.webp)
Key Takeaways
- Masking is a behavior many autistic people adopt to camouflage autistic traits, often to avoid discrimination and social rejection or to access opportunities.
- Masking can contribute to poorer mental health outcomes in autistic individuals.
- Masking intersects with social identities, particularly marginalized identities, in nuanced ways.
- Unmasking in certain environments can reduce the toll masking takes on autistic people, but for many reasons, it is not always an option.
- Masking both protects autistic individuals’ safety as well as hurts our long-term well-being—it’s a complicated experience, and each autistic individual may have their own relationship with it.
What is autistic masking?
Masking is the practice of concealing autistic traits and performing neurotypical behaviors. Autistic people mask for many reasons, often to avoid mistreatment and potentially traumatic experiences. Autistic individuals mask to different extents, and though masking is common among autistic people, not all of us mask. Masking can be intentional or done unconsciously. Many autistic individuals experience a mixture of both. Masking is a complex, highly variable behavior that looks and feels different across individuals.
Masking, for many autistic people, is a necessary mechanism used to survive and seek advancement in a world built around neurotypical expectations. However, it can also have severe impacts on our wellbeing. Tightly managing our behaviors to cater to other people’s comfort can wear on our mental health.
Masking is a multifaceted part of many autistic individuals’ lives, and each autistic person may feel differently about masking’s role and meaning in their life. Understanding the reasons we mask and the impact of masking can allow us to connect more deeply with ourselves and better identify our needs. Gaining this understanding can also empower neurotypical individuals to better support autistic people in their lives.
Why do autistic individuals mask?
Autistic people mask for many reasons. In a world where neurotypical norms are the expectation, many of us mask to gain social acceptance. We might mask to avoid rejection, fit in, or even “pass” as neurotypical, which can help us avoid painful confrontations with stigma, discrimination, and bullying. We may also mask to avoid being singled out for our differences. By masking, we can avoid becoming the center of attention for things that are normal for us. This prevents us from having our autistic traits invalidated and treated as unusual or dramatic.
Masking is a way for us to spare ourselves experiences that are, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, traumatic. It allows us to move through our days with less friction from the external world, reducing the long-term psychological load of repeated rejection and mistreatment. We tend to learn to mask after we’ve already endured social trauma, in an effort to avoid retraumatization.
Additionally, masking is a strategy for educational and economic advancement. “Breaking” the unspoken social and behavioral rules we’re supposed to follow can threaten our upward mobility at work or school. We may receive poorer performance evaluations and harsher judgment in job interviews or networking settings. A UK study that surveyed autistic adults captures this fear. Respondents viewed masking as essential to getting hired as well as succeeding and developing professionally. Ultimately, masking is a way to play by the rules and move up social and career ladders, rather than get kicked off them.
For many, masking is both a habit and a strategy, in varying proportions. Among autistic people who mask, many learn to do so unconsciously. This is especially common among later-diagnosed autistic people, who may not realize their masking is an autistic behavior, or they may not understand how it fits into their larger experience as autistic people.
What do autistic masking behaviors look like?
Masking varies greatly across individuals and situations. Specific masking behaviors are often tailored to the communities an individual is a part of or specific scenarios. This is because the goal of masking is to camouflage autism and appear “typical,” and different spaces define “typical” in different ways.
Many masking behaviors are performances of neurotypical behaviors. A common example is intentionally making eye contact, even when it’s uncomfortable or distressing. Doing this involves close monitoring and modulation of eye contact, making sure it’s not too much or too little. Masking can also include performing specific facial expressions, mannerisms, and tones of voice, often mirroring those of whoever we are engaging with.
Masking can also involve planning things to say in advance, including responses to anticipated talking points. While masking, you may find yourself communicating in ways that feel unnatural and uncomfortable. For me, an autistic person who doesn’t have a strong natural drive to ask questions, this means I keep a mental list of questions I can ask in conversation to demonstrate that I’m engaged.
Putting on a neurotypical facade can also mean suppressing and concealing traits and behaviors associated with autism, like stimming. Or, masking could mean adapting stims that are more accepted by neurotypical people, like playing with our hair or shaking a leg while sitting.
It can look like downplaying interests in conversation that we worry seem unusual or too intense. Masking can also mean downplaying reactions and experiences connected to autism. We might conceal distress over sensory stimuli or deviations from the expected flow of events.
How does masking affect mental health outcomes?
While masking is a valuable survival strategy, it can present significant challenges to autistic people, especially when sustained over long periods. Research shows a relationship between masking and higher rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and there are many reasons this may be the case.
