Part 1: Feedback, RSD, and the Stories We Carry

The Backstory Nobody Asks About

By Dale Smith, Cultural and Behavioural Realist | Creative Director, Bridge  |  insidebridge.com

Why feedback lands so differently — and what leaders need to understand before they say a word

A few years ago, someone I trusted said something to me that I wasn’t expecting. They told me, gently but honestly, that I didn’t always take feedback well — that I had a tendency to deflect it, explain my way around it, or quietly hide behind my professional expertise when it arrived. My first instinct, if I’m honest, was to explain my way around that observation too.

But something made me pause. Instead of defending, I started observing. I became, in a sense, my own guinea pig — watching myself in real time whenever feedback came my way, noticing the moment it landed, paying attention to where it went and what it did. What I discovered was more interesting than I expected. The response wasn’t consistent. It depended entirely on who was delivering it, how they framed it, and what history — conscious or not — I associated with them. With certain people, feedback felt like useful information. With others, something entirely different happened. A kind of internal switch would flip, and before I’d even consciously processed what was being said, I was already explaining, deflecting, or quietly circling around it.

I wasn’t reacting to the feedback. I was reacting to everything that feedback had ever meant.

I’ve spent a significant part of my career working in leadership development and organisational culture, and I have ADHD. I share that not for sympathy, but because it’s part of how I came to understand this so personally — and because I’ve found that using myself as a reference point, when I’m willing to be honest about what I actually experience, gets me one step closer to understanding what others might be going through too. Dr. EdwardHallowell, one of the world’s leading ADHD specialists, describes how people with ADHD often accumulate over years and decades a relentless diet of correction, redirection, and perceived failure. Over time, that accumulation doesn’t simply affect confidence — it rewires how the nervous system responds to feedback itself. This connects closely to what psychiatrist Dr. William Dodson first described as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD: an intense, almost instantaneous emotional response to perceived criticism, disappointment, or rejection. The word “perceived” is doing a lot of work in that description, because the nervous system doesn’t wait for confirmation. It reacts to the signal of possible threat before the conscious mind has had a chance to evaluate it.

But the longer I’ve sat with this, both personally and professionally, the more firmly I’ve come to believe that this isn’t only an ADHD story.

Every single person sitting in a feedback conversation — the one giving it and the one receiving it — arrived there carrying years of accumulated experience around what it means when someone points something out about them. For some, that history is relatively benign. Feedback was delivered with care, received in safety, and over time became something they associate with growth and trust. For others, the history is considerably more complicated. Feedback was weaponised by a parent, delivered inconsistently by a teacher, or used as a tool of control by a manager who confused criticism with leadership. In some cases it was never really about performance at all. The nervous system, as Dr. Daniel Siegel’s work on interpersonal neurobiology reminds us, doesn’t file these experiences away neatly. It stores them as patterns of prediction. And those patterns activate long before the rational brain has a chance to engage.

So when we talk in organisations about feedback being a gift, about feedback being an opportunity to grow — and I genuinely believe both of those things can be true — we have to ask ourselves an honest question first. A gift is only received as a gift when the person opening it has reason to trust the giver. And that trust, for many people, isn’t a given. It has to be built. Sometimes rebuilt. Sometimes constructed from scratch in the face of a personal history that taught them the opposite.

I’ve worked with leaders who are genuinely skilled communicators. They’ve done the workshops, they know the frameworks, they deliver feedback with care and real intention. And they’re still puzzled about why it doesn’t always land. The reason, more often than not, has nothing to do with their delivery. It has to do with the fact that the person sitting across from them walked into that room carrying ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years of experiences that shaped how those words would be received — and nobody thought to ask about that first. Nobody built the foundation before expecting the feedback to do its work. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson’s landmark research on psychological safety found that the conditions for honest, productive communication don’t happen automatically. They have to be created deliberately. And you cannot shortcut from “I want to give this person feedback”to “that feedback will land well” without first establishing that the person genuinely feels safe enough to receive it. That’s not softness. That’s architecture.

I’m sharing this series because I think we’re still having the wrong conversation about feedback in most organisations. We invest enormous energy in how to give it — the frameworks, the phrasing, the feedback sandwich that anyone with a sensitised nervous system sees straight through — and comparatively little time asking why it doesn’t land, and what needs to be in place before it can. In the next piece, I want to talk about the mask. Because before we can have an honest conversation about feedback, we need to talk about what people are actually protecting, and why asking them to simply drop their guard — without first earning the right to see what’s behind it — can do more harm than the feedback itself.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on feedback, neurodivergence, and what leaders need to understand before the conversation begins.