The venture capital pitch room is charged and heavy in that special way only high-stakes rooms can be. Elena—health tech founder, mother of twins—is the only woman CEO in a room full of older, mostly silent men. She’s spent six months orchestrating and sweating through every stage of her Series B round. Her company is ready for breakout. The first question lobbed at her? Not about her patents, her scale, or her metrics. It’s this: “How do you manage the work-life balance with two kids?”
Her male cofounder fields questions on leverage and market vision. Elena answers, outwardly smooth, but her body is electric with dread—muscles tight, skin hot, pulse thumping, that ancient sense of being watched and judged. She catches three men trading glances, texting under the table.
Every ambitious woman knows this moment.
You find this particular fear everywhere—in hospital departments where a female chief has to over-prepare just to avoid being second-guessed. In the nonprofit boardroom where a so-called “intense” but highly competent director must fire her golden-boy subordinate and feels anxious before every single board meeting. It’s in law firms, university lectures, the PTA meeting, the high school principal’s office.
Dr. James, now a seasoned ER administrator, corrects a risky recommendation from an older, much-beloved male physician in front of her team. Her facts are airtight—she’s seen this case a hundred times—but her throat closes. She has to apologize before she can even raise her concern.
Maria, director of a statewide nonprofit, faces that same dread—not in a tower, but by the phone in her kitchen. The fundraising head she must fire is tied to two former board chairs and whispers have already started: “too intense.” She’s led her organization to record-breaking results, but her hands sweat and shake as she dials.
She feels sick.
Three women, three sectors, different roles—all living with the same invisible enemy: a loud, body-based “Danger!” blaring any time they dare to claim expertise, defend their work, or set boundaries. If that reflex feels familiar—even as a high-performer, even if you think you “shouldn’t” feel it anymore—you’re not imagining things.
You’re not broken.
You’re reading a signal that your body, your ancestors, and your professional culture needed you to have in order to survive.
This essay unpacks why so many brilliant, ambitious, successful women—including those who’ve done therapy, yoga, executive coaching, and all the “work”—still face body-level dread and self-doubt when they step into power. Each claim and stat is footnoted for accuracy. The science is real. The history is real.
Your experience deserves respect, context, and—maybe more than anything—company.
The Family Survival Manual
Let’s start where these patterns begin. If you’ve spent time apologizing, shrinking, or over-delivering—even after building your own firm or earning top marks at work—it’s not just “imposter syndrome.” It’s protective wiring from the earliest years of your life.
For women raised with chaos, neglect, unpredictability, everyday stress, or straight-up violence, the core lesson is this: “Stay small, stay safe.” You become a master of reading other people, scanning for danger, holding yourself back. Because that’s how you made it through.
Relational trauma—in clinical language—doesn’t always mean catastrophic events. Sometimes it’s just a slow, grinding lack of emotional safety. Not knowing if a parent will listen or erupt. Learning there’s no space for your anger or needs. Being expected to be “the helper” or the one not causing trouble. Over time, your nervous system learns to approach every room—family, classroom, later workplace—as a place to monitor, adapt, and avoid conflict.
Even the highest performers still carry this.
Maybe you’re a lawyer who panics every time a partner asks you to “pop in” to discuss a brief. Or a doctor who edits her own medical judgment for “tone.” You might rewrite emails three times to “soften” your words. Say “just a thought!” instead of owning an idea.
This wiring doesn’t dissolve with degrees or promotions. Research shows that almost 75% of executive women report feeling like frauds at work—even after being praised or promoted. Reports of imposter feelings are tightly correlated with childhoods where personal boundaries weren’t respected, where the fear response became stuck in high gear. Trauma professionals call this “functional freeze”—everything looks good outside, but inside? You’re always braced for danger.
Let’s make this concrete. Ann is a law firm associate on partnership track with a stellar record but a constant knot in her stomach. If a male colleague interrupts, her response is to minimize: “Sorry, maybe my suggestion wasn’t clear.” Ruby is a head nurse in a large city hospital, praised for efficiency but regularly criticized in evaluations as “too direct”—even by junior male staff.
