The 4 Types of Autistic Masking

when I was reacting to the fake disorder cringe subreddit for the video that I posted on Sunday I stumbled across this terrible post I didn't respond to it in that video maybe at sometime in the future I can do because the comments are like an interesting ride the post was titled how these people sound and then it has a picture of someone in a wheelchair it says so I'm a paraplegic I can't move my lower body and then the person standing up says oh my God me too I'm just so good at masking it's barely even noticeable anymore they don't understand autistic masking and they're basically saying like if you were autistic there's no way you would be able to cover that up now obviously this image is ridiculous I don't know a lot about it but I'm pretty sure people take issue to being called a paraplegic but if I'm honest when I look at this post I kind of had some similar thoughts to this when I was first considering the fact that I might be autistic like I'm autistic but then I'm going out into the world and pretending I'm not autistic every day it's like a really difficult concept to get your head around it's really abstract doesn't mean it doesn't exist though it is a very real thing and it's even mentioned in the dsm5 diagnostic criteria for autism symptoms must be present in the early developmental period in order for you to get an Autism diagnosis because it's a neurodevelopmental condition but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities or may be masked by learned strategies in later life of course it makes sense that if people have the ability to they going to stop doing things that end in them being perceived negatively and they're going to do more of the things that win them approval of the people around them that's just a normal human response and so while people who are not Autistic or otherwise neurode Divergent they may mask as well an autistic person who is more different than the average person who is more of a minority in terms of how their mind works me need to put more effort into this mask in order to match up with you know what's considered to be the norm otherwise they risk things like bullying I've read quite a few studies and books that kind of try and categorize different types of masking and different ways and use different terms to describe it and I think it's quite interesting today I'm going to talk through four of them that really really resonated with me so these kind of types of masking move on a scale a little bit from like more unconscious types of masking to more conscious types of masking so number one is a blank mask I first read the term blank mask in the book autism and masking which I'll leave link down below I felt like I knew exactly what they meant and I could definitely see that in my past it's basically kind of turning yourself into a blank slate it's editing out all of your normal and natural responses for fear of doing something that could be judged negatively by the people around you to me this state feels connected to the freeze fear or trauma response so you have fight and flight and then you also have freeze and Fa we'll get on to for in a minute yeah basically you feel threatened you feel overwhelmed by your environment and so you kind of freeze up a blank mask can be something that you adopt quite early on in life that was certainly the case for me and it might be an instinctive response rather than from any sort of feedback you've got to just being in an overwhelming sensory and social environment where it's just information coming at you all the time and you just kind of shut down and Shrink into yourself because it's too much it could also be kind of subconsciously adopted due to the feedback that you've received from your environment so for example when I was 7 years old people made fun of me for kind of flapping books as I read them I do kind of like this movement I felt like such a deep horrible feeling of dread and shame and embarrassment and I think my uh brain and nervous system would have definitely filed that away under things we should try to never ever do again so we can avoid this feeling so yeah under this black mask you might not stem you might switch to more subtle stems like touching your hair and picking at your nails and even kind of finger flicking can be done more like subtly down by your side for me I always had this feeling when I was at school that I was in a straight jacket I always had a very like horrible awareness of my hands and what my hands were doing at all time and and they felt kind of heavy and just like uh why are they attached to my body I don't know I think maybe that was because I flapped my hands so much as a young child and even now I flap objects maybe like I felt like I needed to police them I needed to be aware of what my hands were doing all the time but when they couldn't do what was natural to me I was like I don't really know where to put them anymore you may feel like you're very physically withdrawn and kind of you know like make yourself small tuck yourself away you might not talk very much and some autistic people actually do deal with Selective mutism so they might physically find themselves unable to speak particularly when they're in a very overwhelming situation you might not talk about yourself very much and you may avoid talking about your interest or things you're very passionate about for fear of coming across as weird and too intense I was extremely closed off when I was in primary school I don't think I realized how so at the time because I felt like when I was at home I was quite an open and honest person and I didn't have that many boundaries and so I felt like oh surely when I'm at school people can see that people can see I'm quite an open person person you know they'll they'll get the vibe and then I'm actually just sat there like this and it's like well