Close monitoring and manipulation of your own behaviors, facial expression, tone of voice, posture, and language is hard work. Maintaining this mask over days, months, or even years comes at great energetic cost. This can contribute to autistic burnout—the chronic state of fatigue and heightened stress that many of us find ourselves in as a result of navigating a world that routinely misunderstands and mistreats us.
When masking becomes automatic, or when we spend a great deal of our time masking, many autistic people may struggle with their sense of identity. It can be difficult to tease apart the version of ourselves we perform for others from who we really are after spending so much time wearing the mask. Sometimes, parts of the mask become parts of us, and it’s difficult to reconcile the feeling of loss for who we could have been if we had never pretended to be anyone else.
Wrestling for a sense of connection with ourselves can also lead to reduced self-esteem. If we feel we have to mask to be liked and accepted, what does that say about our true selves? It’s easy to feel bad about who we are when we feel forced to hide our true selves so often. We may wonder if others will like us for our authentic selves and whether we ourselves even like who we are at our core.
Masking can also present a barrier between autistic people and support. High-masking autistic individuals may be misdiagnosed when seeking help, or they may not get evaluated for autism in the first place. While a diagnosis isn’t necessary to access support, it can be incredibly meaningful for many autistic people, since receiving a diagnosis can validate the lifelong struggles we have faced. A diagnosis can also help us find resources specific to our experiences as autistic individuals, such as neurodiversity-affirming therapy.
How do social identities affect masking?
Masking is often credited as a reason autism is diagnosed more often in boys and men than in girls and women. Autistic women and girls face great pressure to mask. Compared to men, women are more often expected to inhabit social roles that require well-developed social dexterity and emotional intelligence. Women are seen as social leaders and mediators in our communities, and are positioned as primary emotional support systems for our children and partners, especially when our partners are men. The norm for female friendship is close-knit, intimate, and emotionally rich. While these ways of relating to others can feel fulfilling to autistic people, they often stand in contrast to our authentic emotional expressions and processing styles.
Girls receive messages about these social roles early in life, reinforced knowingly or otherwise by caretakers, peers, educators, and media. Autistic girls receive consistent feedback on their social performance; they are pushed to be poised, emotionally responsive, and malleable to expectations. Boys, in contrast, face less structured pressure around social behaviors. The attitude that “boys will be boys” persists, and boys are generally allowed more room to follow their whims. Our widespread, rigid cultural expectations for girls exist in opposition to authentic autistic self-expression that leads many autistic girls to start crafting their masks young.
In their 2020 paper, Hull et al. posit that autistic women present with different outward traits and behaviors than autistic men. The female autistic phenotype, as Hull et al. term this phenomenon, is shaped by masking, and aligns less closely with the diagnostic criteria for autism. They conclude that autism may not be more common in men and boys, but rather it’s underdiagnosed in women and girls.
It’s worth noting that little research around this phenomenon delves into the experiences of nonbinary autistic individuals, despite nonbinary people’s overrepresentation among the autistic population. Nonbinary autistic individuals have complex, layered experiences at the intersections of gender, autism, and social performance that warrant a much larger, more nuanced conversation around gender and masking.
In this vein, while much research seems to support the idea that women mask at a higher rate than men, some researchers push back on the tendency towards stereotyping that emerges from the construction of a female autistic phenotype. While there certainly seems to be a relationship between gender and masking––or at least gender and outward presentations of autism––this is an area that requires further, more nuanced research.
To this end, autistic psychologist Dr. Amy Pearson points out the layered experiences that autistic people across marginalized identities have with masking; in her piece “Beyond Masking and Towards Supporting Autistic Authenticity,” she writes, “Many other aspects of our identities (e.g., our race or ethnicity, our sexualities, our professions) are under scrutiny from people in different social groups. For autistic people who experience stigma in relation to multiple (or intersecting, Crenshaw, 2017) aspects of identity, what we call the “mask” might include many masks, or many overlapping and intersecting ways of trying to stay safe in a world that treats you badly.”
These many masks may exist in cohesion or in conflict with each other, to varying degrees. For multiply marginalized people, masking can be a deeply layered experience, and its complexity warrants more discussion than it’s received from researchers and advocates.
What is unmasking?
Unmasking is increasingly offered as a recommendation to improve autistic quality of life and mitigate autistic burnout. With the growth of the neurodiversity movement and the strengths-based approach to autism has come a growing desire to embrace autistic traits; unmasking is a part of this framework’s praxis.
The goal of unmasking is for us autistic people to be our authentic selves more often, reducing the fatigue of continually performing neurotypical behavior. By spending more time living as our true selves, we can grow to feel more comfortable with who we are. We may even heal some of the wounds we’ve received from existing authentically earlier in life and from the routine performance of a less-genuine version of ourselves.
