There’s a guy I used to work with, back in the warehouse days in Melbourne, who everyone called “a lot.” He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t rude. He just said what he thought without spending the first ten seconds of every sentence apologising for thinking it. People found him exhausting. I remember one of the supervisors describing him as “intense,” and at the time I nodded along, because that’s what you do when you’re twenty-four and still trying to be agreeable about everything, including other people’s opinions of strangers.
Years later, I thought about him again. Because here’s the thing psychology actually tells us about people like that. What most of us are reading as intensity, dominance, or being “difficult” is often just the absence of something the rest of us are still doing constantly: apologising for existing. The people we label as having a strong personality haven’t necessarily changed who they are. They’ve just stopped shrinking.
That distinction matters more than it might seem.
The habit of softening yourself is not politeness. It’s a learned survival strategy.
Psychologist Dana Crowley Jack spent years researching what happens when people suppress their voice to keep relationships intact. Her landmark work, published by Harvard University Press, documented how women who silenced their thoughts and feelings to avoid conflict experienced a deep and measurable “loss of self,” one that consistently tracked with clinical depression. The women in her studies weren’t choosing quiet out of contentment. They were choosing it out of fear: fear of conflict, of rejection, of being “too much.”
The research on self-silencing has since expanded far beyond gender. Recent studies consistently find that excessive people-pleasing behaviors are linked to neuroticism, social withdrawal, and diminished self-worth. In other words, the constant performance of smallness has real psychological costs. It’s not neutral. It’s not kind. It’s erosion.
I spent most of my twenties doing this. I grew up in Melbourne, and I was the peacekeeper — the one who read the temperature of the room before saying anything. I carried that reflex into everything that came after — into workplaces, into friendships, into entire relationships I can now barely remember the shape of. By the time I was working that warehouse job in my mid-twenties, shifting TVs and reading about Buddhism on my phone during breaks, I didn’t even realise how much of myself I had quietly edited out. I thought that was just what being a considerate person looked like. I thought everyone did this. It took a long time to understand that what I was calling consideration was actually something closer to fear.
The apology that was never really an apology
There’s a specific kind of sorry that isn’t really a sorry at all. Psychology Today describes what clinicians call the “anxious sorry,” a safety behaviour used to manage anxiety, seek reassurance, and pre-empt conflict before it even arrives. It’s the “sorry, this might be a dumb idea” before you share a thought in a meeting. The “sorry for bothering you” before a completely reasonable request. The pre-emptive apology tossed out like a peace offering to a conflict that doesn’t even exist yet.
This kind of apology isn’t about accountability. It’s about shrinking.
And when you stop doing it — when you just say the thing without the cushioning, without the disclaimer, without the “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but…” — people notice. Not because you’ve become louder or more aggressive. Simply because you’ve stopped performing smallness. To someone who still is, that absence reads as intensity.
Psychotherapist Pete Walker, who specialises in complex trauma, named the reflex behind this the “fawn response,” the fourth stress response alongside fight, flight, and freeze. People who fawn seek safety by appeasing others, staying agreeable, and keeping the temperature down at any cost. It develops in environments where conflict felt dangerous and staying small kept you safe. The nervous system learns: apologise first, and nothing bad can happen.
The problem is that nervous systems don’t automatically update when the original danger is gone. You keep issuing the apologies long after they stopped being necessary. And over time, research shows that suppressing your emotional needs and repeatedly making inauthentic sacrifices damages not just your own well-being, but the quality of your relationships too. The people around you can tell when you’re being real. And when you’re not, something quietly corrodes.
What a “strong personality” actually is
Look, we’ve built a strange mythology around people we call “strong personalities.” We load the phrase with a vague suspicion, as if strength of personality is a character flaw adjacent to arrogance. But if you actually pay attention to what these people are doing differently, the picture is much simpler than the mythology suggests. They disagree without prefacing it with five disclaimers. They ask for things without apologising for the ask. They take up space in conversation without checking first whether that’s allowed. None of those things are dominant or aggressive. They’re just what ordinary communication looks like once you strip the anxiety layer off the top of it.
The research on authenticity backs this up clearly. A review published in the Review of General Psychology found that feelings of authenticity are strongly associated with multiple dimensions of well-being and negatively associated with both depression and anxiety. Living in alignment with who you actually are isn’t just psychologically healthier. It also changes how you move through every room you walk into.
Buddhism has a concept that maps onto this neatly, even if it uses different language. The idea of non-attachment extends beyond material things. You can also be attached to outcomes in social situations — attached to being liked, to being seen as agreeable, to never causing discomfort. That attachment is what drives the constant softening. Releasing it doesn’t make you cold. It makes you honest. And honesty, when it’s genuine and not performed, is one of the most connecting things a person can offer.
Stopping the softening is not the same as becoming hard
This is where people often get it wrong. The antidote to constant people-pleasing isn’t becoming blunt, contrarian, or indifferent to others. It’s not Tyler Durden. It’s not performing toughness as a new identity. It’s simply getting comfortable with the possibility that someone, somewhere, might be uncomfortable with something you said or did, and that this is survivable.
Small daily practices help more than grand shifts in identity. Try this for one week: before adding “sorry” or “I could be wrong, but” or “maybe this is a stupid question” to a sentence, pause and ask whether those words serve the communication or just your own anxiety. If it’s the latter, leave them out. See what happens. Usually, nothing bad does.
Or notice when you adjust your opinion in real time not because you’ve been genuinely persuaded, but because someone frowned or went quiet. That’s the softening in action. You don’t have to fight it. Just notice it. Awareness is where the choice begins.
The people in any room who seem to have the strongest personalities are rarely the ones who decided to become forceful. They’re the ones who got tired of the performance. They stopped pre-apologising. They stopped narrating disclaimers before every honest thought. And because the rest of the room is still doing those things, the contrast looks like intensity. But it’s not intensity. It’s just what it looks like when someone stops subtracting themselves from their own sentences.
That guy from the warehouse? He wasn’t “a lot.” He was just the right amount of himself. The rest of us were still figuring out how much of ourselves we were allowed to be.
