272 | The Roots of Imposter Syndrome -Part 1

In Part 1 of our deep dive into imposter syndrome, counselor and healer Madaline Blau helps us understand where creative insecurity really comes from - and why so many writers feel stuck between confidence and collapse.

We unpack instinct, how insight shapes character and story, and the early experiences that form our creative identity.

This episode ends at a powerful emotional pause, with Part 2 picking up next week as we move into grounding, embodiment, and a guided visualization with Madaline.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve.

Lorien: And I'm Lorien McKenna. And today we're diving into something that comes up all the time on the show, and in the lives of pretty much every creative person: imposter syndrome.

Meg: Every artist has dealt with that nagging voice that whispers, ‘you're not good enough, you don't belong here.’ All that worry that someone can figure out that you're a fraud. It's a feeling that even the most accomplished creative struggle with, and it can quietly sabotage our confidence, our process, and even our joy.

Lorien: To help us unpack why this happens and how to work through it. We're joined today by Madaline Blau: a counselor, teacher, and healer based in Los Angeles.

Meg: Madaline's work blends modern counseling with time honored healing traditions. She's learned from mentors across the Americas and Africa for more than 40 years. She's helped individuals, couples, and creative communities reconnect with their authentic selves, release old patterns, and build lives that connect to their deepest creative self.

Lorien: This will be a two-part conversation. In the first part, we're gonna explore where imposter syndrome comes from and how it impacts our work and the deeper instinctual threads that lead us back to our creative selves. We'll also hear from Joe Forte, Meg's writing partner about the power of insight in storytelling.

Meg: Both parts of this conversation are rich and honest and go places we don't often get to explore here on the show. So Madaline, welcome to the show.

Madaline: Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Meg: It's a very special episode for me. I've known Madaline for many years and she's helped and supported and guided me personally in many ways. So, very special that she's here with us. She has also agreed to participate in our weeks or what we like to call ‘Adventures in Screenwriting.’ So Lorien, why don't you kick us off? 

Lorien: So this week for me started out really creatively strong. I was focused and then I had to take a break from my writing, 'cause a lot of family stuff, a lot of, you know, businessy stuff that took a lot longer than I thought it would. But one of the things that came up was, my daughter's in eighth grade, and so we are applying for high schools. We're looking at all our options, and one of them is this private school that she really wants to attend. And yesterday was the family interview. So you know, my daughter's very nervous, and she and her little friends, not her little friends, these gorgeous, amazing, beautiful spirits, these 13-year-old girls are helping her practice, are firing questions at her at lunch. 

So she comes really prepared and right before we go in there, ‘I'm like, remember, this is about you being, you don't try to tell him what you think he wants to hear in the interview.’ And as she's going in to meet with him, I say, ‘it's your interview too. You get to interview him.’ So she has her meeting, my husband and I go in and then he asks us some questions and then he starts to tell us about her answers.

And he said, one of the things I appreciated about her response to the question, ‘what are you looking for out of high school,’ is she said, ‘make amazing friends, learn some things, and come out with memories.’ And he said he really appreciated that because it felt very true, very real. 'Cause kids going into freshman year in high school really are looking for friends.

And he said, most kids come in there with academics is what they're looking for because they think that's what he wants to hear. And I just thought, I'm so proud of her that she had the courage to just say what she was really looking for, which was friends. And honestly, I feel like that's what we're looking for in almost every interaction we're doing. People to hang out with and be comfortable and build relationships. 

And so it was really inspiring to me. And then I went home and I finally fucking figured out what I'm trying to do with my life, and how I'm gonna get there. My plot, my beacon, and a plan. 

Meg: Wow, that's huge. 

Lorien: Meg, how was your week?

Meg: So for my week, I'm gonna have a guest come on, my husband and writing partner and creative partner, Joe Forte. Because, he's the one that I was kind of drawing from and I'd rather have him talk to you about it. But the setup is, on our workshop site we have kind of once a month you guys can come on and tell us your story and where you are with it. And then we give you questions and we try to help you with your story. Generally asking a lot of questions, sometimes people, ideas. 

