I can’t advocate for myself without getting emotional

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I can’t advocate for myself without getting emotional.

Once I tried to negotiate a medical bill down using advice from many articles online and couldn’t get through the conversation without crying. It wasn’t that I didn’t have money to pay the bill; it was the anger and frustration and feeling of powerlessness of expecting to pay $200 and being charged $1,500.

Today I tried to negotiate my salary for the first time. I had it all planned out in my head what I wanted to say, but as soon as I started talking my voice was wavering. I wanted to say, “I think I’m worth more than the bottom of the salary band for my promotion, here are some examples, the number I’m hoping for is $X.”

Instead the HR person opened the conversation with a detailed overview of how salaries are set at my company. It was actually very helpful, but I felt like the subtext was “don’t be disappointed if we say no because we probably will.” I asked some follow-ups and then the HR person said she can’t go back to the department VPs with “Jane is kind of unhappy with her raise” and that I needed to write down my ask and send it to her and we’ll go from there.

Which is fine! I can do that, it’s what I wanted to do from the beginning. And she was incredibly kind about me crying during our whole conversation. But I still feel so frustrated by the process and with myself for not being able to have this normal work conversation as a seasoned professional in my 30s. I feel so immature. I also feel like I never want to negotiate a raise ever again because the few thousand dollars a year I want to ask for is not worth the emotional energy, stress, and embarrassment this has caused me.

How do I get past this and keep advocating for myself in the future?

I wrote back and asked: “What’s going on in your head when you feel yourself getting emotional? Are you expecting to be turned down and you’re upset/angry about that in advance? Do you find it scary to ask for something you want because you’re worried other people won’t agree you deserve it? What are the underlying emotions that are making it such an intense experience? Also, do you find this happens with any other category of conversation, or is it pretty much always when advocating for yourself?”

It’s mostly an advocating for myself/being assertive thing. I hate rocking the boat. With negotiating in general, I think I get upset and stressed preemptively because I expect the conversation to be … not quite adversarial, but whatever the polite business version of that is. And then I assume I’ll end up looking silly and unreasonable.

For more context on the specific incident I wrote in about, I’m mad at myself for not negotiating when I accepted my initial offer several years ago. At the time I thought it was a generous offer above the company-wide salary band for my level, if slightly lower than the number I initially named. A few days after I joined the company, I learned the salary bands had all increased at some point during the month I was interviewing and I had assessed the offer based on the old information.

This has been eating at me ever since. I feel like a chump for not even asking again if there was wiggle room when we got to the offer stage. Negotiating my promotion felt like the time to make up for it, even while I assumed the answer was no.

(The medical bill example is similar — like I should have known the hospital would overcharge and I was an idiot for not asking the price in advance.)

The thing is, a senior leader on my team (someone with sway over raises and promotions) encouraged me to negotiate. She said it’s probable they could come up, and even if they can’t now they still want to know what I think my work is worth. It should not have been scary. But negotiations get to me! I’m trapped in a doom-loop thought spiral before I even open my mouth.

This might not be where you expected this answer to go, but I am a big, big believer that when your thought patterns on something consistently don’t line up with the reality of the situation, therapy is what will help you fix it.

Here’s what I see in your letter: You believe that advocating for yourself, even in routine and expected ways, will be A Big Deal — that you’ll seem unreasonable or aggressive, and that the act of asking for something you want is an almost inherently hostile move (even knowing, as I’m sure you do, that other people have salary negotiations all the time — so on some level you know it’s not a huge deal, but your brain is still wired to react as if yours will be). You also call yourself as a “chump” for not knowing you had outdated salary info a couple of years ago, when that’s not a normal thing to be expected to realize. Feeling like a chump — or like an idiot for not knowing the hospital would overcharge you — is a pretty adversarial framework to be defaulting to.

That thinking doesn’t reflect the reality of how this stuff works! When that’s the case, it’s nearly always rooted in lessons you learned growing up, lessons that probably made sense for your circumstances at the time but aren’t serving you well as an adult who’s not operating in those same circumstances now.

For example … did you grow up in a family where people weren’t allowed to express their needs, or where only some people were allowed to do that and you weren’t? Or where your needs often weren’t met, and it was a big deal to try to claim things you needed? Or in a family where everything was high-conflict, so when you imagine advocating for yourself, the conversation your brain pictures is dramatic and high-conflict because that’s what was modeled for you early on?

Very often, when your reactions don’t seem warranted by your current situation, it will turn out there there were circumstances in your past where that reaction did make sense.

Therapy can help you unravel that, drain some of those early lessons of their power, and then help you re-wire your brain so it responds in a way that better serves you now.

That’s a long-term answer to the problem, but I strongly believe it’s what will fix this at its root, and I bet it would increase your quality of life in other ways too.