However, unmasking isn’t as simple as flipping a switch, and it comes with its own suite of challenges. For some autistic individuals, it is difficult to “turn off” masking that’s become so automatic over the years. This can be especially true for later-diagnosed autistic adults, who may struggle to discern their authentic self from the mask, and may find that parts of the mask now feel a part of their sense of self. The accessibility of unmasking varies from person to person, and some find it easier after receiving a diagnosis and coming to understand their masking in a new light.
Another reason autistic people might not be able to unmask is safety. We mask for a reason, and no amount of supportive language nor encouragement from advocates and practitioners will change the conditions that led us to start masking in the first place. Masking is a protective mechanism against trauma and, sometimes, physical danger. For many of us, it has a place in our lives.
The conversation around unmasking doesn’t have to be binary. Unmasking in situations where it is accessible and safer can greatly benefit our well-being, but in other circumstances, masking remains necessary. Sometimes, we can afford to unmask certain traits and not others—which may feel more achievable than trying to unmask completely. Unmasking will mean something different to each individual. Unmasking is a choice, including when you choose to unmask, and how far back you peel the mask.
Getting support with masking
As with many conversations around autism, the discourse around masking invokes rightful criticism of the medical model of disability––the framework that treats disability as a series of inherent deficits rather than the result of a culture that doesn’t accommodate disabled people. Masking can be treated as something harmful that, yes, originates from the routine mistreatment of autistic people, but is ultimately in our power to cast aside. This is a reductive look at a complicated facet of autistic experience, something between an albatross and a lifeline.
For the neurotypical people in our lives, understanding why we mask and the toll it can take on us is an essential step towards making real space for autistic people, and supporting those of us who do want to unmask.
Each autistic person has their own relationship with masking, which may change as they move through life. Prosper Health can help autistic individuals unpack what masking means to each of us and process the impacts it has had on our lives. Prosper Health therapists employ a strengths-based approach to neurodiversity, and helping autistic individuals identify the inherent value of autistic traits.
These approaches can help us with the decision to unmask, empowering us to be our authentic selves in more aspects of our lives.
Related Posts
Meltdowns in Autistic Adults: Why They Happen, What They’re Like, and How to Live with Them
“Meltdown” is not a term often associated with adult life, but for many autistic adults, meltdowns are a reality. For us, meltdowns are not what you might picture at first: an inconsolable child, acting out over not getting what they want; they’re more like the release valve on a neurobiological pressure cooker.
Autistic Stimming: A Look Past the Stereotypes
Stimming, shorthand for self-stimulatory behavior, is a set of self-regulating behaviors commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder. Stimming can involve a wide variety of behaviors that stimulate one’s own senses, such as moving the body, playing with objects, or making vocalizations. Stimming, like many autistic behaviors, has been stigmatized, and often regarded as a symptom to be reduced by treatment. However, stimming is a normal, often harmless reality of autistic life, one that helps us regulate our senses and engage with the world more authentically.
Sensory Overload in Autistic Adults
Sensory processing differences–sometimes referred to as sensory processing disorder–can significantly impact emotion regulation, daily functioning and overall well-being. Sensory overload occurs when the nervous system is overwhelmed with more sensory input than it can process, a common experience for autistic adults. Research psychologist, Dr. MacLennan, and her colleagues report that approximately 9 out of every 10 autistic adults in their research experience sensory processing differences. Considering the wide-ranging and profound effects of sensory processing differences, it is crucial to understand the nature of sensory overload, its impact on the nervous system, and strategies for managing sensory differences.
Sensory overload can present as a physical, cognitive or emotional response because these experiences overlap. For example, sensory overload may look like irritability, anxiety, difficulty concentrating or fatigue. When it becomes too intense, the body may have a fight or flight response, leading to a meltdown or shutdown while your body is trying to protect you from danger. Developing sensory self-care strategies is vital to your well-being and mental health because sensory overload can contribute to anxiety, stress, fatigue and further impact any existing mental health difficulties.
The senses and their role in sensory processing
While most are familiar with the five senses, visual (sight), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and tactile (touch), many are unfamiliar with other senses that play a crucial role in sensory processing. These include the lesser-known vestibular (balance), proprioceptive (position), and interoceptive (internal) senses. These three are particularly significant to autistic people. The vestibular system is in the inner ear, and it helps with balance by sensing the orientation of your head in space. It can be activated through sensory input such as rocking or spinning. Proprioception is our innate sense of our body’s position in space. It’s activated by anything that creates pressure on the joints, such as carrying heavy objects, pushing or pulling. Interoception refers to our internal body sensations such as hunger, thirst or needing to use the bathroom. Individuals with hyposensitivity to interoception may struggle to access these internal cues. These lesser-known senses are incredibly important in sensory processing and nervous system regulation.