And this month we had a wonderful writer come on and she told us a story that was very clear. It was a tragedy. But then the end got a little bit mushy. And it turns out when we asked a lot of questions, she got a lot of notes, and a lot of people wanted hope. They wanted hope in this tragedy. And so she got a little bit lost, I think, in all the notes because that really wasn't what she was writing. And yet she understood the note and does she need hope? 

And, I was thinking later when walking the dog, because every time I talk to you guys every month, your stories are still turning around and I'm still thinking about it. I was like, you know, I think you can write a tragedy, of course. It's a classic form. But it needs to have an insight. If you have a tragedy with no insight, then you're gonna get notes like that. 

Like, ‘where's the hope,’ and ‘why did I read this,’ and ‘why did you tell me this story?’ So that word insight is something, it's not my word, it's a new word that's been coming up in my life and in my work a lot. And the person who kind of showed that light to me of the word ‘insight’ is Joe Forte. So I'm gonna bring him on real quick.

Joe: So insight is something we talk a lot about in our practice, and we're constantly asking ourselves the question or that question, and we may not know the answer and we may not know the answer until the script is finished, or until the film is made. But it's the point of the creative act for us. And I think one of the big reasons people turn to movies or art, because you know only in that medium can they experience, you know, an insight. And it can only be found through the journey in the organization of your plot and characters. 

So the insight can be a tone, an attitude, a style, but it's ultimately, and most importantly, the point or destination of your film. And outside of your character and plot, the insight might seem trite, and I think that's a big thing to say, separated from the emotions of the narrative.

So, for instance, the film Midnight Run, the insight in this film is that you can only move forward in life by letting go. Seems pretty obvious, but the narrative that film makes it feel earned and inspired. So bounty hunter Robert De Niro has to let go of his hurts and disappointments, which doesn't seem that remarkable just to talk about. But because the entire goal of the film's main character is to deliver a fugitive and collect the bounty that will allow him to get his dream, the insight of the film feels dynamic because the climax of the film is De Niro letting go of that fugitive, letting go of that goal that we've been following tor the whole movie and giving up the bounty because of the way that fugitive has inspired him to change. 

So the way I think of it is like you're going into an antique store or a dream and you go in and you collect a harp and a giraffe and a box of snuff and a zipper and an umbrella. And the journey to insight is taking these random elements and defining how they are connected, and finding that connection is the insight that no one else has made, hopefully, before your film, but you have because you are the writer and you took the journey. 

And that is what separates great writing from formula. Getting to the specificity of that insight through action so that it can be experienced, not just named, is what film and theater and art does well. It must be found and named because it is earned and felt because it is played.

Lorien: I wanted to add something to this. I, you know, back when we were at Pixar, Meg, you would talk about the click, which is, I think what you're talking about. Like, you were working on something and you couldn't get it, and then there was this click that would happen. That, and I think it's that, right? The insight, aha, I, all the pieces are fitting, fitting together, and then I know what I'm actually. What I'm saying, instead of what I'm trying to say.

Meg: You're starting to get more and more clarity on the insight and now suddenly, oh, the plot clicks to the insight and they actually, and the character arc, all three things. The plot, the character arc, and that emotional insight. Start to click together, and there's a simplicity to it. A lot of time with emerging artists, there's so, it's so complicated because you're throwing everything in there, which is normal in the beginning, but, when you really, truly get this, it's actually beautifully simple, usually, and so that you can start to explore the depth of what you're talking about, not just many things.

So that was my week and I especially wanted to do it for our wonderful writer Heather, who came up in our workshop, and was pitching to us, and I wanted to get that message out to her. Madaline, let's do your week.

