Autistic camouflaging/masking paper

Thank you. I read with much interest.

Masking is a concept I've struggled with. I like to think that I just bumble about life being me and could not quite conceive of this "mask" I sometimes took off at the door. I cheerfully sat in my assessment and said I didn't think I did that.

But it seems masks are only sometimes stuff consciously done to fit it. I can see now it's also the alternative strategies used to navigate the social world; all the ones I thought everybody used before I learned NTs have other mysterious means of knowing what's going on around them and what to do with it. Doesn't mean you are necessarily 'play acting' your way through life, does it?

I realise this is a little researched area, but this makes clear now that 'masking' is a range of approaches, not all of them are conscious and not all of them involving a different face to the world as such.

I get it now. My strategies work, but they are hard work. No wonder I get tired.

I am sure that some of the strategies described in the paper are also used by neurotypicals in situations where they feel socially anxious. However, there are a number that are autistic-specific, and, of course, autistic people are socially anxious far more frequently. A much greater proportion of the strategizing employed by autistics is conscious and intellectually-based than is the case for neurotypicals. As you say, all this effort makes socialising disproportionately tiring for us.

Yes, 'intellectually-based' is the operative word. I am only just recently realising how hard I pull on my intellect to understand the needs of others and hit the right tone for them. 

For instance, I used to be a MET police trainer, dealing in some very delicate subject areas. I actually read up on body language to detect signs of distress in my students and would be consciously panning the room on the look out of those signs someone might not be coping.  But I thought all good trainers did this. It comes from a place of genuine me. I want them to learn. I am committed to the cause, but I want them to be emotionally safe in the process. So, not a mask as in pretence, but it was 'masking', in the sence that my logical strategy was hiding from me and everyone else, the deficit in picking up the paralinguistic cues which I now learn are innate and unconscious to others. Who knew? I'd also script in my head answers to common questions such that they could be received in the right spirit by the students.

I loved training, but was permanently knackered. I'm too old to do that on more than an occasional basis now. It would wipe me out.

Yes, 'intellectually-based' is the operative word. I am only just recently realising how hard I pull on my intellect to understand the needs of others and hit the right tone for them. 

For instance, I used to be a MET police trainer, dealing in some very delicate subject areas. I actually read up on body language to detect signs of distress in my students and would be consciously panning the room on the look out of those signs someone might not be coping.  But I thought all good trainers did this. It comes from a place of genuine me. I want them to learn. I am committed to the cause, but I want them to be emotionally safe in the process. So, not a mask as in pretence, but it was 'masking', in the sence that my logical strategy was hiding from me and everyone else, the deficit in picking up the paralinguistic cues which I now learn are innate and unconscious to others. Who knew? I'd also script in my head answers to common questions such that they could be received in the right spirit by the students.

I loved training, but was permanently knackered. I'm too old to do that on more than an occasional basis now. It would wipe me out.