Do you Internalise or Mask or both ?

And my Nan!

Turtle said:

What's ironic about her superiority complex i.e material possessions,  bigger house, car etc is that it is all down to her previous and current partners financial security and solvency. She has only ever had a low-paying, unskilled, part-time job and if single, would be in a council flat and probably using a food bank which is, low and behold, the very kind of people she looks down on with Daily-Mail, fueled hypocrisy. 

OMG - you know my sister! 

Haha, yes, we have a family member we all call Mrs Bucket. What's ironic about her superiority complex i.e material possessions,  bigger house, car etc is that it is all down to her previous and current partners financial security and solvency. She has only ever had a low-paying, unskilled, part-time job and if single, would be in a council flat and probably using a food bank which is, low and behold, the very kind of people she looks down on with Daily-Mail, fueled hypocrisy. 

I guess masking is what spiritual people would call ' The Ego ' although I am still very much uncertain  as to whether those of us with neurodiversity are better placed to eradicating the ego or hampered by it. I did watch an interesting conversation between Dr Gabor Mate ( Trauma & addiction specialist and writer on ASD ) and Adyashanti ( spiritual teacher ) which was very interesting. 

I think as I've gotten older I do primarily mask but I definitely masked when I was young because I had to learn to protect myself from people at school, at that time it was about 50/50 but now more like 90/10 in favour masking.

When I was a kid I was extremely quiet I never really spoke unless I was specifically spoken too and I got a lot of stick from my family because of it, they're all NT I'm the first in my family. They always used to get angry or annoyed because i wasn't social with them, didn't have interest in them in terms of what they did and actively trying to not be around people. Looking back I was pretty much forced to be 'normal' and it's had a detrimental effect of my mental health.

Masking I'd say is more effort on a day to do because you are acting to an insane level of detail but if you can find a path in life where you don't need to and you have people that understand and are comfortable with you being you, and you are comfortable being yourself around them too I imagine that's the only way to live life of minimal burnout as an autistic person.

I read too that females generally are better at/mask more than males and I would say it's plausible but at the same time I'm so "good" at masking that I didn't get diagnosed until I was 22 and that was only because I just could carry on living the way I was living. When I was doing all my research into autism before my diagnosis I was looking at adult male/female autistic traits which buy n' large are the same but I definitely lean to the more female ends of the spectrum. I'd probably that on average females learn to mask at younger age and as a result they get better because they have more time but there will alway be outliers like me that learned early on in life I'm not like everyone else and the people that are different always get bullied and shunned so I better stop being like that so that doesn't happen to me. 

I would tend to agree with that, I do love my kids but just feel like a failure as a parent all the time.

If I had my time over I probably shouldn't have got married or bought a house or had a child - the stress and responsibility is more than I can take - I should have just done my nerdy, specialist jobs, earned loads of cash and bought all the toys I wanted.- like a DeTomaso Pantera.

A step further than that, I probably might have done well in a place where they looked after me - just let me build models and play with trains. 

That's great ! So pleased you're reaching out and being open. It's nice to hear that actually. Thanks. 

It's good advice. I have thought about that for a long time and got nowhere but somehow been drawn back to thinking about this reply at various points today. What would you have done differently ? 

I think I do both, but mostly I internalise. It's bad! I've spent most of my life keeping all my feelings stuck inside and ruminating on everything because I couldn't explain to anyone. The longer you live like that, the harder it is to let it out.

I don't like masking. I hate pretending to be someone I'm not. I can't convincingly act cheery and friendly when I'm not feeling it. I'm bad at acting, especially if I'm tired/anxious/stressed.

However I do make an effort to be polite by doing friendly smiling, because when I was younger I always got told off for not smiling and I don't want to be considered rude. It might be a friendly smile into thin air, as a sort of compromise if I don't feel like doing eye contact. (I only just realised that I do this, it must look weird.)

I'm glad you're thicker-skinned!

I'm working on it. I was abused as a child and bullied throughout my entire life, and the build-up of so many people being nasty to me has really affected my self-esteem.

I do both. Internalizing aggravates my anxiety, and masking wipes me out. I'm not just hiding my disinterest of what others are saying, not just trying to fit in socially. I'm masking certain behaviours, such as stimming and random sounds. I'm also very childlike, so have to hide that in public and at work. I have to relive my day, analyse, find faults, stress over them and get angry with myself for not meeting my standards. Then I have to predict all the conversations I may have the following day. I'm not surprised that the only thing I want to do is sleep.

I'm with you there.

I was like that as a child. Now, I'm thicker-skinned.

Internalising is more than just keeping it all inside imho - it's also getting really affected by nasty things people say to you, ruminating on them and letting them affect your self-esteem. 

Basically keeping it all inside.

What's internalising?

Here, in Rural Ireland, even men aren't allowed to be eccentric. We're branded 'Not Wise'.

I can mask up to a certain level. But thinking of issues, such as the things my cleaner told her gran did and said, would make me giddy.

Probably, but I think the flipside of this is that NT people often then begin to normalise our often very stressful traits by saying things like "everyone is a bit autistic" or other minimalising things like that.

I've just realised I'm still calling you Hook! And you've changed your name to Michelle.

I agree with you. It's possible that there is less need for NTs to sustain this kind of behaviour because the 'threats' they face in most environments are less pronounced. They can usually feel comfortable in an environment after a relatively shorter period of time. It's only when new people enter a situation that some of them revert to putting on a false persona or masking in some way  

I'm sure that for many autistic people the need to mask is much greater because we rarely feel comfortable in the NT environments we have to navigate and survive in, so we are never allowed to drop the masks we create.

I can relate very much to what you say. I do it all the time too, sometimes without knowing. I change my voice, sometimes in very subtle ways, sometimes dramatically; I change my physicality too—and all as an adaptive reaction to the situation I find myself in and/or in the people I am with. 

What I'm not convinced of, though, is that it's a phenomenon unique to autistic people. It may be that it is certainly more pronounced in autistic people, but I would question whether it is unique to us.

My thought is that everyone does it to some degree, whereas, for some of us, like you and I, we do it a lot and for longer periods.

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