Trained Not to Trust Ourselves

How graduate school shapes dissertation writing and haunts the book

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

If you’ve been following along, you know I recently wrote about the five key shifts involved in transforming a dissertation into a book and published a follow-up podcast episode that explored some more specific examples of what to do and what not to do.

Today I want to go deeper on the shift that I think is the most fundamental and often the most psychologically difficult: moving from constantly proving yourself to claiming your authority.

This shift is hard for a reason, and it’s not just about writing habits. It’s about undoing years of conditioning that taught us not to trust ourselves.

Graduate school is an infantilizing experience.

I don’t say that lightly. Of course I know many faculty genuinely support and care about their students. But the structure itself treats graduate students as a lesser class of citizen, and that shapes how we learn to see ourselves, our ideas, and our place within that hierarchy.

Our committees have enormous power over how our dissertations are written and how we move through graduate programs. I’ve seen faculty tell graduate students they cannot pursue certain lines of inquiry because they fall too far outside the bounds of the discipline—not because the ideas are bad, but because they make committee members uncomfortable or don’t fit neatly into existing scholarly categories. We learn early that our intellectual instincts can be overruled, that our curiosity must be tempered by what’s deemed acceptable.

And this dynamic extends beyond the intellectual. In my own graduate program, I taught classes as the instructor of record—designing syllabi, lecturing, and grading—but I wasn’t permitted to eat the snacks in the faculty lounge. Other instructors with only MAs could, but not PhD students. The unspoken message was clear: like children staring at a cookie jar, we couldn’t be trusted not to take too much, even though we were paid the lowest wages in the department for teaching. This bizarre infantilization of 20-, 30-, and 40+ year-olds seeps into our brains.

And these experiences accumulate. They teach us that we are not yet full members of the scholarly community. That our voices don’t carry the same weight. That we need permission.

This conditioned infantilization bleeds into writing in profound ways.

We learn to write defensively—hedging, qualifying, citing exhaustively, and showing our work at every turn. Some of this makes sense; the dissertation exists to prove you’ve mastered the foundations of your field. But defensive writing becomes more than a strategic choice. It becomes a posture, a way of being on the page.

We hide behind mountains of citations, foregrounding other scholars’ voices because theirs feel safer and more legitimate. We write “Smith argues” and “Jones demonstrates” until our own perspective nearly disappears. We hedge constantly—“it could be argued that,” “this seems to suggest”—building in plausible deniability.

We might be afraid to make a genuine argument at all. Not because we don't know how, but because making an argument entails taking a stand and subjecting our ideas to criticism.

This defensive mode can protect us when our professional futures depend on the approval of a small group of people with significant power over us. But this survival strategy doesn’t serve you when you’re writing a book.

Once you have a PhD, you technically have more assumed credibility, but you may not feel like you’ve earned it.

The credential changes overnight; the internalized sense of being a lesser intellectual does not. Nobody teaches you how to turn off the graduate student posturing, the reflexive deference that kept you safe for years. Nobody tells you that you can now eat the snacks in the faculty lounge.

So you keep writing like a graduate student even after you’re not one anymore. You keep hiding behind citations, hedging, and asking permission on the page because that’s the only way you know how to be in academic spaces. But your book doesn’t need you to prove you belong in the conversation—it needs you to make a compelling contribution to it.

Most readers aren’t evaluating whether you deserve to be here. They’re curious about your argument. They hope you’ll change how they think. You can stop showing your work in the same exhaustive way—no genealogical histories of every theory, no fortress of citations around every claim. But knowing this intellectually and actually doing it are two different things. The defensive posturing is now deep in our bones.

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The voice shift is scary because it requires you to be vulnerable in a new way.

Writing with authority means standing behind your ideas without an escape hatch. It means saying “I argue” and “this book demonstrates” and trusting that your years of research have earned you the right to make these claims. It means foregrounding your own voice instead of hiding behind the voices of scholars who came before you. And it means unlearning the lesson that graduate school taught you over and over: that you cannot be trusted.

I am here to reassure you that you are trustworthy. (Hell, it was always my position that PhD students deserved to be trusted and fed as well!) Your perspective matters—not because Smith and Jones and Garcia validate it, but because you’ve done the work, you’ve thought deeply, and you have something to say.

Part of my work as a writing coach and developmental editor is supporting scholars in this process. Here are some of the ways we start making that shift:

• First, notice when you’re hiding. Look for passages where other scholars’ voices dominate and yours recedes. Look for strings of citations that function as a shield rather than a genuine engagement with the literature. Ask yourself: am I citing this because it’s essential to my argument, or because I don’t trust my own authority?

• Second, notice when you’re hedging. Phrases like “it could be argued,” “this seems to suggest,” “might potentially”—these are the linguistic fingerprints of a writer still asking permission. You don’t have to eliminate all hedging, but you should be choosing when to hedge rather than hedging by default.

• Third, practice saying what you actually think. When you’re revising, ask yourself: what am I really arguing here? Then write that claim as directly as possible. “I argue that...” See how it feels. It might feel presumptuous. It might feel exposed. That discomfort is the feeling of unlearning.

Moving from “please pass me” to “I have something to say” is genuinely hard and it’s not just a writing problem.

It’s about reclaiming a sense of intellectual authority that graduate training often systematically undermines. The food in the faculty lounge, the lines of inquiry we weren’t allowed to pursue, the constant message that we weren’t yet ready to be trusted—these things leave scars.

But you have a PhD now. You did the work. You earned the credential. And your book is an opportunity to finally write as someone who belongs in the conversation—not as a guest asking permission, but as a voice worth hearing.

So this week, pull up something you’ve written recently. Look for the places where you’re hiding behind citations or hedging your claims. And ask yourself, what would it look like to write as someone who trusts herself?

Other Content in the Diss-to-Book Series: