Your High Performer Isn't Difficult. They're Running on Empty
What childhood emotional neglect actually costs your team, and what managers can do about it
Most managers have encountered this pattern without having a name for it. An engineer shuts down completely during a code review. A senior leader goes quiet in a meeting where decisions don’t go their way. A high performer misses a deadline and then disappears rather than flagging the problem. A team member explodes when given constructive feedback, then apologizes the next day as if a different person did the exploding.
The instinct is to call these “communication issues” and send someone to a workshop. That rarely helps, because the root isn’t a skill gap. It’s a pattern built long before anyone joined this company.
Dr. Jonice Webb’s research on childhood emotional neglect describes what happens when children grow up in environments where their emotional experiences are consistently ignored, minimized, or treated as inconvenient. Not necessarily abusive homes. Often loving ones, where parents simply didn’t have the tools to acknowledge feelings. The child learns, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that emotions are a burden. The adaptive response is to wall them off.
That wall doesn’t come down when the person gets a job offer. It comes to work.
And in a technical organization, the five triggers Webb identifies map almost precisely onto ordinary workplace situations that most managers treat as interpersonal quirks rather than patterned responses to something much older.
Trigger one: conflict
Conflict requires two things that childhood emotional neglect specifically undermines: the ability to tolerate your own discomfort, and the ability to stay present with someone else’s. Webb describes how people with CEN often lack the internal equipment to identify what they’re feeling in the moment, let alone put it into words, let alone stay regulated while the other person is also activated.
In an organization, this shows up as conflict avoidance that looks like agreeableness. The engineer who never pushes back in design reviews. The manager who tells every direct report their work is great and then lets performance problems accumulate until they become a formal action or a departure. The team that reaches consensus in meetings and then re-litigates everything in Slack afterward, where it’s safer.
The organizational cost is decision quality. Conflict avoidance masquerading as collaboration produces conclusions that nobody actually believes, built on input that nobody actually surfaced. I’ve written about this in the context of vibes-based cultures: when the social cost of disagreement is too high, people optimize for legibility rather than accuracy, and the organization loses its ability to course-correct before problems become expensive.
The intervention for managers isn’t to force conflict. It’s to make conflict structurally safe: written pre-mortems, anonymous input mechanisms, explicitly modeled disagreement from leadership. When the structure protects the person, they don’t have to rely on internal equipment they may not have.
Trigger two: needing help
Webb’s observation here is precise. When asking for help in childhood repeatedly resulted in disappointment or indifference, the adult learns that reliance is dangerous. Not as a conscious belief, but as a visceral prediction. Asking for help triggers the anticipation of being let down, which triggers withdrawal. Psychology Today describes this pattern as counter-dependence: a deep fear of relying on others that gets mistaken for self-sufficiency.
In technical organizations this looks like heroic individual effort followed by quiet failure. The senior engineer who works late for two weeks rather than flag that the scope is impossible. The new hire who spends three days stuck on a problem they could have solved in three hours with one question. The team lead who handles every escalation personally because distributing the work requires trusting that others will come through.
The pattern is almost universally read by organizations as either admirable independence or poor judgment, depending on whether the outcome goes well. It’s rarely identified as what it actually is: a deeply ingrained prediction that asking for help makes things worse.
The managerial lever here is making help-seeking visible and rewarded. Leaders who narrate their own uncertainty model a different template. Teams where someone asking a question in a shared channel gets a quick, non-judgmental response build evidence, over time, that the old prediction doesn’t hold here. That evidence accumulates slowly. It matters.
Trigger three: strong emotions in others
This one is underappreciated as an organizational variable. Webb describes how people with CEN often become visibly activated when others express strong emotion, because the emotional display triggers their own walled-off feelings and the discomfort of not knowing what to do with them. The response is to withdraw, deflect, or shut the emotion down.
