Why Nice Fundraisers Become Bitter

How resentment quietly builds when you abandon yourself for the mission

Have you ever noticed how some people in fundraising start out hopeful, warm, and deeply connected to the mission… and a few years later they’re cynical, exhausted, and quietly resentful?

In this episode, Erin McQuade-Wright explores why bitterness is often not a character flaw—but accumulated self-abandonment.

When we constantly override our needs, overextend ourselves, avoid boundaries, and expect other people to regulate our emotional experience, resentment begins to build beneath the surface. And over time, that bitterness doesn’t just affect our wellbeing—it affects our fundraising results, our relationships, and the energy we bring into every room.

This episode dives into the hidden emotional patterns beneath bitterness, how your nervous system shapes your fundraising presence, and why your internal climate matters more than you may realize.

You’ll also learn how to recognize bitterness early, work with it instead of against it, and stop outsourcing your emotional state to donors, leadership, coworkers, or circumstances.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why bitterness is often accumulated self-abandonment 
•  How resentment quietly builds in caring, mission-driven people 
•  The hidden cost of overgiving and chronically overriding yourself 
•  Why your energy and nervous system shape your fundraising results 
•  How dreading your day changes what you notice and attract 
•  A simple somatic practice to regulate your nervous system before bitterness hardens into burnout 

A moment to reflect:

What if bitterness isn’t proof that something is wrong with you… but feedback that something inside you needs your attention?

Ready to go deeper?

Subscribe to The Brave & Balanced Note for weekly reflections and practical tools to help you regulate your inner climate and fundraise with more ease, clarity, and grounded confidence:

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If you know a fundraiser who’s carrying too much, feeling resentful, or quietly burning out, send them this episode. They may need the reminder that bitterness is not failure—and they don’t have to harden themselves to survive this work.