Both are successful. Both secretly dread next steps. Both fear being “found out.”
High-achievement, for many women, is built atop early fear. Not despite it.
What's Running Your Life?
The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…
Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. If vacation makes you anxious, if praise feels hollow, if you’re planning your next move before finishing the current one—you’re not alone. And you’re *not* broken.
This quiz reveals the invisible patterns from childhood that keep you running. Why enough is never enough. Why success doesn’t equal satisfaction. Why rest feels like risk.
Five minutes to understand what’s really underneath that exhausting, constant drive.
When the Workplace Doubles Down
The moment you leave one difficult environment (family) for another (work), the rules don’t actually change—not if you’re a woman with ambition. Boards value you being nice, but not forceful. Donors or VCs expect charm, not challenge. Students push back if you’re direct but accept “authority” from male teachers. Peers call you “intense,” “abrasive,” “too much.”
Rarely as compliments.
Let’s talk numbers, because sometimes the body knows what the brain hasn’t calculated yet. As of 2025, women CEOs are 45% more likely than men to be dismissed from their jobs—even (and sometimes especially) when companies are thriving. Performance improvements shield men from being fired, but barely protect women. About a third of women CEOs are shown the door within three years; for men, it’s just a quarter.
In the startup and venture scene, all-female founding teams still receive only 2–3% of global funding. Nearly 84% of funds go to all-male teams. This isn’t for lack of delivery—female-led companies generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, while male-led startups produce just 31 cents.
The penalty is for being female, assertive, and visible in traditionally male domains.
It’s just as fraught in supposedly “safer” fields. Female doctors consistently receive lower ratings for “being direct,” are interrupted more, and—even as they outnumber men in some med schools—continue to be passed over for leadership. Women nonprofit executives, who run the majority of the sector, are sidelined for the highest-paying, most prestigious positions and often leave due to burnout. Which hits women at rates up to twice that of men in the same jobs.
Teachers who enforce discipline are called “cold” or “unapproachable,” while male colleagues enforcing the same standards are called “effective leaders.”
It’s not perception—it’s institutionalized, well-researched reality.
If you freeze in meetings, soften your voice, or have trouble sleeping before a big presentation, you aren’t “paranoid.” Your nervous system is running the social math. A 2024/2025 global survey found that less than one-third of professional women expect a promotion this year, compared to 40% of men. Fewer than 36% of women in demanding white-collar sectors—law, medicine, NGOs, higher education—feel empowered to do their best work or receive performance recognition on par with men.
Burnout is an epidemic. More than half of high-performing women report symptoms of major burnout—exhaustion, perfectionism, brain fog, health crises—compared to 35% of men in comparable tracks. The “triple shift”—managing paid work, home life, and others’ feelings at work—means women are more likely to drop out, turn down promotions, or leave for freelance work.
Not out of aspiration. Out of survival.
History Isn’t Even Past: Witch Hunts and Their Echoes
The fear that erupts when women take up space is not a recent invention. It’s centuries old. Carved into our collective bones.
Between 1450 and 1750, as many as 60,000 people in Europe alone were executed for “witchcraft.” The majority of them? Women. Their “evidence”? Living alone. Knowing and using herbs. Owning land or wealth independent of men. Being “too” educated, independent, defiant, sexual, old, outspoken, or “unladylike” in almost any way.
Midwives, healers, and knowledge-holders were specifically targeted—not because they were less skilled, but precisely because they were competent, powerful, and economically threatening. Silvia Federici’s extraordinary accounts of these “burning times” show how witch hunts were deliberate campaigns to destroy women’s economic and social autonomy as capitalism and modern states crystallized.
This history is not abstract for the body. Women learned for centuries that standing out meant risking everything.
Fast forward: the mechanics have changed—today it’s social media slander, professional exile, being forced out after demanding real change, or relentless scrutiny of “likability”—but the echoes persist. When a senior woman is demoted after raising ethical concerns, or a Black executive leaves after being told to “tone it down,” it’s not weakness. It’s not hypersensitivity.
It’s the body reading an old code: taking up space still brings consequences.
