When Being Around Other People Starts to Feel Like Performance
Many people move through relationships with a quiet but persistent sense that they are adjusting themselves all the time. The adjustments may be subtle, changing tone, monitoring facial expressions, rehearsing responses before speaking, or carefully observing how others react in order to decide what feels acceptable. Over time, this can begin to feel less like conscious choice and more like something automatic, happening almost before there is time to notice it.
For some, this shows up as people-pleasing or self-monitoring. For others, it feels more like performing a version of themselves that seems easier for other people to receive. There can be a strong awareness of how they are perceived, paired with a quieter uncertainty about what they genuinely feel, want, or need underneath that constant adaptation.
This can become exhausting. Not only because of the energy it takes to remain so aware of oneself in relationships, but because it can create a sense of distance from one’s own internal experience. Many people describe feeling as though they are “different versions” of themselves around different people, or that they are never fully relaxed in connection. Others speak about feeling frightened of being “too much,” “too emotional,” “too needy,” or somehow fundamentally difficult to be around.
Underneath these experiences, there is often a deeper relational question: What happens if I stop adapting?
Adaptation Often Begins as Protection
From a psychological perspective, adapting to relationships is not inherently unhealthy. Human beings are relational and social; we naturally adjust ourselves to different contexts. The difficulty arises when adaptation becomes less flexible and more rooted in survival, when staying connected feels dependent on staying carefully managed.
Attachment theory and developmental psychology both suggest that children learn very early which parts of themselves feel welcomed within relationships and which feel more difficult for others to tolerate. These lessons are not always explicit. Sometimes they emerge through repeated emotional experiences, perhaps certain emotions were responded to warmly while others were met with discomfort, criticism, withdrawal, or overwhelm.
Over time, the nervous system begins to organise around these experiences. A child may learn that being quiet reduces tension, that being agreeable preserves connection, or that emotional expression risks disconnection. Others may learn that achievement, caretaking, humour, or high self-awareness become ways of maintaining relational safety.
These responses often make profound sense in context. They are not signs of weakness or inauthenticity. They are adaptations shaped by environments, relationships, and nervous systems attempting to maintain belonging.
The Fear of Being “Too Much”
One of the most common experiences people describe in therapy is the fear of being “too much.” Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too needy. Too intense. Too complicated.
Schema Therapy offers a useful lens for understanding this. Schemas are deeply rooted emotional and relational patterns that develop through repeated experiences over time. Someone who has repeatedly felt misunderstood, criticised, or emotionally unsupported may develop schemas linked to defectiveness, shame, emotional deprivation, or self-sacrifice. These schemas are not simply beliefs that can be rationally dismissed; they become embodied expectations about how relationships work and what is likely to happen within them.
When these schemas are activated, even small relational moments can feel emotionally loaded. A delayed reply may trigger fears of rejection. A subtle shift in tone may activate worries about being “too much.” Someone may immediately begin analysing themselves, what they said, how they sounded, whether they were inappropriate, demanding, or overwhelming.
Over time, this can create a strong tendency toward self-monitoring. Rather than remaining connected to internal experience, attention shifts outward toward managing how one is perceived.
Masking and the Loss of Internal Reference Points
For many neurodivergent individuals, these experiences intersect closely with masking.
Masking involves consciously or unconsciously adapting behaviour, communication, emotional expression, or body language in order to fit social expectations or reduce the likelihood of negative responses. While masking is often discussed in relation to autism and ADHD, many people engage in some form of relational masking when safety or belonging feels uncertain.
Research increasingly highlights the emotional and psychological impact of long-term masking. Constantly monitoring oneself can create chronic exhaustion, anxiety, and a sense of disconnection from identity. Over time, it may become difficult to recognise what feels natural versus what has been learned for acceptance.
This can become particularly complex for people who receive a neurodivergent diagnosis later in life. Many late-diagnosed autistic or ADHD adults describe realising, often retrospectively, how much energy had gone into adapting and compensating throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Experiences that once felt like personal failings begin to make more sense through a neurodivergent lens.
At the same time, late diagnosis can bring grief as well as relief. There can be sadness for the years spent feeling misunderstood, self-critical, or chronically “wrong.” Some people begin questioning which parts of themselves feel authentic and which developed primarily in response to external expectations.
This is not an identity crisis in the dramatic sense it is sometimes portrayed. More often, it is a gradual process of reconnecting with internal experiences that were repeatedly deprioritised in favour of adaptation.