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Transcript

Erin McQuade-Wright 0:02

Welcome to The Brave and Balanced Fundraiser, the podcast I wish I'd had during my 15 years as a professional fundraiser. I'm your host, Erin McQuade Wright. This is your space to breathe, realign, and reconnect with the part of you that chose this work for a reason. Together, we'll explore tools and practices that help you show up less stressed and spread thin and more grounded, brave, and on purpose. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Have you ever noticed how some people in fundraising start out excited and warm and hopeful and deeply connected to the mission, and a few years later, they're cynical or exhausted and quietly resentful? In this episode, we're talking about why nice fundraisers become bitter and how that bitterness is often not a character flaw, but a signal that something inside us has been ignored for too long. You're gonna walk away from this episode understanding how resentment quietly builds. You're gonna be able to clock it when it's happening within you. And we're gonna talk about how your energy shapes your fundraising results and how to stop outsourcing your emotional state to other people, like donors and coworkers and leadership, so you can show up with more freedom, more presence, and more genuine connection in your work. Let's get into it. I'm really interested in bitterness. This is an aspect of my fundraising that was kind of like, the snowball speeding down the mountain, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and I didn't know why it was there. It was really easy at first blush for me to look around my environment, and I could point to the people who were "making me bitter." But as I learned more about emotional regulation, as I learned more about managing my own nervous system and energy, I became more adept at navigating this. So this is something I think can really be helpful to you, and I wanna share it today. And the headline here is that, you know, bitterness really doesn't usually start as bitterness. I remember being a baby fundraiser, joining the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and learning that National Philanthropy Day was coming up, and we needed volunteers to co-host that event. And so I raised my hand and said, "I'll be a co-host." And the person that I was paired with was about my age. She was a fundraiser at an organization, I think she was at a school. And we had a pretty turnkey job of finding sponsors, getting the venue, finding an emcee, and sort of outlining what the day was going to look like. But it was a luncheon. We weren't creating a new event or re-event- reinventing the wheel. So in that sense, we could build upon what the co-hosts before us had done, and we ended up doing the same venue that they had done and maybe the same emcee that they had secured. So it was... we didn't have an incredibly heavy lift, but my co-chair for that event seemed to me to be really tightly wound. And I learned quickly in working with her that it seemed like everything was a problem. And things that I was able to see as objective, like maybe... I mean, nobody's really objective, but I would see an email come in and I'd be like, "Okay, we need to do this and this or look out for this and that." And her response was, "Can you believe they emailed that to us? I am so insulted." And I was like, "Oh, gosh, let me go read it again. What did I miss?" But I started to notice a pattern over time that this was just her mode. She was ready for the drama. In some cases, she was bringing the drama. And I found it really hard to work with her. We were able to do the event. It went off without a hitch, but this person was, in my experience, a kind of a volatile partner that had an air of bitterness to her. And I'm not judging her or saying that she had nothing to be bitter about. We did run into some hurdles in the planning of that event. But the way she approached it, I had just enough distance that I could see she was bringing some of her stuff to this process, and that stuff was kind of bitter. She had some bitterness that she was bringing in. And I don't think that that was her. I don't think that... You know, maybe at the time, I believed that's who she was. But n- from the vantage point I have now, I can see how her bitterness, as I perceived it, probably didn't start out that way. It probably started out as caring deeply, saying yes, wanting to be of service, overextending, finding that there was a little too much on her plate, wanting to be liked, wanting to prove herself, and it tipped. It tipped into she's got too much, and she's not saying no. She's not voicing a boundary. And I think there was also, uh, in the mix, she wasn't feeling seen. And I recognize this all in myself too. And you know, when someone gets under our skin, the wisest thing to do is to inquire about how we are showing up in that way. What's the thing that annoys me most about this person? And then the second part of that is: how am I exhibiting that same behavior? Maybe in a different way, maybe not professionally, but with my family. Because it doesn't get under our skin unless we own some of that. We have it. We see it in ourselves. There's a phrase that goes, "You spot it, you got it." So I was spotting bitterness in her, and absolutely the reason I could see it is because I had it in myself as well. So bitterness is really often grief showing up, it was never spoken aloud. If we think that we're not being seen, we're not being valued, and then we be- bury that, yeah, that's the perfect formula for bitterness. We can have an unconscious belief that if I give enough, surely people will appreciate me, value me, rescue me, or finally make this worth it. And I talked in an earlier episode about a client who just kept creating work situations where he was the one doing all the work, and everybody else was a volunteer. And, the desire that he had beneath this pattern was to be appreciated, to have this sort of shield around himself that he wouldn't be criticized or judged if people could see how full his plate was and how hard he was working, that he would earn some goodwill from that strategy. The only problem with that is it brings bitterness with it. That's the shadow that comes with that strategy, bitterness. So when donors don't notice the sacrifice or our leadership might normalize it and say, "Yeah, you're, you're supposed to be working that many hours a day," or, "Yeah, we do events multiple nights a week." Or coworkers might notice how much time you're putting in or how much energy you're putting in, that it's really, really natural and normal that we become resentful, and we can start to think, think or say things like, "I'm doing everything here. Nobody understands how hard this is," or, "Why am I the only one who cares?" And bitterness really grows when we chronically override ourselves and then expect other people to regulate our emotional experience. So for me, I'm a little embarrassed, although it's all a process, but I'm a little embarrassed when I look back at my work managing teams and how often I was teeing people up to say, "Oh, gosh, Erin, you've got so much going on. Why don't you, why don't you let somebody else take this piece of the work? Oh, I... You, you don't look good. I can tell you're coming down with something. Why don't you go home and rest?" That was me expecting other people to step in and regulate my experience, and that's just wrong. It's flat out not their responsibility And that was teeing me up for getting bitterness as a response from others who were caretaking me on top of their other jobs, and that's not easy to say. It feels really vulnerable to say that. But that, for me, was in the mix together. So how do we shift this? How do we notice when it's happening within us? For me, bitterness has a really specific signature in my body. I notice that my jaw, my lower jaw starts to jut out, and my eyes start to close a little bit, and I start to feel like I wanna cross my arms across my chest, and I'm probably cursing somebody out in my head. That is a very specific energy, and when I am in that energy, point blank, I am not gonna be as successful in managing my work relationships. I am not going to be as successful in my fundraising because I am in the process of shutting down. And what's underneath that is my body needs to feel safe. My nervous system needs some tending, and if I know how to do that, I can go do that, and then I'm regulated, and I'm open to possibility. I'm open to conversations. I'm not gonna snap because I'm not wound so tightly. But if I don't know how to do that, what am I gonna do when I get home? I might snap at my family members. I might drop work so fast that I don't even think about it until I'm back in the office, and then I'm right back in the soup again of feeling resentful and bitter, right? So I get this sort of blockage over time of not having dealt with those