Madaline: So nine years ago I decided it'd be a fabulous idea to plant cherry trees on my property. Cherry trees, you need a male and a female. So we put them in, so we put them in one hole and I planted them right next to my studio, which stupid thing to do. And, I don't, people who garden will know, that, in California we're losing stone fruit, to invasive little bugs that eat them in from the inside out.

And so my cherry trees have been slowly dying. And this weekend we decided, this was the weekend that the cherry trees were coming down. And now I feel like George Washington and the trees are enormous and they tied rope around them and they just started pulling them and we were thinking, ah, ‘why are they pulling them? There's gotta be roots. Like these were enormous trees like roots going down. Probably gonna have to fix my wall and my studio.’ 

No, they pull 'em over and there was no taproot whatsoever. It had been eaten up from the core. And I thought, ‘huh. Now if I were still on the res, this would be a medicine sign.’ So all week long I've been thinking about where, and it's, maybe it's because we're doing this podcast because that's what happens when you feel like an imposter. You feel like you can't find your core or like it's been rotted away and when you go to turn to it, it's not there. So I've been spending the whole week thinking about where that's happening in my own life right now.

Meg: Okay. I can really relate to that, but okay, let's get into it. Fraud syndrome. From your perspective and experience, and I know you do work with a lot of creative people in this town, and probably around the world. What do you think it is? What, let's just start with, it doesn't have to be like a clinical definition, but just from your experience.

Madaline: Well, I'm not gonna give you a clinical definition 'cause I'm not a psychologist. But I'm just gonna pick up the thread that you, that's in this web that has already begun to be woven. What you're actually talking about is an insight, and instinct, all come from someone who is connected to their heart. And when you're connected to your heart, you're connected to something that is universal. That all human beings experience. 

And that's when that click happens because everybody who's had a similar experience in one form or another, all of a sudden feels known, spoken for, recognized. And because of stories, I think, stories are one of the most sacred ways we have of passing down knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation, for those who we will never know. 

It's really important that it be able to be at the core, at that place, that intellectual. There's Plato, there's Aristotle, there's all these different kinds of intellectual eras that man has gone through, but the heart doesn't change. So when you get to that place, if you have the courage to be in that place, because it does take courage to be that vulnerable and to be a human being, it's to be at risk, to be a human being. To be alive is to be at risk. 

So to be an artist and to take that risk and say, this is what this is, here. This is what I experienced. This is what I saw. This is what I'm seeing. This is what you need to recognize. It's very risky because you can't write about those things, speak those things, if you are not willing to feel those things. 

Because an artist is a midwife. They're bringing things from the world that does not exist yet that does not have names, through them into this world and giving it name, shape, form, and meaning. When you do that, it passes through you, so how it feels, what that causes to your nervous system. If it's something joyful, then it's pleasurable to experience. If it's something tragic, it's painful to experience. If it's something shameful, it's hard to say. 

But that's all part of the story. And an artist has to be at once willing to, in some ways open themselves, and their body, and their nervous system, and their heart, and their flesh, to those experiences, and then be willing to say, this is how it is.

And in a, in the culture that we're in now in a western culture. Most of our culture right now is tied to not speaking truth. It's tied to gaslighting. So, it's asking you to not be yourself, to not speak unless it falls in line. So, it's very dangerous, but it's the most important time for artists. This is the time when you are needed the most.

Meg: Let me ask you about that, Madaline, because, and this is more now from a writing perspective. We hear our members on our workshop site pitching, sometimes we get a very passionate social issue that they wanna talk about, which aligns to what you're saying. But, from a writing point of view, and I think what you're also really deeply talking about when you say human connection, is what do they, as a human being, whatever the social thing that's going on, it has to travel through time. 

That social thing may not be happening in a decade and twenty years, but I just wanna clarify for our listeners, you're not necessarily only, or specifically, talking about a social thing that needs to come through them, injustice, or, well, you're talking about a personal human experience.

