Have you ever felt tears rise in your throat during a work conversation and swallowed them so fast your neck hurt? For some women it's tears. For others it's a tight chest, a clenched jaw, a shaky voice, or that wave of emotion you shut down before anyone notices.

There’s an unspoken rule in law that nobody warns you about: if you feel something hard, you’d better hide it. And if you don’t, people might think you can’t handle the job. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.

Welcome to The Lawyer Burnout Solution, the podcast for women attorneys who want to move from survival mode to a sustainable, fulfilling lawyer life. I’m Heather Mills, and every week I share tools, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you reclaim your energy, confidence, and career.

Last time, we talked about the Gratitude Trap and how the thought “I should be grateful” becomes a way of silencing yourself. Today we’re looking at another version of that same pattern. “I should be strong.” “I should be tougher.” We’re exploring moralized thinking, the belief that certain emotions say something bad about you. And let me be clear from the start. You are strong. That part isn’t in question. You wouldn’t have made it this far in law if you weren’t. The question isn’t whether you’re strong enough. It’s this: what’s the cost of constantly proving it? What are you giving up to maintain that armor?

In law, the rules about strength aren’t written anywhere, but you learn them quickly. Don’t cry. Don’t look overwhelmed. If you say you’re struggling, you’d better follow it with a solution. And whatever you do, don’t let emotion show on your face. I learned this early.

Two partners once took me to lunch for my review. My brain immediately spun out. This must be good news. Or maybe we’re in public so I won’t react. Please don’t let me react. They said a lot of positive things. Then one small area for improvement, something so minor I honestly can’t remember it now.

But I remember the physical experience. The pressure in my throat. The heat behind my eyes. Biting the inside of my lip and raising my eyebrows to keep it together. The embarrassing part wasn’t the feedback. It was that I had a reaction at all.

And that’s how it is for so many lawyers. A moment of hurt gets misread. A boundary becomes an attitude. A tear becomes a story. So your nervous system adapts. It learns to shut everything down before anyone can see it. From the outside, this looks like strength. Inside, it feels like disconnecting from yourself.

When you push feelings down long enough, they don’t disappear. They show up as irritability. As exhaustion you can’t sleep off. As numbness, where nothing really lands. None of this is weakness. It’s your system carrying more than it should, without anywhere safe to put it.

And that fear you’re carrying didn’t start in law. Most women were taught early on to manage their emotions carefully. Be good. Don’t upset anyone. Don’t be dramatic. Keep the peace. You learn that being responsible makes you lovable. Being agreeable keeps you safe. Being emotional makes things harder.

But men didn’t get emotional freedom either. They were handed a different set of rules. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t show fear. Anger is allowed. Everything else, push down. It’s not emotional freedom. It’s just a different kind of cage.

Different conditioning, same outcome. None of us were taught how to feel emotions in a supported way. And then we enter a profession that reinforces every bit of that training.

For women, especially women of color, LGBTQ+ women, first-gen lawyers, or anyone carrying more than one marginalized identity, the calculation becomes even more complex. You’re not just managing emotion. You’re managing how that emotion will be interpreted through existing stereotypes.

A moment of passion gets read as anger. A firm boundary gets labeled as attitude or being difficult. A tear confirms what someone was already looking for. Clients tell me this all the time: the pressure isn’t only about hiding emotion. It’s about being hyperaware of how everything you do might be filtered through narratives that were written before you ever walked in the room.

That isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition. It’s your system keeping you safe in a world where the rules aren’t applied evenly. If you’re carrying that extra layer of awareness on top of everything else, of course you’re tired. The cost is higher.

Many women learn this quickly. The emotional range men are allowed is already narrow, and ours is even narrower. We know that if we show too much emotion, we risk being labeled dramatic, unstable, or not tough enough. So we overcorrect. We tell ourselves we have to be tougher than everyone around us just to earn our place, and then tougher still to keep it.

Your nervous system isn’t dramatic. It’s remembering. Remembering every moment, from childhood to last week, when showing what you felt wasn’t safe. So now when emotion rises and your throat tightens, your voice shakes, or you blink fast, that’s not failure. That’s protection. Not protection from the feeling, but from the possible fallout of showing it.

