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

This is a pattern of behaviour that seems to set this particular group apart. They appear to be highly socially motivated to fit in, to belong, which is at odds with the traditional picture of autism. But the strategies women adopt to achieve this belonging appear to be only partially effective, if at all, and are also mentally and physically damag

We tend to be emotionally withdrawn yet friendly and socially adaptive. We’re social chameleons, and masters at making people like us, but we never let much of our real selves show. We erect rigid rules around our lives to manage stress and make an unpredictable social world feel a little less scary: make eye contact for this many seconds, eat this

PTSD-fueled hypervigilance can look a lot like masking: you’re constantly scanning your environment for threats, and modulating how you present yourself, so you can stay safe. To complicate matters, many Autistic people experience trauma at a young age, and have PTSD symptoms from that.

Deep compensation is an attempt to overcome such difficulties by trying to extract the ‘principles’ of social understanding, such as finding out how to interpret emotional expressions, how to pay attention to social cues, how to ‘read the room’.

Masking comes at an immense personal cost. Empirical research shows that masked Autistics are lonelier and more socially anxious than their unmasked Autistic peers,[9] and experience depression at elevated rates.[10]