Legacy isn’t just story—it’s memory and muscle. Survival is knowing how to fade into the wallpaper. Today, your “irrational fear” when pushing at work? That’s your body remembering the true cost of being “too much.”
The Science: Fear Lives in Your Body and Blood
Modern science agrees: trauma is not just a “story you’re telling yourself.” It carries a genetic legacy. The field of epigenetics—a big word that means “how your life leaves marks on your genes,” like highlighting recipes in a family cookbook—shows that stress and trauma change not just you, but the next generation. If your grandmother lived through famine or persecution, her stress biology rewrote her genetic code. Your body inherited her preparation for threat.
Simple, true story: Rachel Yehuda’s research on Holocaust survivors found that their children—and even grandchildren—had altered stress hormone patterns, heightened anxiety, and different gene “expression.” All without directly experiencing the original horror. Maternal stress in pregnancy does the same for unborn children, essentially “programming” the nervous system to prepare for a world of scarcity, vigilance, or attack.
Think of it like this: Your DNA is the recipe book. Epigenetics is the sticky notes and highlights—”watch out for wolves!,” “be wary of power!,” “danger in being seen!”—that get handed down. Your fear may not be about right now at all.
It could be your body playing the odds from centuries ago.
Women’s alarm systems—thanks to both evolution and gendered socialization—are tuned to faster, more sensitive settings than men’s. Our brains scan for threat more quickly. The “alert” button stays on longer. Settling back to calm takes more effort and time. For ambitious women with lived or inherited trauma, what looks like “overreactivity” is actually a finely-tuned survival instrument.
The Cost of Climbing: Bigger Bullseye, Harder Recovery
The price of stepping up—especially for women with trauma histories, or marginalized identities—doesn’t shrink as you move up.
Often, it gets sharper.
Consider these daily realities:
Ever been undermined by someone you had to fire, then watched the board examine your “tone” instead of his performance?
Raised your consulting or speaking rate and been called “greedy” or “out of touch”?
Asked for investment or partnership and been told—sometimes by allies—”maybe next round. You don’t have the right chemistry for this team”?
Delivered top-notch program outcomes, but a man who did less (or less well) got the headline and the promotion?
Been the only woman or Black, queer, disabled, or immigrant leader wondering: “Is this the moment I pay the price for pushing too hard?”
This is not just anxiety. It’s threat assessment—your system running the real risks. High performers burn out—or numb out—under this load.
If you freeze, fawn (placate), dissociate, or break down crying in your car after a confrontation, this is still a trauma response. No matter how polished your exterior. High-achieving women are more likely to suffer in silence, hide chronic self-doubt, or develop health issues than to admit to “weakness” in hostile workplaces.
You’re not uniquely broken for feeling this. You’re remarkably resilient for surviving it so well for so long.
What Helps, What’s Possible
Here’s what I know after years of sitting with women carrying this weight: the fear doesn’t magically vanish. But it can shift from running the show to being just one voice in the room. The body-based dread that rises when you speak up, set boundaries, or claim your worth—it’s real, it’s legitimate, and it’s not going anywhere completely.
But you can change your relationship with it.
Recovery doesn’t mean becoming fearless. It means building a bigger container for the fear—one that can hold it without being collapsed by it. It means learning that the alarm going off doesn’t always mean real danger. Sometimes it’s just your nervous system playing an old tape that doesn’t match the current moment.
The work starts with the body. Not because the mind doesn’t matter, but because trauma lives in muscle memory, in the way your shoulders creep toward your ears in meetings, in the shallow breathing when you see certain names in your inbox. Somatic practices—whether it’s trauma-informed yoga, EMDR, or simply learning to notice and breathe through activation—help your nervous system learn that not every visibility is a witch trial. Not every disagreement is exile.
Building your “window of tolerance”—that space where you can feel stressed but not overwhelmed, challenged but not collapsed—happens slowly. Through practice. Through staying present when every cell screams to flee. Through learning to distinguish between real threat and inherited vigilance.
Support matters more than we admit. Find the women who get it—not the ones who’ll tell you to “just be confident” or “stop caring what people think,” but the ones who know what it costs to show up anyway. The ones who understand that courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s moving forward with your knees shaking.