no wonder nobody wants to talk to you you might be quite stoic and you might edit out your emotions I often had a blank expression as I just said and my mom would say to me you should probably smile more when you're at school cuz she'd watch me walk in with a blank expression and it was kind of said in a way of like oh maybe people might like you more people might want to be your friend a bit more if you smiled I don't think it would have made a difference in fact I actually this one day I was like okay I'm going to smile at people because my mom has said it I think I was just walking around going like smiling all the time or something and then some girl came up to me and said why are you smiling you look like a rabbit and I was like okay not going to do that again blank mask back on activated cool you might not just edit out your smiles though you might edit out negative emotions as well and autistic shutdowns can be seen as kind of an internalization of an autistic meltdown so say you got really overwhelmed by loud noises say the fire alarm kept going off and it was overwhelming you maybe if you were at home that might have triggered a meltdown and you might have been you know crying and hyperventilating in a corner and letting the emotions out but because you feel threatened and you're in this public environment instead you internalize those emotions and you just kind of go quiet but that can be pretty damaging to your mental health particularly if it happens over and over again if you feel safe once you get home you may just kind of postpone that meltdown and have that meltdown once you get home that's quite a common thing that parents of autistic children describe like once their children get home they kind of explode and everything comes out but I think it can be pretty damaging internalizing those strong emotions like they have to go somewhere and it's almost like it gets redirected at yourself and I think this happening again and again could lead to autistic burnout which I've heard described as being like a prolonged shutdown I read a brilliant quote that described this sort of blank mask thing it's from a study called when the masks comes off mother's experiences of parenting a daughter with autism spectrum condition the use Spectrum condition it was by Anderson ETL and it was from 2020 the minute she got in the school door I remember Jane would immediately change you could physically see her change from being upset and angry to being almost like these mannequins I feel in a way that this form of masking can be seen as sort of the entry level masking or it might be for some people I certainly feel like it was this way for me it's maybe kind of a way to sort of break yourself down edit out everything that's there so you can stop again and build yourself up as somebody who is more socially acceptable number two closely connected to the blank maskk we have foring and people pleasing I'm sure this is very familiar to a lot of people here foring is another threat response you try and make yourself look appealing to whatever is threatening you if you for you always try to be nice you try not to upset anyone you push down your own needs and you put whoever you're interacting with needs ahead of yours you become kind of passive and you might smile all the time until your face hurts to kind of reassure the people around you that everything's okay and you're okay you're being as inoffensive as possible to try and gain approval or just not get disapproval there was a really interesting study from 2021 where they got 17 autistic people to have conversations with strangers and they filmed them and then they asked the autistic people after this interaction to watch back the video and point out the different ways in which they were masking during this interaction I thought that was a really cool idea but in that study described a few different categories of camouflaging Behavior quite a few of them I feel fall under this heading of the foring and people pleasing the first was innocuous socializing so innocuous meaning not likely to offend or cause hostility this involved mirroring so copying the other person in some way so when you're talking to somebody you might find yourself kind of copying that person's body language or the mannerisms that they have or you might even adopt their accent a little bit basically you're making decisions on how you'll present yourself based on what you think they'll approve on so you kind of well if you're doing that then you must be okay with that sort of action so I'll do that as well sort of thing you might Force eye contact if you think it's reassuring for the other person even if it's difficult for you you might find yourself smiling a lot as my mom recommended so you don't look stoic and you don't scare off the other person with your Moody resting autism face you might kind of laugh a lot at what they say in order to give a bit of speaker support and you might laugh a lot after what you've said as well I'm not sure my laughing is always particularly appropriate I get a lot of comments of people saying they find me a bit annoying because I'm giggling and things like that I think it's just kind of ingrained in the way I interact now as a way to show people like look I come in peace I don't know somewhere in my brain I've connected that laughing happens when social situations are going well so if I laugh then that must mean it's going well or I'm going to manifest that the discussion is going well or I can even maybe like reassure the other person that I like them like look I'm finding you funny because I know how stressful social situations can be and I'm kind of projecting onto them and I want them to feel okay because I know how much social situations sometimes don't make me feel okay I just always want everyone around me to feel okay so desperately but I remember at school I would