emotions, not really giving space for those emotions to be felt, and it getting backed up. And that's when we gotta look out for road rage, snapping at our colleagues, not being able to hear an idea without shutting it down, right? This kind of "resting on no," being the critic because we're just trying to protect ourselves, and that's what it comes down to. I'm bitter because what I'm missing here is myself 'cause I keep abandoning myself And when we talk about self-abandonment, it's very specific. It's, "I'm not going to voice my truth. I'm not going to take care of myself. I'm not going to ask myself what I need and then give myself that. I'm just going to sort of look away and then come back to work prepared to be resentful." And I'm really interested in how this ripples out into our fundraising results and that statistic I keep coming back to in this podcast, which is that the average fundraiser lasts 16 to 24 months in their job before going somewhere else. So if that's you, if you're thinking about leaving, I would ask, is there bitterness as a part of your decision-making? And if there is, I want to challenge you that that bitterness is not your fault, that it's there, but it is your responsibility to deal with it. It's your responsibility to tend to yourself and give yourself what you need. So what do you need? What do you need? When it comes to letting emotions out, this can look like having a cry in the shower. This can look like putting pillows on the bed and beating them up to get some of that anger out. Reducing that emotional constipation might feel like work that you don't wanna do or work that you'd rather distract yourself from, but I promise you, reducing this internal clutter feels so good, and it gives you the space internally where you can feel like you've got some room to breathe and that life isn't so intense crashing down on your head, that that emotional tending is work that it's your responsibility to do, just like it's my responsibility to tend to my emotional work. And all of this affects the energy that we have, that we bring to our work, that we bring to our life. And this is the thing I want you to take away from this episode most of all. Your energy is shaping your results. And so if your results have been anemic or just a trickle compared to what you would like to see, it's the easiest thing in the world to look around at your board or your leadership or your donors and point the finger. It's a lot harder but a lot more powerful to look at the energy that you are bringing. So I don't wanna tell you to just think positive. This is not an attempt to, like, steamroll over the bad feelings and give yourself a good feeling instead. That's spiritual bypassing, and I'm not an advocate for that. But I do want you to think about how you approach your day. So do you wake up in the morning and dread your day? I've had mornings where I woke up like that, like, "Ugh, this day," like it owed me something or like it did something to me. "This day." And then I went on to have that kind of a day. The day was not good. Or rehearsing mentally a fight, a one-sided fight that I'm having with someone that I don't like. Here's what I should have said to them. How many times have you relitigated an argument that you've had? My hand is in the air. I have done that. It's like the mind wants to go to something chewy and just chew on it. Or anticipating disappointment. This donor's gonna say no. This event is just gonna be a cluster. I'm... It's gonna be such a mess. I'm the only one that knows how to manage this or whatever. Whatever your stories are. When you wake up already convinced that the day will drain you, you're stacking the deck against magic finding you. I really want you to hear that. When you wake up and you are convinced that you know what this day is gonna bring you, and it's not gonna be good, you're stacking the deck against the magic that's trying to find you right now. And people can feel that. People can feel your constriction. If you're coming in tense and having any interaction with donors, which if you're a fundraiser, you should be interacting with donors every day in some way. People can feel that constriction. They feel your resentment. Even though it's not pointed at them, they can feel it, and they can feel when you are armored, when you have your armor up. And again, it might not have anything to do with them. It might be toward your CEO or your team, but they can feel that, and I want you to be aware of this. I want you to have the ability to regulate yourself and bring yourself back. It's a lot easier to say things like, "I'll feel better when leadership changes. I'll feel better when the donors start to respond. I'll feel better when people appreciate me, and they can s- they can see what I'm sacrificing here." But that... all of those ideas give away your agency, and the moment we make other people responsible for our emotional state, we become trapped. The moment we make other people responsible for our emotional state, we become trapped, and that's where the bitterness comes in, and it starts to calcify and get hard. So what if we, instead of seeing- Bitterness as something wrong with us or something we're messing up or some-- a failure. What if we just see it as feedback? Feedback from our body, from our emotional or nervous system that, "Oh, there's something I need right now that I'm not giving to myself." What if it was that simple? Bitterness might be a flag for you that you need to set a boundary, that you need to prioritize your rest, or you need to say what's true, or to ask for support. Bitterness is not proof that you're bad. It's information that something inside of you is calling for your attention, and that makes it a wonderful opportunity for you to tend to yourself. So this is not about me gaslighting you or you blaming yourself and adding this to the list of things that you're getting wrong. No. This is really good news because you have agency over your energy. At every moment, you get to choose the energy that you wanna feel, and that energy ripples out and ultimately determines how your life is lived and what comes back to you in terms of fundraising, in terms of relationships, in terms of wellness and health. So you're not responsible for everything happening around you, but you are responsible for how you care for your inner climate. So the thing that I want you to become mindful of is that shift internally that happens early on in the resentment process. "Oh, it just happened. I felt resentful. Let me lean in rather than leaning out and just putting my attention on someone else." Notice if there is resentment and stop overriding yourself. Take a moment, whether it's in your car, whether it's in the bathroom stall, whether it's at home, and just make some space, I'm talking ninety seconds, to feel that, to feel what's coming up. And just like you would with a little three-year-old who's upset and crying, just be with that feeling and say, "It's okay. It's okay to be here. You're allowed to feel exactly how you feel." Overriding yourself would be to say, "Stop feeling this way. Stop it. I don't wanna feel resentment, so just stop it," and that's just a formula for that feeling to grow. But when we allow space for it and say, "Oh, here you are. I notice that you're here. What do you want me to know?" It creates space for that feeling to actually be processed by our nervous system, and it goes on its way, and we avoid that emotional constipation that builds up and turns into anger coming out sideways at other people who don't deserve that, fighting with people on the internet, et cetera. So I always love to bring it back to the body, and I talk about feeling your feet on the floor, feeling the chair holding you, and taking a couple breaths. Just noticing what's happening in your body. You can check in with the belly, the chest, and the throat and see if there's constriction there. If there's a tightness there that you can melt even 1%, you're gonna do that through your breath, your exhale, and make that exhale as long as you can. I promise you, you do not have to become hardened to survive this work, and you don't need to wait for other people to change before you can reclaim your own energy. The more responsibility you take for your inner climate, the less bitterness has room to grow and fester. So here are your takeaways from this episode. Number one, bitterness is often accumulated self-abandonment. Number two, your nervous system and emotional state shape how you fundraise. Number three, dreading your day in the morning changes how you show up and what you notice. Number four, other people cannot be responsible for regulating your inner world. And number five, bitterness is just feedback. It's not a character flaw. If you know someone who would be helped by this episode, I'm gonna ask you to send it to them and do so- with my love and my blessings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time