I'm afraid to quit

What this looks like

You’ve decided you should leave. You’ve also decided you can’t. You can’t picture having the conversation with your boss. You can’t picture surviving the income gap. You can’t picture telling your spouse or your parents. You’ve been about to quit for months or years and you haven’t, and each day of staying makes the next day’s leaving harder.

You’re not afraid you can’t survive leaving. You’re afraid of what surviving leaving would require you to admit.

What you’ve already tried

• Updated your resume
• Applied to a few things and pulled out of the process
• Imagined the conversation with your boss
• Negotiated mentally with your future income
• Therapy that explored why this scares you
• Reading about people who left and were fine
• Reading about people who left and weren’t fine

The fear didn’t move.

Should I quit my job?

Why preparing yourself hasn’t worked

You very likely came out of childhood with a particular relationship to security and to admitting you want something different. You may have grown up watching adults sacrifice their own preferences to keep things stable, and absorbed that staying put was responsibility. You may have absorbed the message that wanting to leave a paid job is selfish or ungrateful or impractical. You may have learned that admitting you’ve been miserable means admitting you’ve been wasting time, which is its own thing you can’t bring yourself to admit.

You can’t think your way out of fear by thinking about the fear. Each thinking session produces brief relief because you’ve imagined yourself surviving. The relief reinforces the thinking. The thinking has become the substitute for the leaving.

If you hate the job and can’t leave, see I hate my job but I can’t leave . If you don’t know what you’d do instead, see I don’t know what to do with my life .

You’ve been using the thinking as a substitute for the leaving. As long as you’re substituting, you don’t have to leave.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy exposes the relief valve you’ve been using to make the staying tolerable. Thinking about quitting has been the substitute for quitting, and as long as the substitute works you don’t have to leave. We close that loop, and the leaving stops being theoretical.

You’ll resign. You’ll have the conversation with your boss. You’ll navigate the income gap. None of it will be impossible.