Published on 12, July, 2020
Or are you like me? Expecting at any moment to be outed as an intellectual fraud. It's an area of high,possibly pathological,insecurity for me. I think it connects to the bullying related trauma. Being treated as a lesser person by my school age contemporaries, especially as a teenager.
I've heard of things like this, of being outed as stupid and receiving ridicule and bullying from people. It is a form of trauma. I think it's similar to someone trying to buy expensive clothing to look rich, to avoid looking poor, even though they might actually be poor (especially after spending all that money on expensive clothes) but they will do that, in order to protect themselves against the bullying and ridicule of others.
I think you could try to show yourself, that even if you displayed low IQ, or went through the same kind of thing as you did back then, that you won't be ridiculed, and imagine that other people actually stepping in to help you out. Another exercise is to Imagine telling your bullies what you've always wanted to say to them.