitive dysmorphia emerges when there is a persistent mismatch between:
Objective reality
competence, achievement, contribution, evidenceSubjective self-appraisal
doubt, insufficiency, fear of exposure
Definition in the map:
Cognitive dysmorphia is an altered self-appraisal produced by prolonged exposure to environments that demand excellence while denying rightful presence.
Key dynamic:
The individual is upright.
The mirror is warped.
The room remains unnamed.
6. Embodied Threat Response
(The body enters the conversation)
Cognitive dysmorphia does not stay cognitive.
Identity threat activates the HPA axis
Cortisol is released
The nervous system remains vigilant
Beliefs like:
“I don’t belong”
“I’m about to be exposed”
“My success is accidental”
are interpreted as survival threats, not abstract worries.
Key dynamic:
The body responds before the mind debates accuracy.
7. Behavioral Adaptations
(How people survive the room)
In response, individuals often:
Overfunction
Take on more responsibility
Accumulate credentials
Work harder instead of resting
Attempt to “earn” belonging
This is not pathology.
It is strategy.
Key dynamic:
Striving increases not because appraisal is wrong, but because the room is unstable.
8. Health and Well-Being Consequences
(The cost of prolonged vigilance)
Over time:
Cortisol rhythms flatten
Inflammation increases
Fatigue, burnout, anxiety, depression emerge
Risk for cardiometabolic and autoimmune conditions rises
The body carries what the system refuses to acknowledge.
Key dynamic:
Belonging uncertainty becomes embodied inflammation.
9. Mislabeling the Experience
(Where systems deflect accountability)
At this point, the experience is often named:
“Imposter syndrome”
“Low confidence”
“Mindset issue”
Interventions focus on:
CBT
Resilience
Mindfulness
Individual coping
Key dynamic:
The individual is asked to recalibrate while the room stays crooked.
10. The Missing Layer: Structural Repair
(What actually resolves the cycle)
Cognitive dysmorphia does not resolve through effort, reframing, or striving.
Repair requires:
Transparent pathways for advancement
Alignment between contribution and reward
Reduction of chronic evaluation
Protection, not just praise
Conditions of belonging and rightful presence
Belonging = nervous system safety
Rightful presence = physiological legitimacy
When these are present, the body stands down.
The appraisal recalibrates naturally.
The distortion loosens.