The High Cost of High-Functioning: What My Therapist Taught Me About Saving My Own Life
How I Stopped Hiding Behind "Polished" and Reclaimed My Authentic Self Through Internal Family Systems Therapy
For decades, I treated compartmentalization like a leadership superpower.
Need to swallow blinding physical pain to implement a flawless new corporate strategy after a brutal round of layoffs? No problem. Need to put on my absolute best, hyper-competent face for a high-stakes interview while my personal world is fracturing into a million jagged pieces? Please. I got this.
Box it up, slide it onto a mental shelf, lock the vault, and smile.
I thought it was just the standard-issue Gen X executive survival kit: lace up, lock it down, choke back reality, and let the overachievements do the talking. As professional women, we often wear our ability to completely sever our agony from our output like a shiny badge of honor. We practically put it on our résumés.
But a funny thing happens when you spend your life building airtight emotional vaults. Eventually, you receive a single piece of feedback—a single, innocently delivered word—that acts like a stick cracking through the carefully lacquered surface.
For me, the word that set my world on fire was “polished.”
A few years ago, I was told directly that I was not being seriously considered for senior leadership roles because I lacked “polish.”
The Word That Shattered the Performance
Not going to lie: when I heard it, that word cut me to the bone. Not because the person delivering it was mean, but because it was an incredibly accurate description of my performance. The white-hot rage that flashed inside me wasn’t aimed at them. It was a rage that incinerated the last vestiges of the identity I had so carefully crafted to fit what I thought would be the most palatable, successful version of myself.
Now? I’ve done the work. I used that anger to fuel my creative career rebirth. I wrote myself out of the frustration, and I am standing on the other side of that dark night of the soul.
But narrative growth isn’t a straight line. Knowing I am historically triggered by the end-of-year evaluation cycle, I recently made it a point to check in with my long-time therapist, Kimberli, to process some lingering anxieties.
During the session, I found myself essentially bragging about how easily I used to detach the logical, get-things-done version of myself from the messy, wounded parts. Then, the real truth slipped out. I wondered aloud, in a voice that felt more like a confession than a statement:
“I can’t seem to do it anymore.”
Kimberli listened with her usual grounded empathy and then introduced me to a framework that explained exactly why that one word felt like a tactical airstrike on my psyche: Internal Family Systems (IFS).
It turns out my masterclass-level ninja skill at compartmentalization isn’t a personality trait to be proud of. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply exhausted internal defense system built out of raw necessity just to survive.
The Inner Boardroom: Understanding IFS
Created by Dr. Richard Schwartz, IFS posits that the human mind isn’t a single, monolithic “me.” Instead, it is an internal boardroom made up of distinct subpersonalities—or “parts”—all organized around a core, unburdened Self.
Every part has a job, and more importantly, every single part has a protective, positive intention—even the ones that are actively wreaking havoc on our health. IFS breaks these parts into three primary categories:
- The Exiles: These are the wounded, terrified, or ashamed parts. They carry historical trauma, raw grief, and deep pain. Because their agony is so overwhelming, the rest of the internal system works a 24/7 graveyard shift to keep them buried.
- The Managers: These are the proactive, Type A protectors. They run the day-to-day show. They ensure we look good, hit our deadlines, pay our hefty people-pleasing tax, and maintain absolute, rigid control so the Exiles never leak out and ruin the professional metrics.
- The Firefighters: These are the chaotic, reactive protectors. When the pain of an Exile threatens to breach the Managers’ defenses, the Firefighters swoop in to put out the emotional fire by any means necessary. They don’t care about your health, your diet, or your reputation; they just want to numb or distract the system right now.
Building the “Lee Angel” Cage
When my therapist laid this out, the lightbulb didn’t just turn on—it scorched me. I realized that my ultimate “Manager” strategy was born out of absolute terror, and that “Lee Angel” was the cage I built to keep myself safe.
Years ago, after leaving an incredibly toxic workplace, I did what many high-achieving women do: I internalized the toxicity and decided I was the failure. To survive in higher education leadership, my Manager stepped in and made a conscious decision to tone myself down. I adopted a radically different personality—one that was smart but not too smart, calm, agreeable, soft-spoken, a “safe” team player, and willing to work hard without making waves.
I even toned down my name. Instead of insisting on being called Leetta Jackson Angel—a name I had to claim, defend, and explain my entire life—I shortened it to Lee and added my married surname. I christened myself “Lee Angel.”
I painstakingly built that persona: a flawless, shiny package of toxic agreeability, hyper-competence, and unbothered poise.
When I experienced profound personal loss, my internal system went into code-red lockdown. My Manager looked at that immense, unspeakable sorrow and realized that if I stopped to feel it, I would not survive it. So it shoved the grief into a concrete vault.