Madaline: Yes. The injustice that's happening is just what's happening in the moment. But the experience of that is what each person is hoping to be able to have articulated so that they know that they exist ,and that it's real. And what artists can do is show the effect of whatever is going on. What that, how that creates the life of that human being or impedes the life of that human being, or draws a community together or separates a community and takes 'em apart.

Meg: What that, and what human does in response to that's where you start to get into story versus situation, right?

Madaline: Exactly. 

Meg: The realization of yourself and how are you fostering injustice, how are you being, having injustice to yourself, how are you? That kind of self view I think is what a lot of our emerging writers miss, which is a great dovetail into imposter syndrome. 'Cause that's all self view, I think. I think that what you're talking about, that insight and that flow imposter syndrome really is a way to stop it. Is a real way to get back to safety. 'Cause you're talking about risk, right? You're talking about standing here and exposing yourself and showing yourself and your vulnerabilities inside of whatever package you're putting it in. 

And then that voice starts. Because you've gotten very close to showing yourself to talking about your vulnerabilities. And I think that can also be when tap, tap, tap, or it happens when you're actually successful, and now tap, tap, tap. So how does, in terms of knowing ourselves and authenticity, the imposter syndrome arrive, or what do you think it is?

Madaline: It starts when we are born into a family and we're taught that we, the things that we are, have to be in order to be lovable, to be safe, to have some sense of agency, to exist, to be, to actually feel yourself as existing. And also, and this is gonna sound odd, but to be able to dissolve, which means to be able to bond and be part of something larger. 

So, the, to get to the instinct you have to be able to be connected to your intuition. You have to be willing to follow your intuition. So, in writing, you know, you may be writing something, you don't know why you're writing it but you can't stop yourself from writing it. You don't know what it is yet, but you're following a thread. That thread has an instinct to it.

You can't see that it's, you know, it's maybe the beginning of the moon and you only see this tiny sliver, but you just keep watching it over the month and then all of a sudden it's a full moon. The importance of that is, is that is also where integrity lies, where truth is, instinct and truth. Your mind will lie to you, because it's the part of you that keeps you safe, and connected, and being able to survive in whatever environment you are in.

Your instinct is deeper. Your instinct is connected to, not just the immediate environment that you're in, but there are some cultures that believe that there's only one soul, and when you tap into soul, your soul, what you're actually doing is tapping into the larger one soul that we're all a part of. And so when you see a piece of writing is soulful, it's because it's touched the universal, it's touched the universal soul. 

But to do that, you have to be down at your instinct. You have to not have to know where you're going, but to be able to feel that you're going somewhere that has a pull that keeps your curiosity alive, you can't stop it and you have to follow it. And that's the commitment to the art. That's the commitment to the page really. And maybe you're gonna throw away two thirds of the day's writing, but it led to that one page that now has brought you into the story at its deeper level.

Or the character, now you understand this character and the character's motivation or what they're actually experiencing versus what you would think they were experiencing or what culture is telling them they should be experiencing or how they should be behaving.

So, I'm gonna shift the perspective a little bit and talk more of a psychological term because imposter syndrome is a psychological term. Imposter syndrome, or feeling like a fraud happens when we're disconnected from our deeper self, and we're being our affected self. 

So as a child, when we're not allowed to be ourself. We have to constantly adapt to the environment. And in my generation, which was eons ago, it would be ‘little girls are seen and not heard,’ right? So, I learned to be very quiet because I wanted to be a good girl because I wanted to be loved and to belong.

So there's usually four main drives. Why we will adapt ourselves. One is to feel that we are loved and we belong, that we have approval. The next is to feel in control that we have agency. The shadow side of that is to feel it, to want to be controlled, which, like you would say, I never wanna be controlled. But if you think about it, when you're a child, you do want to be controlled. You want someone to take care of you. So, you can be and discover and do your job as a child, which is to figure out you, in the world.

Lorien: Is that like boundaries, like have a curfew, here's when bedtime is, that type of thing?

