Published on 12, July, 2020
If anyone would like to share their experience with masking, or offer advice to anyone, or your opinions feel free to share it here. I would also be interested to hear from you guys, both NT's and ND's
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This is interesting. Thank you for starting off this thread. I'm going to read the replies slowly and digest.
Masking is the most puzzling aspect of all this to me. (And, of course I am still awaiting my assessment.) If that's all you've ever done and it's become your norm, how can you tell you're doing it? Am I doing it, even? How does it fit with those who experience social anxiety? I have so many questions...
It's odd, I don't fit in many social contexts for sure. I didn't play with other kids in primary. I wasn't afraid of them and I didn't dislike them, I just didn't get what they were doing - nothing interesting to me, for sure. I can't play ball games. I didn't like the sensations of slides and such. Role play had no interest for me. I'd rather be in doors drawing. I am socially a bit gauche sometimes, slow on the uptake of social cues and inclined to stick my foot in it when I don't mean to and there are quite a lot of jokes and small 'p' politics that float over my head and have to be explained to me by friends. But, from the age where friendship is based on one-to-one conversation (not small talk, but the stuff that matters) I have always had good friends. I find myself naturally hanging out with deep, tolerant, often unconventional personality types. I've often been socially indifferent, but never anxious. I just accept that I am a marmite personality - you get me or you don't.
That said, there are situations in which certain responses are required in this life - work etc, which I do find really rather tiring to guess at and produce.
So, I can't make my mind up whether I've just never bothered 'masking', because I can't be bothered much to try to fit where I obviously don't. Or whether, I have subconsciously to some extent in some situations.
How do you identify it? How do you know it's happening?
As a night-shifter having done rather a late one writing a few posts ~ I saw this and related muchly with what you stated about your childhood, and would love to answer your questions. But sleep must be attempted ~ so if you have anxiety issues masking is occurring, and perhaps check out the book GAMES PEOPLE PLAY - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS, by ERIC BERNE MD ~ or perhaps my most recent posting on the thread Hyperempathy about the joy of other peoples suffering and one-up-person-ship and all that.
Dawn said::-) Know that book well. We draw on the Parent/adult/child concept quite heavily in training
:-) When I did A-level Psychology and Sociology back 1990, a classmate loaned me a copy after I had gone on about all the social interaction patterns I had observed and asked about, but no one knew the answers, with either blank stairs as being the most common reaction, then the next most common was puzzled identification, then that it had always been this way and you just had to get on with it ~ then one person told me I was damned for noticing and walked off.
So twelve years later my classmate loaned me the book, and every single question about the patterns was answered. It took me but a few hours to read, and a few hours to do my PS homework asking, "What do Psychology and Sociology mean to you?"
My course tutor asked me to stay behind with my classmate, and told me that it was more the custom to write a Psychology Dissertation at the end of a university degree course ~ rather than at the beginning of an A-Level college course! And he wanted to know how my friend and I were so knowledgable about psychology and sociology. So I told him about the social patterns thing and having gotten into metaphysics aged 5, philosophy at 6 and theosophy 8, and my friend told him his father was a professor of psychology at a university.
With being somewhat familiar with GPP then, perhaps check out TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis, by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines ~ as it is basically the training manual to become qualified at TA, and a self development manual to become more balanced and presently aware.
:-) Know that book well. We draw on the Parent/adult/child concept quite heavily in training