How This Shows Up in OCD
In obsessive–compulsive disorder, adaptation and masking can take on a particularly self-monitoring quality.
Someone may become highly focused on how they come across to others, carefully analysing tone, wording, facial expressions, or emotional reactions. Conversations may be replayed repeatedly afterwards in an attempt to determine whether something inappropriate, harmful, or unacceptable was said.
This can become especially difficult in presentations involving responsibility, moral scrupulosity, or relationship-focused OCD. There may be a strong fear of being careless, selfish, manipulative, or harmful without fully realising it. As a result, the person may continually monitor themselves in an effort to prevent relational harm.
Approaches such as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT) recognise that the problem is not the existence of uncertainty or self-awareness itself, but the compulsive attempts to resolve uncertainty through repeated checking, analysing, and self-surveillance.
Over time, this level of monitoring can create profound disconnection from spontaneity and self-trust.
How This Shows Up in Eating Difficulties
In eating difficulties, adaptation often intersects with visibility, shame, and the sense of taking up “too much” space emotionally or physically.
For some people, making themselves smaller becomes both relational and embodied. Needs may be minimised. Preferences may be withheld. Emotional expression may feel difficult or unsafe. There can be a quiet but persistent feeling that existing comfortably within one’s body, needs, or presence risks judgement or rejection.
Body image and self-worth are also deeply relational experiences. Research consistently demonstrates that experiences of criticism, comparison, objectification, and conditional approval shape how people come to relate to themselves physically and emotionally.
In this context, eating patterns can sometimes function as attempts to manage visibility, regulate emotional discomfort, or create a sense of predictability within relationships that feel emotionally uncertain.
Again, these patterns are not random. They emerge within relational and social contexts that shape what feels acceptable, desirable, or safe.
Authenticity Is Not the Opposite of Adaptation
Discussions around authenticity can sometimes become oversimplified, framed as though the goal is simply to “stop caring what people think” or to fully “be yourself” at all times. But authenticity is far more nuanced than this.
From a relational perspective, authenticity is not the absence of adaptation. It is the gradual ability to remain more connected to one’s internal experience while also remaining in relationship with others.
For many people, this develops slowly. Particularly when adaptation once served an important protective function.
Psychodynamic theorist Donald Winnicott wrote about the idea of the “false self,” not as deception, but as a relational adaptation that develops when someone does not feel fully safe to exist spontaneously within relationships. Importantly, Winnicott did not suggest that these adaptations were pathological in themselves. Rather, they reflected attempts to preserve connection within environments where authenticity did not feel fully possible.
Seen through this lens, masking and over-adaptation are not evidence of failure. They are evidence of how deeply human beings prioritise belonging.
Reconnecting With Yourself Gradually
Because of this, authenticity is rarely something that appears suddenly. It often develops through small relational experiences that gradually feel safer.
This may begin with noticing preferences before automatically dismissing them. It might involve expressing something small, tolerating disagreement, or allowing a moment of visibility without immediately retreating into self-monitoring.
For neurodivergent individuals, it may involve experimenting with reducing masking in carefully chosen spaces. For others, it may involve recognising how much energy goes into performing calmness, agreeability, or emotional manageability.
These shifts are often subtle, but psychologically significant. They create new experiences for the nervous system, experiences where authenticity does not automatically lead to rejection or disconnection.
Over time, this can slowly reshape relational expectations.
Therapy as a Space to Unmask Safely
Therapy can become an important space for this process because it offers an opportunity to experience relationships differently.
Rather than focusing solely on symptom reduction, therapy can support people in noticing what happens internally within connection, what gets monitored, hidden, softened, or over-managed. The therapeutic relationship itself often becomes part of the work, offering a space where preferences, needs, emotions, and differences can gradually be expressed and explored more openly.
In approaches such as CBT, EMDR, Schema Therapy and integrative psychotherapy, this process may involve understanding schemas, reducing compulsive self-monitoring, exploring relational fears, and gradually building tolerance for visibility and authenticity.
This is not about becoming a completely different person. It is about reducing the distance between internal experience and external expression over time.
Considering Therapy
If relationships often feel effortful, performative, or shaped by constant self-monitoring, therapy can help you explore how these patterns developed and how they can begin to shift.
I work with adults experiencing complex PTSD, OCD and eating difficulties, offering trauma-informed, neurodivergent-affirming therapy in Menai Bridge and Llandudno, as well as online across the UK.
Adapting to stay connected often develops for very understandable reasons. But over time, it is possible to build relationships where less energy goes into performing, and more space becomes available for simply being.