In a technical context, this shows up in postmortems, performance conversations, and one-on-ones. The manager who is physically uncomfortable when a direct report gets upset and who ends the conversation as quickly as possible rather than sitting with the discomfort. The senior engineer who responds to a junior’s frustration with a lecture rather than a question. The team lead who keeps every difficult conversation so clinical and structured that the human in the room never feels seen.
The organizational consequence is that people stop bringing the real information. When emotional signals consistently get shut down, people learn to strip emotion from the data before it arrives, which means they also strip urgency, severity, and context. The system gets sanitized input and makes decisions accordingly. Shame-resilient postmortems address part of this structurally: when the format makes it safe to surface what actually happened, including the human parts, the information that reaches decision-makers is more accurate. But the structural fix only goes so far if the people running the meeting still visibly shut down when someone gets emotional. The room reads that. The room learns from it.
Trigger four: receiving criticism
Webb’s framing here is important. For people with CEN, criticism doesn’t just register as information about a piece of work. It registers as evidence about their fundamental worth, because growing up without emotional validation leaves people without a stable internal sense that they are acceptable. Criticism collapses the distinction between “this output needs work” and “I am not good enough.”
In a performance review context, this means that feedback delivered without careful structural protection tends to land as verdict rather than data. The person either collapses into excessive self-blame, goes silent and withdraws, or reacts defensively in ways that look like arrogance but are actually the opposite: a person desperately shoring up a self-concept under attack.
Organizations routinely misread both responses. The person who collapses gets labeled as fragile. The person who defends gets labeled as difficult. Neither label is accurate, and neither generates useful next steps.
The control surface here is specificity and separation. Feedback anchored to observable behavior and output, rather than character or presence, gives people something concrete to respond to rather than an identity to defend. “This function doesn’t handle the edge case where the input is null” is processable. “You tend to be careless with error handling” is a verdict. The difference sounds small. In a nervous system that can’t easily distinguish between the two, it isn’t. I’ve written about how technical debt is a people problem precisely because feedback cultures that produce the most defensive behavior tend to produce the worst code quality outcomes alongside it.
Trigger five: being evaluated
Webb’s fifth trigger is more diffuse than the others: the general experience of visibility, of being seen and assessed. For people with CEN, evaluation isn’t neutral. It activates the old experience of not being enough, of being found wanting, of having the internal self exposed to a gaze that doesn’t know how to hold it. Psychology Today notes that many CEN adults develop an enduring sense of a “fatal flaw,” a private conviction that closer inspection will reveal them as fundamentally defective.
In organizations, this is most acute during performance review cycles and promotion decisions. But it also operates in smaller moments: presenting work in a team meeting, having code reviewed publicly, being asked a question in an all-hands. Any moment where the person is visible and the audience holds evaluative power.
The response that makes this worse is ambiguity. When people don’t know what they’re being evaluated on, they fill the gap with their worst self-assessments. When criteria are unclear, the person with a fragile internal foundation assumes the judgment is negative. When feedback is infrequent, each instance carries disproportionate weight.
The intervention is the same one that helps everyone and helps this group more than most: make the criteria explicit, give feedback frequently enough that no single instance becomes the whole story, and separate evaluation of work from evaluation of worth as clearly and consistently as possible. That distinction is obvious from the outside. It is not obvious from inside a nervous system that learned early the two were the same thing.
What managers can actually do with this
None of this requires a clinical framework or treating the office as a therapy room. What it requires is recognizing that organizational behavior patterns often have roots that predate the organization, and that structural design can either activate those roots or give people enough safety to work around them.
Make conflict structurally safe rather than expecting people to be comfortable with it. Make help-seeking visible and rewarded rather than implicitly associated with weakness. Respond to emotion in meetings with curiosity rather than clinical deflection. Give feedback that is specific, behavioral, and forward-looking. Make evaluation criteria explicit and reinforce them consistently.
These are the conditions of a well-run team. They’re also the conditions that give people carrying old wounds the best chance of bringing their actual capability to work, rather than spending most of their cognitive energy managing triggers they can barely name.
The wall doesn’t come down by itself. But the right environment stops requiring people to build it higher.