You need people who can hold space for both your power and your terror without trying to fix either one.
The Larger Truth
Every time you refuse to shrink, you’re not just changing your own story. You’re rewriting the code. When you speak up in that meeting—voice shaking, maybe, but speaking anyway—you’re not just advocating for your idea. You’re breaking a centuries-old pattern. When you hold your ground despite every alarm bell ringing, you’re teaching your nervous system—and maybe your daughter’s future nervous system—that taking up space is survivable.
This isn’t about individual healing or “fixing yourself.” The structures that penalize women for being powerful are real. They need dismantling. But while we’re doing that broader work—the policy changes, the culture shifts, the long arc toward justice—we still have to live in our bodies. We still have to show up to work. We still have to decide whether to speak or stay silent in each moment.
Your fear makes sense. It’s not weakness—it’s wisdom from women who paid prices we can barely imagine. But their survival strategies don’t have to be your permanent address.
You’re not just passing down caution and vigilance, but audacity and example. The next generation—your daughters, mentees, colleagues, students, and community—needs to see you fire, not just survive. Your honest refusal to shrink is a kind of legacy activism. Even when the world stays hard, your presence, your power, your voice—these are victories every time you use them.
If nobody has told you that yet this week, let me say it now: You’re not alone. Your fear was never your fault. What you do with it now is your gift.
The work is refusing smallness. Everything else—toolkits, data, breathing exercises—is just scaffolding.
The revolution? It’s happening every time you show up. As you are. On the day you most want to run.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2018). Imposter Phenomenon among High Achieving Women.
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. - Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.
- Bravata, D. M., et al. (2020). Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: A Systematic Review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35, 1252–1275.
- Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham Books. (On boundaries and vulnerability; supported by numerous therapy and trauma texts.
- Fortinberry-Murray, M. (2025). Even successful women CEOs more likely to be fired. Fortinberry Murray.
https://www.fortinberrymurray.com/todays-research/even-successful-women-ceos-more-likely-to-be-fired-2 - Russell Reynolds Associates. (2025). Why Women CEOs Leave Sooner – and How Boards Can Help All CEOs Thrive.
https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/insights/articles/why-women-ceos-leave-sooner-and-how-boards-can-help-all-ceos-thrive - Russell Reynolds Associates. (2025). Why Women CEOs Leave Sooner.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/06/04/why-women-ceos-leave-sooner-and-how-boards-can-help-all-ceos-thrive/ - Flowcap Capital. (2025). Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends.
https://ff.co/women-funding-statistics-2025/ - Theanna. (2025). The State of Female Founders.
https://www.theanna.io/state-of-female-founders - National Academy of Medicine. (2025). Gender-Based Differences in Burnout: Issues Faced by Women Physicians.
https://nam.edu/perspectives/gender-based-differences-in-burnout-issues-faced-by-women-physicians/ - Her990. (2024). Burnout and Pay Gaps: Navigating the Challenges of Nonprofit Leadership as a Woman.
https://her990.com/burnout-and-pay-gaps-navigating-the-challenges-of-nonprofit-leadership-as-a-woman/ - Edutopia. (2017). Gender Equity in the Classroom.
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/gender-equity-classroom-rebecca-alber - Gendercide Watch. (2001). European Witch-Hunts.
https://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html - IMSS Chicago. (2024). Midwives and Healers in the European Witch Trials.
https://imss.org/2019/12/a-note-from-the-collections-midwives-and-healers-in-the-european-witch-trials/ - Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia
- Yehuda, R., et al. (2025). Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence. Nature Scientific Reports, 25, 18429.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z - BBC. (2022). Can the legacy of trauma be passed down generations?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics - ScienceDaily. (2025). Maternal stress during pregnancy could leave traces in the placenta.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250204132227.htm - Mayo Clinic. (2024). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – Symptoms and causes.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355967 - Columbia Law School. (2025). Falling Down Hard: The Gender Gap in Executive Turnover.
https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/08/20/falling-down-hard-the-gender-gap-in-executive-turnover/