But it also shoved my voice. It buried my writing so deeply in the dark that I actually forgot I was a writer. To touch the pen was to touch the vault door, and the Manager was not about to let that door budge. Instead, it took the wheel and drove my career straight into the corporate dirt while I sat in the passenger seat acting like everything was fine.
The brutal reality of the corporate matrix: It doesn’t hand out gold stars for loyalty. Even though I gave that system my absolute everything, the return on investment was a joke. I was systematically overlooked and sidelined. My expertise and relentless work ethic didn’t mean a thing because the culture didn’t value my authenticity—it valued my competence, as long as it remained silent.
Why the Surface Cracked
According to standard professional definitions, a “polished” person displays a high degree of refinement, grace, and sophistication. They are free from awkwardness or rough edges.
If you know anything about me, I am not here to be smooth. I am aggressively curious, socially awkward by design, and rough around the edges by necessity. I don’t engage in polite, sanitized corporate small talk; I ask questions designed to cut through the noise, because that is where I figure out what really makes people tick.
When I look back at the “polished” performance my Manager forced me to give for years, I was existing, but I was not living. The “not polished” comment let me know that my performance was good enough to keep me employed, but it was never going to move me up the ladder. I had toned myself down to the point of invisibility. I was safe, sanitized, easily overlooked, and in absolute agony.
When your Managers work that hard to repress devastating grief, professional rejection, and your own authentic fire, your body becomes a war zone. My system responded with autoimmune disease and chronic physical pain.
When the emotional heartbreak threatened to breach the vault, my Firefighters rushed in with the oldest weapon in their arsenal: food, and later, pain medications. Not to escape reality, but to turn off the relentless, roaring noise in my own mind long enough to survive the night.
Shifting from Management to Self-Leadership
The ultimate, beautiful twist of IFS therapy is realizing that my coping mechanisms, the rigid “Lee Angel” persona, and the intense compartmentalization weren’t signs that I was fundamentally broken. They were signs that my protective parts were fighting like hell to keep me alive.
The goal of this journey hasn’t been to hate these parts, to fight them, or to fire them. It has been to step into Self-leadership—a space of calmness, curiosity, clarity, and compassion.
Once I became present in my body again, I could see that even though the word “polished” had sent me reeling, I needed to hear it. I had spent years dimming my own light for the sake of palatability. Reclaiming my full first name, Leetta, was the first bold, unpolished step toward creating the life I actually want to lead.
The 8 Cs of Self-Leadership
When you stop hiding behind a polished cage and allow the core Self to lead, you naturally exhibit what Dr. Richard Schwartz calls the 8 Cs. Here is how they translate to real-world leadership:
- Calmness: Not a fragile, icy “unbothered poise,” but a deep-seated groundedness. It is the ability to sit in an organizational storm and be the anchor because your internal foundation is solid.
- Curiosity: Replacing inner criticism with an open mind. Instead of judging your coping mechanisms, you ask, “What is that part of me trying to protect right now?”
- Compassion: Extending grace inward. Looking back at younger versions of yourself who were just trying to survive, and feeling profound love for their grit.
- Clarity: The opposite of muddled instincts. Clarity lets you look at corporate feedback like “unpolished” and see it for what it is: a sign that you were trying to play a game you were never meant to win.
- Confidence: Not manufactured corporate swagger, but a quiet, unshakable trust in your own capability to handle whatever pours out of the vault.
- Courage: The raw nerve it takes to reclaim your identity, pull those heavy concrete boxes off the mental shelves, and look at the terrifying things you buried—like your true passions.
- Creativity: When the inner Manager steps down, the channels open up. For me, creativity is the inevitable, beautiful return of my voice and my writing.
- Connectedness: The ultimate dissolution of isolation. It is the harmony that occurs when your internal parts stop fighting for the steering wheel and allow the core of who you are to guide the ship.
The Unpolished Truth
Recently, one of my direct reports shared, unprompted, that the reason people love working for me is because I care. I don’t micromanage, but I expect excellence. I have their back if they make a mistake. Above all else, I treat them like human beings.
That right there? That is a direct result of engaging my pure, unfiltered, human-centered Self. The corporate matrix might not know how to log that on a performance rubric, but my people do.
For the first time, I can look at my hyper-vigilant, exhausted Managers and my desperate Firefighters and say:
“Thank you. I see how hard you worked to protect me when I was paralyzed by loss. I see how you kept me standing when I was being overlooked. But you can stand down now. The core Self is awake. I’ve got this.”
True resilience isn’t about how many grief-filled boxes you can stack on a mental shelf without them toppling. It is about having the courage to sit on the floor, open the boxes, and invite the parts of yourself you buried back into the light.
I am unlocking the vault. I am holding space for the pain. And beautifully, painfully, inevitably… I am Leetta, and I am writing again.
