Hot Seat Therapy and 360° Reviews Are the Same Bullsh*t
Too many internal coaches and managers still measure growth by how well you conform to other people’s expectations—especially if you’re neurodivergent, BIPOC, queer, or disabled. The result? More masking. More burnout. Less truth.
This post offers a radical reframe of feedback.
We’ll also dig into why the beloved 360° review process often mirrors a shady group therapy tactic called hot seat therapy—and how both can go off the rails without care, consent, and context.
My Childhood Experience with Toxic Feedback
I know firsthand how harmful “hot seat” dynamics can be. I’ve done it multiple times in “therapy” as a child, against my will. It was torture being seated in the middle of a group and having them unleash anything they want at you. It was like being in a room with Donald Trump & Elon Musk together. The only thing missing was a chainsaw.
In the hot seat, they told me they didn’t like my ethnicity, my “rich people” clothes, how I spoke, or even the size of my nose. This wasn’t a trauma informed exercise, neither was it in an eating disorder recovery program. This was just a bunch of random adults and teens in “group therapy” spewing venom in the hopes of making themselves feel whole. Talking about what triggers them about me. It was basically like being bullied on X. I personally refused to roast anyone, which obviously did not go over well with therapists leading this exercise.
How did this even happen?
As a teenager, I nearly stopped eating and weighed 72 pounds—my body’s response to the constant domestic abuse at home. And all the messages I got to be more “white” from them and everyone else around me. I shared with my parents that I was stressed out about them fighting and some racist stuff at school. I weighed around 105 before that, so it was never about weight loss. It usually isn’t for a lot of people.
Instead of seeing me as someone who needed support, I quickly became an inconvenience for my parents. I became the scapegoat for everything wrong in their lives. Especially since I smoked (which helped me focus) and talked a lot in class. My grades started sliding from the As and Bs all the years prior. I was “bad” for these things that should have been more of a signal that I needed support from them. Not another beating or yelling or anything else.
As a result, I got so sick I landed in the ER, hooked up to heart monitors and IVs multiple times. I was told by doctors in ERs that I may not make it through the night — more than once. And then all the crazy abusive therapy experiments started and escalated.
One psychiatrist —Bruce Fabric—called my father in for some “private feedback.” He suggested that since I wasn’t doing as my father pleased, he should just disown me. He said that eating disorders couldn’t be cured, and he could easily, legally, get rid of this problem (meaning me). He did that with his own daughter, who ended up in an ashram.
For a while, that’s exactly what happened to me. I was disowned — my father wanted to control the family. He also wanted to build yet another multi-million dollar home in the Bay Area instead of paying for proper, compassionate treatment specifically for eating disorders (and ADHD). Nobody had any say in the family except him. And my mom didn’t want more abuse for standing up for me. Eventually, her conscience gave in, and she stood up to him.
For context, the ED happened in the late 80s and early 90s, and growing up in an Asian immigrant family made this even worse. I quit the eating disorder when I moved away to college, but this experience never left me. I stood up to my father as an adult, but the family dynamic barely changed. I was always the canary in the mine, expected to give my life to preserve theirs. And the external feedback — that was always valued over anything else. It is something very ingrained in Asian culture.
Read on if you want to learn about a better way to work with feedback. And also prevent yourself from being put in a hot seat.
Feedback is Often About Control
It’s about preserving broken systems and assigning blame to those who speak up to drive change.
Both bad hot seat therapy and broken feedback systems ask: “How do others see you?”
But never: “How do you experience yourself? What’s true for you?”
Now add to that:
If you’re Black, Brown, or Asian, your tone is policed harder.
If you’re fat, disabled, queer, or visibly gender-nonconforming, your presence is questioned before you even speak.
If you’re a woman of color in leadership? People may call you “intense,” “angry,” and, more likely, “not a culture fit."
When feedback does not include proper context, consent, and care, it becomes a weapon, not a tool.
Now think about 360° reviews with autocratic managers. If you’ve ever sat through one of those, your nervous system will feel like it got tasered. That glossy HR promise of holistic development can turn into a glorified roast—with little context, follow-up, or care for your experience or growth.
Bad feedback culture in the workplace really does have a lot in common with hot seat therapy.
Prioritizing External Feedback = Compliance Culture
I’m not anti-feedback. But I am against the uncritical outsourcing of authority to external systems—especially systems that are sexist, racist, ableist, fatphobic, and transphobic. Systems that are built to reward people who already have the best options.
If you’re an internal coach or manager and you only teach people to grow through “feedback,” but don’t also teach them to filter that feedback through their nervous system, values, lived experience, and intuition? You’re not empowering them. You’re programming them to mask better.
Masking is a trauma response. Not a leadership strategy.
Many of us have had to become hyper-adaptable because we had to. The masking, the chameleon-ing, the constant tracking of people’s moods and reactions—it’s not authenticity, it’s survival.
Putting people in survival mode does not lead to a better bottom line in the long run.
When marginalized people are told that their gut reactions are “too sensitive” or “not aligned with the team’s experience,” they don’t grow.
They learn that their truth must be filtered through the comfort of the dominant group before it’s allowed to matter.
So, they go quiet. They burn out. They vanish.
The result? You lose a valuable employee or coaching client.
For Internal Coaches and Managers: Do Better
If you’re coaching or managing someone who is neurodivergent, BIPOC, queer, or otherwise marginalized, please stop centering external feedback as the holy grail of growth. Sure, a lot of teams ask for 360 feedback — but do something constructive and not destructive with this.
Start asking better questions in 1:1 manager or coaching chats:
How does this feedback land for you?
What part of it feels true? What part feels like projection?
Does this feedback honor your identity and lived experience?
Are you contorting yourself to meet someone else’s comfort?
For Everyone: Deprioritize External Feedback
If you’re neurodivergent—say, ADHD or autistic—you’ve already spent your life filtering the hell out of everything. You are fluent in micro-vibes, tone shifts, smiley emojis, Slack silence, and the thousand ways people signal disapproval without ever saying a word. You’re also likely to have spent years being forced to blindly trust in systems that were never built for you.
So when coaches or managers tell you to listen to the feedback without also honoring the context of your lived experience? What they’re really saying is: go and shrink yourself until you don’t trigger anyone. You do not have to take ignorant advice like that.
Your own internal data is real data:
How did you feel in that meeting?
What made you shrink or light up?
Where did your body tense?
Did your energy crash or rise?
Did that feedback feel like guidance… or shame?
This is hard data from our nervous systems, our trauma histories, our identities, and our intuition.
Three Tips to Fix “Feedback”
Start with Internal Feedback First: Before asking what others think, help people reflect on their own truth. And give them time to process what’s coming up for them as well as the internal impact of whatever feedback they get.
Make Feedback Mutual, Not Hierarchical: No more top-down critiques with zero vulnerability in return. Real leadership invites conversation, not just commentary. Allow people to decide when they are in the space for feedback. Allow them to set boundaries and give feedback in return.
Build-in Pre & Post Care: Offer the meeting agenda and a copy of what you will review beforehand. After feedback, offer space for people to unpack, integrate, and choose what they want to work on. Healing and growth are not immediate—support must be ongoing.
Nobody is saying that external feedback isn’t necessary when there is wrongdoing (e.g., the current political leaders destroying everything this country was built on). But in general, external feedback is usually only helpful as supporting material. And if it’s not valid for you, you don’t have to take it.