Calling Collapse™: What Organisations Can Do When Masking Meets a Deeper Sense of Purpose

By Dr Jen Spencer. 

This is the second in a two-part series on neurodivergent professionals and the hidden cost of appearing fine at work. 

The first article in this series argued that psychological safety is not only something a team creates. For neurodivergent professionals, years of learning which traits are met with acceptance can produce a self-imposed unsafety that persists even in genuinely supportive workplaces, the quiet cost of masking. This piece picks up where that left off: what happens when that erosion collides with a genuine calling to the work itself, and what organisations, not just individuals, can actually do about it.

I call that collision Calling Collapse™. 

What Is Calling Collapse™?

Calling Collapse™ can happen when a person's calling, and therefore their identity, erodes because their values and the barriers in front of them no longer line up. It is not burnout, which describes mental and physical exhaustion. For a neurodivergent professional, Calling Collapse™ can take hold when:

• They cannot act in the workplace in line with their own values; because 
• They are busy shielding their identity to appear neurotypical; and in doing so
• They lose the psychological safety a genuine calling is meant to provide. 

Research on calling consistently finds that it is living out a calling, not merely having one, that is linked to greater meaning, satisfaction, and psychological wellbeing (Duffy & Dik, 2013). That benefit depends on actually being able to act on the calling day to day, which is exactly what masking interrupts: a professional can still have the calling and lose access to what makes it protective. 

The barrier behind this is the same kind other professionals face, just less visible: a workplace that makes no real room for how they think, communicate, or process the world, so masking becomes the cost of staying employed there. Every bit of capacity spent masking is capacity that doesn't go toward the patients, students, or clients they came here to serve. It can happen to any professional operating from a genuine calling. 

For neurodivergent professionals, masking is frequently the mechanism that keeps the barrier invisible: successful masking gets people hired, promoted, and praised as low-maintenance, which erases the exact evidence an organisation would need to see that something is wrong. 

Take the teacher example from the first article. Her scripted greetings and suppressed stimming kept her masking successful for years, which is exactly why no one noticed when she started staying late, not to prepare more, but to sit alone in her classroom, unable to face one more parent conversation she no longer had the capacity to handle honestly. Nothing about her file would show that. It is Calling Collapse™: not a problem anyone at work could see, but the quiet collapse of the person underneath an appearance everyone still believed was fine.

Warning Signs Organisations Miss

Because masking works, the usual signs of distress often do not appear. What to watch for instead:

• A consistently high performer who never raises concerns, requests flexibility, or discloses a need, even when policy explicitly invites it.

• Sudden withdrawal from informal team interaction, breaks, chat, optional social contact, without a corresponding dip in formal output.

• A pattern of invisible extra preparation, arriving early, staying late, over-documenting, to compensate for something never named.

What Organisations Can Do

• Build structural flexibility, in format, environment, and communication channels, into how roles are designed by default, rather than treating it as a disclosure-triggered accommodation.
• Separate psychological safety measurement from team-level surveys alone; ask specifically whether people feel safe deviating from the expected way of doing things, not only whether they feel safe speaking up in meetings.
• Train managers to treat the absence of complaints as neutral information, not as evidence of wellbeing.

What Individuals Can Do

Alongside the private strategies covered in part one, rebuilding self-efficacy, the belief in your own capacity to succeed, matters most here. 

The Calling Collapse Recovery Framework™ points to four ways individuals can build that belief back up: 

1. Building a support system
2. Setting boundaries around autonomy
3. Practicing self-care
4. Pursuing ongoing skill development

Each maps onto what Albert Bandura identified as the actual sources of self-efficacy: genuine support and encouragement, mastery experience, managing one's own physiological and emotional state, and the compounding effect of skill built alongside seeing others succeed (Bandura, 1997). 

Seeking out neurodivergent-led professional networks does double duty here. It builds skill, and it is proof, not just reassurance, that success on your own terms is possible. 

Conclusion

Masking and Calling Collapse™ are not the same experience, but for neurodivergent professionals who came to their work through a genuine sense of calling, they frequently compound each other, and organisations rarely see it happening. 

Recognising that the employees who appear most seamlessly adapted may be carrying the heaviest invisible load is the first step. Building workplaces where masking is no longer required to belong, and where a person's calling can survive contact with reality, is the work still ahead.

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About the Author

Jen Spencer, PhD, is a researcher, keynote speaker, and workshop facilitator working with educators and helping professionals across the US. Her career spans ten years in healthcare, seven in K-12 teaching, three as a vocational rehabilitation counselor, and several in state education leadership at the Indiana Department of Education. She has presented at conferences including ResearchED and the Indiana Association of School Principals. Drawing on that path and her doctoral research in educational leadership, she developed the Calling Collapse™ Recovery Framework, distinguishing burnout from the deeper identity-level erosion helping professionals experience when systemic barriers keep them from living out their calling. 

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman.

Duffy, R. D., & Dik, B. J. (2013). Research on calling: What have we learned and where are we going? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 83(3), 428–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.006 

Pryke-Hobbes, A., Davies, J., Heasman, B., Livesey, A., Walker, A., Pellicano, E., & Remington, A. (2023). The workplace masking experiences of autistic, non-autistic neurodivergent and neurotypical adults in the UK. PLOS ONE, 18(9), e0290001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290001