For anyone exhausted by people-pleasing, masking, or keeping the peace at their own expense.
When the mask begins to slip
In the years since being diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, I have spent a lot of time thinking about masking: the conscious or unconscious effort to suppress natural instincts and modify behaviour to appear socially acceptable.
At a certain point, particularly for those diagnosed later in life, the mask begins to slip. Sometimes we make a deliberate decision to take it off; more often, our nervous systems simply run out of the energetic fuel required to keep it in place.
It is revealing to notice how that unmasking is received. In some spaces, people are accustomed to neurodivergent communication styles, unusual movements, and direct requests for adjustments. In others, the policing is immediate – like the training course where a fellow participant told me nobody would ever take me seriously as a leader if I continued to move my hands like that when I spoke.
Toning ourselves down to fit in is rarely about our own wellbeing; it is almost entirely about managing other people's comfort. We swallow our need to regulate our bodies, force ourselves through exhausting small talk, and suppress natural tangents because we have learned that our authentic baseline is received as impolite, disruptive, or unprofessional.
A classic example is the neurodivergent tendency to relate to someone’s experience by sharing our own equivalent story. In neurotypical spaces, this is frequently misread as self-centredness or one-upmanship rather than an effort to connect. Sociologist Damian Milton named this the "double empathy problem": the idea that communication breakdowns between neurodivergent and neurotypical people are a two-way mismatch in communication styles, yet the burden of adaptation is almost always placed entirely on the neurodivergent person. To keep the peace, we adapt, silence our instincts, and carry the physiological cost.
The legacy of 'white politeness'
Masking is not an isolated neurodivergent quirk. It is intimately tied to a wider cultural conditioning that prioritises decorum over truth: the legacy of "white politeness".
Historically, British civility was built on a hierarchical social structure where those in power separated themselves through a rigid code of manners. Good breeding meant indirect speech, emotional repression, quiet bodies, and the complete avoidance of overt conflict. That legacy persists today in the way politeness is weaponised to maintain power and punish difference – such as the persistent, racist stereotyping of Black women as ‘aggressive’ whenever they speak directly or show emotion.
Even in progressive and caring environments where emotional literacy is celebrated, a culture of polite avoidance often runs the room. When an interaction threatens to become heated, emotional, or uncomfortable, people reach for familiar social crutches. We deploy humour, retreat into pleasantries, or swiftly change the subject to smooth over the tension.
There is an unconscious habit of policing our own and others' words and bodies to preserve an artificial calm. But when we grow up in cultures that prioritise immediate comfort over voicing dissent and setting boundaries, we learn to mistake compliance for safety. We develop avoidant, people-pleasing habits that leave our true thoughts unsaid and our physical bodies braced for conflict.
The cost of the 'nice' workplace
I often see the fallout of this dynamic when facilitating in organisations that pride themselves on being ‘nice’. On the surface, the culture appears warm and supportive. But beneath that pleasant veneer, serious grievances, structural inequalities, and unaddressed conflicts can be left to fester because nobody wants to be the one to disrupt the calm.
Employees in these environments describe how intimidating it is to raise concerns. The workplace becomes silencing precisely because the culture equates directness with hostility. Politeness is used to uphold a hierarchy where challenging the status quo is framed as bad manners. Avoiding awkwardness brings a moment of short-term relief, but the long-term consequence is chronic resentment, disengagement, and staff burnout.
This is personal territory for me. My own learned defence mechanism has long been to avoid conflict and over-adapt in order to maintain belonging. For years, I experienced a fierce internal conflict between the instinct to please others at all costs and the direct, honest communication I actually needed to stay well.
Getting comfortable with the short term discomfort that might arise from sharing or receiving challenges, needs, boundaries, concerns and emotions is likely to offer longer term gains.
Building the capacity for discomfort
Unlearning polite avoidance is a somatic practice, as well as an intellectual one.
When you’ve spent decades surviving by keeping others comfortable, setting a boundary or voicing disagreement triggers a threat response in the autonomic nervous system – the network regulating your involuntary stress and survival responses. Your throat tightens, your heart accelerates, and your brain warns you that rejection is imminent. In trauma and nervous system frameworks, this leads to the ‘fawn’ response - placating, appeasing, and stepping over your own boundaries to neutralise perceived danger.
It’s difficult to think your way out of that reflex. If your body equates directness with disaster, willpower alone will likely fail.
This is where somatic coaching comes in. We have to build physical capacity to tolerate the bodily sensations of discomfort without immediately rushing to appease. That means practising micro-moments of friction:
Noticing the physical urge to smile and apologise when someone interrupts you, and choosing to hold your ground instead.
Dropping your breath into your belly and letting the diaphragm expand when a silence feels awkward, rather than babbling to fill the void.
Feeling the solid contact of your feet on the floor when delivering a ‘no’, letting your body support you while the adrenaline wave crashes.
When you can sit with the physical feeling of discomfort in your chest without dissociating or scrambling to smooth things over, speaking with integrity feels like less of a terrifying risk and becomes an accessible choice.
Beyond the shame spiral
Part of tolerating discomfort is learning what to do when things go wrong. When we start speaking directly and examining the norms we have absorbed, we will probably make a few missteps. In our efforts to prevent conflict, we may discover that our polite silence or unexamined habits have caused harm or excluded others.
When that happens, the temptation is to collapse into a shame spiral: an agonising loop of defensiveness and self-blame that threatens our sense of identity.
We need to learn to take our capacity to cause harm seriously while holding our egos lightly. Causing hurt or getting something wrong does not mean you are fundamentally bad; it means you are a fallible human navigating complex interpersonal terrain. Collapsing into shame prevents genuine accountability. Sitting with the discomfort of having made a mistake allows you to listen, repair the rupture, and integrate the learning for the future.
Compassionate honesty is a discipline. It asks us to stop using politeness as a shield against awkwardness, and to start trusting that our relationships are sturdy enough to survive the truth. Unlearning the reflex to shrink and appease is demanding work, but it is the only way to build connections that are rooted in reality rather than compliance.
Working together
If you are exhausted from carrying the physical tension of people-pleasing, masking, or keeping the peace at your own expense, somatic coaching can help you to build the internal capacity to speak with clarity and hold your ground.
Learn more about my 1:1 work on my Coaching page, explore how breath regulates your physiology on my Breathwork page, or book a free discovery call to discuss where we might start.