laugh a lot I felt like I just sat there and laughed all day I just like like oh my God please don't bully me I kind of guess sometimes I I laugh just just general like speaker support it doesn't necessarily have to be because someone's funny it's just like H I'm here human and I can make this sound from my mouth that humans make when they talk to each other I don't know a lot of the people in the study said they centered and kind of deferred to the person they were talking to so they kind of like took the attention off themselves and they put it on their social Partners instead 82% of them said they asked the other person a lot of questions and I remember being in kind of my late teens when I discovered that asking people's questions was just a great way to make yourself look like you knew what the hell you were doing socializing I can remember thinking like hey I've got quite good at the socializing thing all you have to do is ask people questions and so now I always do this I pre-planned questions and it's great as long as you don't run out of questions but like people like talking about themselves they like to be asked things it makes them feel nice it makes them feel special I like to make other people feel happier and then you don't get asked too much about yourself and there's no risk of you revealing anything a bit too autistic I use questions as kind of like a shield like deflecting people's attention from me but what about you what about you let's talk about you over half of the 17 autistic people spoke about guiding the conversation away from themselves and back to their social partner as well and whatever the person they were talking to was interested in rather than their own interests this can be because I suppose talking about our own interests can make us look rather autistic I've definitely had many times where the intensity of my passion has made people bemused you might feel like you often let other people guide the topic of conversation I really love it when you talk to somebody who's like that right kind of extrovert who's not too overbearing and overwhelming and it's like a nice warm person but they just they'll talk and they'll just carry the whole thing for you oh it's Blissful sometimes the people in the study discussed being agreeable respectful cooperative and avoiding confrontation or complaints so like say you're in a room that's much too bright for instance you might not complain about that to the person you're speaking with I think I certainly realized very early on that the way I felt about sensory things in my environment was a bit strange I didn't realize that my senses were different exactly but I realized that I complained a lot that's how I felt like I'm quite negative about my environment particularly and I got that feedback you know like I'm being negative I use dramatic language to describe things like I'll say that's attacking me or that's killing me or that's absolutely awful which people felt were like inappropriate language Ed to describe the situation so I learned kind of n just don't do that just don't don't speak up about those things and I actually think it can get to a point where you're so used to telling yourself that you know that feeling isn't valid that you actually can't listen to negative Sensations in your own body anymore I feel like my teens was just me feeling like a blob of awful and I couldn't tell where it was coming from it was just like everything equals bad you may be overly apologetic you may say sorry all the time you may desperately seek the approval of your conversation partner I do this all the time like people like I'm like why do you care so much about what that random person thinks of you but for some reason in the moment I often desperately do and this can make as pretty vulnerable because not everybody deserves that again foring can be quite an instinctive or subconsciously adopted type of masking for me I feel like it's just so deeply ingrained now if I just walk out of the house and in public it's like Boop that mask comes on without my permission and throughout my life I've spoken about this before how I would think like just be yourself and social situations I'd really beat myself up why are you agreeing with things you don't agree with why are you letting people kind of walk over you when that's not your personality you're actually quite an assertive opinionated person why can't you allow yourself to be a bit more like that in public it felt dishonest why does my personality seemed to just like leave my body abdicate goodbye it frustrated me and I felt like it made me actually come across worse socially sometimes because you just seem like you've not really got much going on upstairs you're just like uh yes great everyone's wonderful I'm the worst I'm just going to sit here and smile and Nod and it's not like always the most attractive way to be and it feels very connected to low self-esteem as well I don't know whether other people can relate to that you're always putting the other person that you're talking to above you and you feel like them feeling happy with the interaction and feeling content while they're interacting with you is the most important thing way more important than you yourself feeling content and comfortable in the situation and that's just not true like they they aren't more important than you you and it's really kind of sad that a lot of us have that response it's not your job to keep everyone in the world happy and it's not your job to make sure everyone that you ever speak to is happy so the last two types of masking are kind of more conscious types of masking so you've kind of like made the decision to try and be better socially number three you might use compensation strategies so these might be steps that you actively take to learn more about socializing and how to be better and gain social skills I just