Madaline: It, yes, it includes that. It also includes not having to know everything. Children whose parents are unable to parent them, maybe because they don't have enough of a support system to feel secure, and so they're affected children will step in. Children want their parents to be happy at all costs, and they will sever arms and limbs and pieces of their heart and pieces of their personality in order to not burden that parent. 

What happens in that process when they do that long enough is they start losing connection to their core. Think of my cherry trees, and how the root of the tree had rotted away. So, it didn't have any the first four years of a tree, the stalk the center of the tree that's growing, it's soft wood. Every year it's laying another layer around it. It's laying a harder wood around it. It takes four years for that wood to harden to protect the core, which is called the heartwood.

When the heartwood gets damaged, the tree is not saveable. That's not true in humans, but we do share 92% of our DNA with trees. We're not, we are akin to trees. They are our ancestors really. They are relatives of ours, literally. 

So when a child is adapting their behavior to parent to their parent or protect the parent or enable the parent to function. They are in the parent's body rather than their own. They're thinking for them, they're all out there, rather than experiencing and connecting to their own sensations and asking themself, ‘how does this make me feel?’ No, they're asking themself, ‘how does my parent feel about this?’ You know, because their parent is what they need to be safe and secure.

And a child needs safety and security to grow. An artist needs a safe circle, right, of peers to be able to grow in. So as that happens and the child grows, and they're now learning to find themselves in others, rather than themself, they can't feel their own instincts anymore. Their instincts have been co-opted to be used for others. And an imposter when you're caught in the in, in the disconnection and susceptible to being, feeling, like a fraud. 

By the way, feeling like a fraud is an important thing to understand, because that's you telling you, ‘hey, I've lost connection to me. I am off my own center. I am not asking myself, I'm not taking care of myself. Who am I taking care of here? Who am I serving and who do I wanna serve? I need to serve me so I can serve anybody else.’ 

So just to finish out the things that usually pull us into. Distancing ourselves away from ourselves. There's loving, belonging, approval. There's being in control or wanting to be controlled, by the way, in wanting to be controlled, a lot of times when a child doesn't get to be able to be controlled, what goes along with that is martyrdom, blame, victim, playing those things because you're trying to get someone to take care of you. It's a wounded, it's a wound of not having gotten care that need, that you're needing.

So then there comes being separate, being able to experience yourself as existing as a sovereign being. People will do a lot of things when they don't feel that way, they'll inflate themselves or feel deflated. There's all kinds of trajectories off of that. And the other thing is dissolving. We all, at times, wanna dissolve and feel, and I think it's part of why there's, there was such a draw in the sixties towards drugs because our culture doesn't provide any way for us to have communal ecstasy. To connect with the divine. 

And we aren't mental beings. We are beings that have been created from stardust. And there's times when we want to be a part of that, of our essential self, which we can experience on our own, but only to a certain degree. There's a way in which when you know, when you're at a concert or you're someplace and everybody's feeling the same thing at the same time it's transcendent.

The danger in it is that people, if people aren't marshaling what they are using to be in that transcendent state, they can gather for hate. It's much easier to gather in hate than it is 'cause there's no vulnerability in hate. There's tremendous vulnerability in love. So if a person is frightened of loving, which is really not easy to do on the planet right now, these other states, these other frequency bans become a false safety. They're actually extremely dangerous. 

We all need to know that we are humans. So when you're writing a story and that click, that instinct happens. You're coming back from that affected world to your original wild state. And what I mean is not wild by being outta control, wild by being the two-legged being, human, that you are in the chain of life.

And those are the stories that enable us to experience ourselves as sacred and experience other things as sacred. And I think that is the most important aspect of not feeling like a fraud. So when you yourself feel like you matter and you're sacred, you're not afraid of being a fraud, you can stand up for a lot of things. You can take risk. 

You know, when we pulled these trees down, it was like, it's like, ‘what the hell was hold, why didn't these trees fall over on their own?’ Well, they had developed these really big side roots, and they were balancing and anchoring themselves from these side roots, but they, those side roots couldn't feed them and nourish them, and so they were dying. Same with a human being. Same with anything that's a lie.

