I'm in an untenable situation at work and although i plan to retire soon, I'm trying very hard to hang on a little while more for my husband's sake. (We can live on his income alone, and have been prepping for me to retire, but I don't want to SLAM him into being our sole support very suddenly.) So I have "fuck you" money but I'm trying to be as professional and smart as possible.

I have a background as a client-facing business analyst that included taking the lead on conference calls, doing webinars and even formal presentations for 30-60 external client staff at various management levels. Working with external clients is part of my job, I have tons of experience and was not intimidated by any of it.

Last year I started this job, in pretty much the same position. From the start, my manager micromanaged my work, directed me not to do anything without being told to, and wouldn't let me participate in calls with the clients. In hindsight, I feel he took away my agency with all that. At about the one year mark, I got a very good performance review and he is now requiring me to do the client-facing portion of the job.

The problem is that he makes me prep to the nines for any interaction with the client. If they initiate a conversation, I need to find out what they want to talk about first, so I can research it and have all answers ready. I need to anticipate everything they might ask. I must not ever say anything incorrect and even saying something like "I don't know that but I will find out and get back to you" is not acceptable. Before demos or training sessions, I have to prepare to the level of having a script written or memorized, practice it until I'm "100% confident", then rehearse it with my manager where he throws questions at me and "makes suggestions", and do dry runs with him. I am never to wing it with any client discussions, however casual or formal, with one or all of them.

I got yelled at a few months ago when I dared to meet with one of the clients to answer questions he had without doing all of the above. My manager actually yelled at me as the meeting was starting and forced me to postpone it as the meeting was starting and the client was emailing me going "I'm here, are you coming?"

I am now terrified of the client-facing portion of my job. All of that prep-work isn't too much to ask on the surface, but the result is that I dread it so much but I can't avoid it. I feel like that incident of getting yelled at when the meeting was starting, really damaged my trust and/or respect for him and turned the client interactions into something fraught with terror. It's making me lose sleep from stress and I have trouble talking about it without bursting into tears. I am now behaving as if I have zero experience, making mistakes, procrastinating, all out of dread.

I want to talk rationally to my manager about it, but this risk-aversion/gatekeeping behavior seems to be the culture so I don't think he'll back off. In anticipating a discussion with him, the only resolution I can see happening is that they either terminate me or I quit out of frustration. His management style removed my agency early on in the job (red flag, but I thought maybe I could push through it), made me insecure and destroyed my confidence.

Professional ladies, can you think of any way I can address this with him without sounding like a whining child? Is there a way I can get my confidence back or is this a lost cause at this point?