think for a lot of autistic people it doesn't come instin ly it doesn't come intuitively but we can be quite good at learning so you might watch TV or read books and analyze the dialogue and that might inform how you go out and interact with other people in the world you might actually look up YouTube videos or read books about how to socialize I said this before but I always used to think I should really read that How to Win Friends and Influence People book I've never read it but I really probably should at some point cuz I've not been winning that many friends and influencing that many people in my life you might practice facial expressions or your body language in the mirror you might watch people in real life and take mental notes you might hear someone say a phrase that you like and be like well that's going to be my catchphrase from now on and feel like that's a very conscious decision that you've made in your mind you may memorize scripts and try and think of all the different possibilities and how you would respond to each thing I definitely script phone calls and as I say I do write out questions before I know I'm going to have to have a social interaction we may have to actively seek out information about socializing in a way that most people don't have to number four we have extroverted masking this is another term that I read and thought yes I know exactly what you're talking about and this tried to ruin my life I'd say this is kind of on the opposite end of the scale from a blank mask this is not scientific this is just me putting my arms in the air and making a scale that I've just made up 5 minutes ago but I feel like yeah blank mask at one end extroverted masking at the other end it's like not passive masking it's masking that requires a lot of sustained effort and is highly highly exhausting and definitely for me personally this is what is most likely to to plummet me into autistic burnout and basically you pretend to be extroverted you push push push against your natural nature and you try and Win Friends and Influence People you might feel like you're playing a character you might feel like you've asked the world who do you want me to be and then you've decided to try and be that person you might use little bits of yourself and your actual personality underneath the mask if you can remember what bad is for example when I went to college I kind of felt like I rebranded myself it literally did feel like I was kind of mentally seeing myself as a brand I was into film making that had got quite a lot of approval from people at school people who were usually mean to me had come up to me and said wow you know the films you make are so good so I decided okay that can be my identity and I'd made one horror film trailer so I was like cool I'll make horror films then was I particularly massively interested in horror films kind of I just decided that that was going to be my personality and I was going to be outgoing and extroverted and I remember just having this image in my head of this like ideal person who was never shy and was always super confident the whole thing is is kind of similar to foring it was like okay what are people liked me for let me do more of that let me edit my behavior to make myself more palatable and pleasing to other people but to like an extreme extent you might change your physical appearance too when you're playing this character I won't leave the house when I haven't got makeup on because I feel like it kind of does some of the masking work for me when I was in college I had red lips every day and I wore a lot of bright colors and I just felt like it was a way to put across to people like I do have a soul probably kind of fighting the stoic autistic blank mask sort of thing like no look there is something going on in here even if I don't always have the energy to show it all over my face I am a person and I did strangely often find that people were quite nice to me on non-uniform days when I was in high school that sounds so ridiculous I think the way I dressed was kind of not how people expected because I was so withdrawn and kind of shut down and faded into the background seeing me in my own clothes was kind of strange I'd wear like faux leather jackets and like black boots and I don't know people just seem to find it kind of surprising like look she has a personality she's made some decisions she has kind of like a unique style that's interesting so yeah I think it's just kind of an easy way to do some of the work before I've even left the house and before I've become overwhelmed it's like oh look I'm here I am a person I am now personing today Paul Micha from autism from the inside has also spoken a bit about he used to have dreadlocks and and he kind of did this because it made people make assumptions about him that he was a certain sort of person that he was like a fun guy and I think he kind of said it made people come up to him more at parties and things like that and they kind of yeah just did some of the work for him in creating this Persona which I think is really interesting and I really like that example because it's obviously from a guy and we often see masking spoken about as being something that autistic women and autistic girls do more often but I think a lot of us mask some people will literally role playay and Method act you know on a daily basis that sounds really tiring if you're not autistic imagine like having to go into work every day and pretend to be someone else and have to monitor everything that you're doing and making sure it's all in character and is believable it's kind of sad in a way though because that masking kind of did work that was my most socially successful period of my life and of course there were still times where embarrassing things happened and people thought I was a bit odd and stuff like that but mostly I had a lot of friends and