You’re at work, and you’ve just handed in a report. You know you’ve smashed it, and you can’t help but think you deserve a pay rise for carrying your entire team on your shoulders. And then, within an hour, you’ve received a blunt message from your boss, and you’ve decided you’re terrible at your job, totally worthless, and you’re probably going to be fired.

If this extreme emotional see-saw sounds familiar, you could have ‘sufferiority’.

The term – a blend of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’, with an added ‘f’ to convey the suffering it causes – was invented by psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber, author of What We Want (and also my friend), after a conversation we had during lockdown.

We were talking about ‘imposter syndrome’ – the feeling that you don’t deserve your success and achievements, which is often linked to low self-esteem and generally attributed to women. I told her I feel this all the time, before shyly admitting that I yo-yo between this and its very opposite: feeling that I’m better and I deserve more. I either have an inflated ego or my self-worth is on the floor – there’s no inbetween.

She assured me that this is something she experiences herself, and that it’s also something she had noticed in her clients, eg the woman who wouldn’t date because her standards were too high, but also because she didn’t feel like she was worthy of love. We decided there should be a word for this, so ‘sufferiority’ was born.

Since then, I’ve noticed the different ways sufferiority pops up in my life. I either think my husband doesn’t deserve everything I do for him, or I’m punching above my weight. In social situations, I can feel confident one moment and worry I’m being too annoying the next. It can be conflicting, and the self-esteem drop can be crushing – so I asked Fox Weber to help me unpack this phenomenon. Where does it come from, why do we experience it, and what can we do to overcome it?

“It’s a split sense of self-worth, where a part of you believes in some glorified potential and feels immensely capable, and another part of you feels deeply inadequate,” Fox Weber explains.

We already know that you can have a ‘superiority complex’, or an ‘inferiority complex’ - thanks to early psychologist Alfred Adler’s theories – but, says Fox Weber, “what’s dizzying is that it can change within the span of an hour. There are some arrogant types who feel genuinely superior, but sufferiority sets you up to do something bold one minute, and then feel the shame of self-loathing the next.”

Fox Weber says the biggest tell-tale sign is the spiral of self-doubt that comes with making an assured move. “It can even affect things like sending emails: you feel paralysed, doubting how you should sign off or how you come across,” she says. It can lead you to overthink social situations or feel easily knocked when you don’t get what you want or fail in some other way.

“Rage can be a big symptom of it,” says Fox Weber. “It’s a seething feeling that others don’t recognise your worth, which makes you feel diminished.”

For some people, it might only pop up in one aspect of their lives – work or relationships, for example – while for others (like me), it can manifest in lots of different ways.

According to Fox Weber, women are much more prone to sufferiority because of the mixed messages we’re given by society.

“On the one hand, we’re told to be confident and know our worth, but we’re also supposed to hold back from bragging; we’re scared of seeming arrogant or cocky,” she says. “There’s a leftover sense that women should be modest and bashful.”

Plus, terms like ‘imposter syndrome’ are so frequently applied to women, that we believe we should feel like imposters, to some degree. “I have sometimes found myself faking imposter syndrome, even to myself, when actually I’m more confident than I want to admit to,” she says.

This essentially creates an internal conflict where we think we should be humble but we also believe we are capable of greater things. It’s a tug of war that can leave us feeling torn and despondent.

It also follows a binary arc of death and glory. “Sometimes I think sufferiority is like theatre in the mind,” says Fox Weber. “It’s a dramatic plot twist that says you are either incredible or disastrous.”

Anxious people tend to experience it more, says Fox Weber, because we’re not great at dealing with uncertainty, so our brains invent some kind of grand conclusion. In reality, though, not everything needs to have such dramatic consequences.

“It’s driving the plot forward, which is much more vivid and engrossing than the subtle shades of grey,” says Fox Weber. 

There’s no magic cure for sufferiority. “It’s more about living with it, not solving it,” says Fox Weber. “It’s about accepting the theatre, without believing it. Sufferority can be an attempt to settle the ambivalence about your own worth, but you have to live with the ambivalence.”

The first step, suggests Fox Weber, is admitting to it. “This can be majorly bonding,” she says. “Telling someone else can be immense relief from private torment. Can you think of someone you can talk to about sufferiority who might relate?”

She also recommends not putting all your eggs in one self-worth basket. For example, if your career is your whole life, you’ll likely feel crushed by the slightest failure in the workplace. “Diversify your sources of strength, so you don’t think it’s death or glory based on one encounter or job application,” says Fox Weber. Remind yourself about all the areas where you succeed. “If we can widen the picture we have of ourselves, we can tolerate the fluctuations with more ease.”

Even though it’s sometimes easier to view life through a black-and-white lens, we need to make friends with nuance. Remind yourself that you’re human, just like everyone else. You can be amazing at some things and terrible at others, or maybe even a little bit good, or a little bit rubbish. And that’s all OK.

Much of it comes down to making peace with failure. “The awkward conversation with that big-deal person probably wasn’t as significant as you think, and you likely won’t win that prize you’ve applied for, but that doesn’t mean you’re untalented or unworthy,” says Fox Weber. “Not everything is so make or break as sufferiority would have you believe.”

In Natasha Lunn’s book, Conversations On Love, this quote from writer Sarah Hepola sums up how to find a sense of balance: “For a lot of my life, I’ve had the sense that I wasn’t good enough or that I was better than everyone else – a back and forth between inferiority and superiority. Not getting what I wanted brings me back to a place in the middle, where I see I am no different to anybody else.”

Images: Getty