Meg: What are some side routes that humans do when they're not authentic? They're off of their center sacred self.

Madaline: They can be pleasers. They can be chameleons, they can change and become whatever they think that person is. I mean, eventually that can go into sociopathy. They can become whatever that person needs in the moment to get what they want. You know, and what they want may not be to take from that person. It may be just to be in proximity to that person, so they don't feel alone. It's not always, you know, it's not always dark and dangerous. Sometimes they just wanna know that they actually exist, and they need someone else for their, you know, we all have sonar going off of us. We all have our unique signature, but signatures have to bounce off of something to come back for you to be able to feel yourself. 

So when a, you send out a false signature, if that, even if that person is loving to you or giving you praise about your writing, you don't really believe it's true because it's not really coming from an, it didn't, you don't feel like it came from inside you. And so no matter how much praise, how many Oscars, how many awards, you still feel empty inside. You still feel, you feel like you're cheating everybody, and why haven't they figured it out yet?

Meg: Do you think that people can instill in their children this sense of imposter syndrome as power, a power move? Meaning I, sometimes when I'm talking especially to young women, I get almost a sense they're afraid of that center. They're afraid of that sacred power center that they have. And it's interesting to me why like they're, it's dangerous to them to go stand there as if their very own power is dangerous and they'd rather get power from victim or pleasing. 'Cause somehow that feels safer, and how would we get those messages, that it's dangerous to stand in your sacred self.

Madaline: If you look back on history for thousands of years, you'll see that we have been in a period of time, where it hasn't been safe to be powerful as a woman where women have been accused of being witches and then hung or burned. Or if you look at the suffragette movement, just to be able to have a vote. You know, any way that a woman can have a voice and speak the truth has been very, has been dangerous.

Meg: How does somebody, especially a young person or a person who's older, who's lived with it now for decades, how do we start to recognize it? That voice, it's almost like internalizing the voice of the oppressor or the person who's telling you, you're not enough. And that sometimes I just saying, who's saying that to you? You know, because I know you're saying it to yourself, but who is that voice? 

Madaline: Well, that's the question. That would be a question. If someone, if I'm working with someone, I say, ‘hey, is that a familiar voice to you? Have you heard those words before?’ Or something like it, that sounds like that. And usually there is. There's someone in their past. It may be a teacher, it could be kids, it could be parents, it could be other kinds of cultural institutions. And those authorities, anyone, we make an authority, we put an authority over our own voice, right? So we turn to that first and we're trying to please that.

And girls are taught to put themselves, maybe not these next generations, but it's still in there to put themselves second to, to please others. If you are not allowed to have power. Then you have to find the, you have to find a way to be in to matter to the power that exists that could keep you safe and alive.

Lorien: I'm paying a lot of close attention to what my body is doing while I'm listening to this. And I am aware that probably people listening to this might be having some similar reactions, right? I can feel my heartbeat really loud all of a sudden in my head and in my chest. My head feels a little hot. I don't feel like I'm gonna cry, but I feel like there's pressure in my head, and it's like that desire to disassociate. Like, there's so much going on with what you're talking about as I'm listening to you as a writer, and a mother, and as somebody, and then I'm going, casting back in the past, searching for those experiences. 

So I feel like I'm living in multiple spaces at the same time. And it's not overwhelming, but it is,I feel like I'm full, like, and my body is full, and the space around me is also full. Like, I've invited too much in all of a sudden, and so I am, I'm aware that probably other people might be feeling this as well, listening to this and, you know, I've worked with you before, so I am, I sort of knew what to expect, so I just wanna pause here for a second and recalibrate.

And this is actually a perfect place to pause, part one. In next week's episode, Madaline guides us through grounding practices, deeper emotional work, and how to move from fear back into our creative center. It's powerful, it's practical, and we can't wait to share it. We'll see you next week for part two.