things were going really well but it was one of the hardest times of my life and that's really confusing oh okay everyone else was thinking things going really well and I was getting approval and thumbs up all the time but it was killing me like what what do you do with that information and I'm still not really sure what the answer is to that I've read that if you don't mask you kind of risk being ostracized by people around you but if you do mask then you're kind of practicing a self ostracization because you're saying like you're your true self who you are as a person is not good enough and the only way you're going to succeed is by being someone else and then if you know you do that and it does work to some extent and you get a approval from people that's just kind of reinforcing that same message that like your true self is not welcome here it can really mess with your sense of identity as well this is something I hear a lot from autistic people and maybe I don't know this is just my speculation but maybe it could be the reason why so many autistic people are kind of diagnosed with borderline personality disorder whether they actually do align with that diagnosis or whether that's the kind of a misdiagnosis they get before their autism diagnosis and one of the traits of borderline personality is feeling insecure about who you are with your sense of self changing significantly depending on who you are with I've spoken quite a bit on this channel about a theory of autism called monot tropism I'll leave a link to the video down below and I also have a video of me doing the mq the monotop ism questionnaire but it's significantly correlated with being autistic having this more sort of monotropic profile basically it's the idea that autistic Minds have a sort of natural tendency to focus on fewer things but at a higher intensity we have a sort of laser beam focus and so being in situations where we're forced to split our attention so for example example a noisy sensory environment like a dinner Hall where things are cluttering all the time and then also social situations which can feel very chaotic for us you know you're having to think about eye contact facial expression body language what you're saying what the other person is saying what the other person is doing with their face what does their tone mean those kind of environments can lead to something that's been called the monotropic split basically when we mask we're splitting our attention between all the different aspects of socializing in a way that's just not natural for us in order to make ourselves seem like we're like every everyone else that like we're polytropic is how you describe you know most neurotypical people or people who are not autistic I'll leave a link down below to the monot tropism do.org website which has a great page about it but yeah basically socializing takes a bit more processing power than we can handle sometimes and that leads to us feeling more exhausted and would explain why we have difficulties with things like maintaining employment a 2019 study of 164 autistic adults and they also looked at some people who were alistic not autistic as well but they found that masking was a risk marker for autistic people wanting to take their own lives so it is serious and it is pretty disgusting that fake disort of cringe think it's okay to laugh at these things I don't know most people have so little understanding of autism but we move we move we keep trying I will say there's a brilliant page on preventing burnout on the national autistic Society I'll leave it link down below but basically they recommend letting yourself be autistic one of the bullet points is acceptance and support interacting with others who could accept them for who they were without any need to mask or pretend especially finding other autistic people who could validate their experiences and offer information and emotional SL social support from lift experience and then also being autistic attending to autistic needs like stemming and spending time with intense interests and comfort items unmasking using autistic strengths or doing things in an autistic way and if you watch my video about monot tropism and you like that theory as much as I do I think it's a brilliant way to describe autism and I'm sure I'll be talking more about it soon but you can also think to yourself like how can I do this in a more monotropic way I think that really helps you to kind of like wrap your head around like what might be the most autistic way for me to do this and also just thinking like what's the easiest way for me to do this if you are someone who fawns and people pleases a lot as well try and be a little bit more selfish like just try and remember your own needs at least a tiny little bit of the day I made a video almost a year ago now about how masking feels from the inside so I'll leave that one linked if you haven't seen it I also have a video taking the cat queue the kind of masking questionnaire and I also got my partner to do it as well who's introverted and we had a video doing that together too so I'll leave all of that linked if you want two exclusive videos from me every month you can join my patreon there's quite a few up there already and there's also three podcast episodes for the second tier in op I do the podcast with my husband the most recent episode was us doing the mq the monot tropism questionnaire together and kind of talking about each of our answers it's an hour and a half of us going through it I'll definitely talk more about that here on the channel as well though in the future thank you so much for watching subscribe always forget to say subscribe if you want to subscribe subscribe don't turn notifications on they're annoying they'll pull your attention out of whatever you want to be deeply focused on it's not monot tropis and friendly [Music] bye [Music]