This isn’t weakness. It’s a survival strategy your system has practiced for decades. And your feelings don’t disappear when you push them down. They wait. They build pressure.

So let’s talk about real strength. Real strength is staying connected to yourself while everything around you moves fast. Yes, there are real risks to showing emotion at work. Women have been misinterpreted, dismissed, and judged for completely normal human reactions. But shutting down isn’t the only option.

Strength starts with discernment. Knowing which rooms feel safe. Knowing when you need the armor. Knowing where you can soften without putting yourself in harm’s way. Strength is taking three slow breaths before speaking, not to hide the emotion, but to stay with yourself. Strength is telling a trusted colleague, “I’m overwhelmed this week,” instead of white-knuckling through it.

And sometimes, strength is knowing this isn’t the room for this feeling right now. If you’re in a partner meeting or facing opposing counsel, you might need the armor in that moment. That’s fine. What matters is that you don’t leave the feeling behind entirely.

Come back to it later. Sit in your car after work and let yourself feel it for two minutes. Tell a friend what happened. Write it in your notes app on the train home. The goal isn’t to feel everything in real time. It’s to come back to what you felt, even if the timing wasn’t right. Strength isn’t the absence of feeling. It’s the willingness to be present with the feeling, even if that presence comes later.

So how do you start unlearning the weakness story? Start small. Start with noticing. The next time your brain says, “You shouldn’t feel this,” pause and ask yourself: what if this feeling isn’t a flaw? What if it’s information?

You don’t need to fix it. You don’t need to talk about it. You don’t need to change anything externally. Just don’t leave yourself.

Most of us disconnect from ourselves the moment a negative feeling appears. We move away from it or reach for something to distract us, like our phone.

I had a client, a mid-level litigator about seven years out, who always said yes to everything. She was excellent at her job. Partners loved her because she never pushed back. But in our sessions, she talked about a low-grade resentment that never went away.

One week she was juggling a complex motion for summary judgment and prepping a key witness. Then a partner asked her to handle an emergency TRO. She felt resentment rise instantly. The old version of her would’ve said yes and stayed up until two in the morning making it work. But she’d been practicing one question: what is this feeling trying to tell me?

And in that moment, the feeling told her, if I take this on, something else will give. Either the quality of my work, or me. So she said something like, “I want to give this the attention it deserves, but I’m deep in the motion and the depo prep. Can we talk about priorities, or is there someone else with more bandwidth this week?” The partner found someone else. The work got done. Her cases didn’t suffer. And she didn’t have to sacrifice sleep or sanity to prove she was a team player. That’s what unlearning looks like: quiet honesty that leads to grounded action.

The legal profession still rewards emotional armor. That’s real. But something else is happening too. Younger attorneys are questioning old norms. Firms are recognizing the impact of chronic stress. Even courts are starting to talk about lawyer well-being in new ways. Not everywhere. Not perfectly. But more than before.

Most change doesn’t come from committees. It comes from small, human moments. Someone takes a breath before reacting. Someone steps outside to regroup and returns clearer. Someone says, “I’m overwhelmed this week,” and two other people quietly admit they are too. These moments shift the tone. This is emotional leadership. Quiet, steady, grounded. You may not realize how much it matters, but people notice, whether they name it or not.

If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: feeling your emotions doesn’t make you weak. Ignoring them is what burns you out.

Here’s your practice for the week. Notice one moment where you tighten or start forcing yourself to look strong. Before you push it down, say to yourself, “I can be strong and still feel this.” You can stay connected to yourself.

If you’ve been holding yourself together for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to relax, your next step isn’t to become more resilient. It’s to stop disconnecting from yourself every time something hard shows up.

This is the work I do with clients, learning to trust your feelings as information, to set boundaries without the shame spiral, and to build a career that doesn’t require you to disconnect from yourself.

If you’re ready to explore what that could look like for you, you can book a free Stress Reset Call at heathermillscoaching.com/call.

Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.