Taking Off the Mask: Practical Exercises to Help Understand and Minimise the Effects of Autistic Camouflaging

At the same time, many unmasking Autistics find that as they get more practiced in self-advocacy, they begin jumping into action more quickly because they’re no longer questioning their every feeling and how every behavior looks.

Wenn Lawson, a psychologist who is both autistic and transgender, has long focussed on issues for autistic females. He has noted that terms such as ‘camouflaging’ and ‘masking’ carry rather negative connotations of deceitfulness, or the need to hide something because it is somehow shameful. Instead he has suggested a rather unwieldy term, ‘adaptive

Finally, one of the damaging consequences of camouflaging behaviour in autistic females is suicidal ideation – not NSSI per se, but as a measure of the potential for self-harm. If, then, you were asked to profile someone at high risk of self-harm, an adolescent autistic female could be the ideal candidate.

Hannah Belcher, an autistic researcher who has written and spoken widely on her own experiences of being autistic, as well as researching the condition, describes her recognition of this pattern of behaviour:

Vulnerable and abundantly energetic, children adapt and conform to social conditioning by learning to ignore the very internal signals that help prevent injury and abuse through our lifetime. Overriding internal signals disrupts our self-correcting reflexes, eventually inhibiting our ability to self-heal and be a coherent organism. Although this fo