 so you've come across what masking is and you hear about everyone saying how bad it is and how you should you should do all of the things that you do on your own around every single person in every single situation and you if they if they say anything about it you can say that they're ableist and they're bad and you know they shouldn't say that or they shouldn't do that or they've got some kind of internalised ableism whereby putting on the social masks is seen as a bad thing. Good day and welcome back to the Asperger's Growth YouTube channel with your host Mr Thomas Henley of course today we're going through another autism related video where I talk about shortly I'm actually managing to do it nowadays shortly on a topic around autism today the topic is masking. Is it bad? Is it not bad? What is it? We're going to go through that in this video and well thank you for sticking along so far even though it's been very minimal amount of time. Let's get into it. For the purposes of this video we are going to be referring to what is known as masking as autistic masking. I'm going to refer to masking as the act of changing one's outward behavior one's outward appearance in order to fit in to certain social groups or situations for example you can mask at work you can mask in a relationship you can mask on your own well maybe not on your own but you can mask in a lot of different areas of life in order to fit a certain social expert expectation autistic masking for all intents and purposes is the act of hiding your autism from the world from other people the issue is with for a lot of autistic people is that we do it all the time with our mom with our teacher with our friends with our partner we tend to mask because we don't feel like anyone can really love or like us because we are autistic very horrible difficult thing it's almost like drastically altering your personality for the benefit of other people they like you and so that you can feel socially validated and not alone the people who like you and socially validate you are validating a non-existent person someone who isn't autistic the the neurotypical version of yourself as it be and that's not a very good thing because there are a lot of things that autistic people do that are really really beneficial for their well-being in general for their sense of self for their confidence things like stimming things things like you know wearing sense you know clothes that aren't awful on your skin or staying out of social situations advocating for yourself there's a whole host of things that I can list but I know that you've not come here to get a list of things so we're going to talk about whether it's good or whether it's bad the other issue with autistic masking is it causes significant anxiety depression low self-confidence lack of emotional regulation and unfulfilled social and sensory needs that is a little bit of a list isn't it I'm going back on myself on that so you've come across what masking is and you you hear about everyone saying how bad it is and how you should you should do all of the things that you do on your own around every single person in every single situation and you if they if they say anything about it you can say that they're ableist and they're bad and you know they shouldn't say that or they shouldn't do that or they've got some kind of internalized ableism whereby putting on the social masks is seen as a bad thing I have a different opinion on this of course and this is why I'm making this video I think something called integrated masking is the way forward what is integrated masking you may ask well you probably will ask that because it's something that I've made up myself it's a term that I've made up to just describe the process of getting getting getting yourself together understanding who you are what autism is like for you how your interactions with other people really understanding who you are as a person through unmasking once you've unmasked you can look at yourself and you can decide which autistic traits you want to show to anyone in your life in any situation you can pick and choose what to what to show people I personally don't choose to stim in front of people I do stim but I I don't stim in a way that I would be comfortable doing so in public mostly just because of the looks that you get you tend to get a lot of attention from it and I know that shouldn't be something that that I that we advocate for other people to do but it's a very real thing that happens and maybe you don't want to be looked at when you're autistic and you're quite socially awkward like probably not the best thing and so I choose not to do that however I'm very I advocate very heavily on a regular basis my style of communication if people don't understand or work through my my style of communication or don't attempt in some way to kind of understand and reconcile with it and adapt then we're probably not going to get on I like to have my own way of communicating with people any other way seems a bit false it tends to be that I I mask the most when I meet people on the instance you know just maybe the first five ten minutes of talking if it goes further than that I tend to drop the mask a little bit I tend to talk about autism I tend to um steam a little bit more you know it's it's all about my own personal way of masking socially the thing is is that after a while once you've adjusted all of these masks that you know for for better or worse people do all the time at work with with friends with family with partners in in random club situations or drunk nights out you know like we all have a different mask that we put on with a different way of engaging with the world depending on our environment situation the people that are around us how comfortable we feel we need to try and incorporate our autistic selves into this into this mask the thing is is that once you once you get good at it once you get confident doing this you actually feel a lot more confident in yourself you feel more at one with the world you don't feel like you're faking things you don't you know you feel more posed and in control that that carries on in and out of social situations it's a very lovely thing to know that you're not hiding part of yourself from the world that you probably should show to the world and that's all about your personal preferences and things and what you want to show people and in what circumstances to do what we do also have to pay attention a little bit to the fact that social skills they're important we need social skills in every environment to make well most in most of the time to be successful dating and interpersonal relationships the workplace and education networking even just work doing the job that requires the least amount of communication with other people you're still communicating with somebody someone's employing you someone's working for you you're always around situations where you need to be good at socializing so that we can pull up these inherent difficulties that that we have generally in socializing so we stand a bit bit better of a chance in the world we have one of the worst employment statistics that you can you can find i think it's about 22 percent in full-time and part-time employment not sure about the full-time aspect of that but that's pretty apparent considering that i know a lot of autistic people can do really well in the workplace if they just had the adjustments and they just had the help to do so i've really struggled in that other aspect of things um in the past it's taken me quite a while to learn social skills to learn the emotional social skills that have helped me to get where i am today i used to be incredibly introverted shy i masked all the time when i got into my 20s i learned about autism i started to unmask perhaps i unmask too much and i was you know i i wasn't considerate of other people's feelings when i when i was speaking or or doing something or behaving learning these social skills allowed me to be more aware of them and make my own decision about things a lot of masking in most people's minds is social skills things things like making eye contact i i make eye contacts but i don't do as much as most people and i'm comfortable with that and i'm happy to make a little bit of eye contact to make the other person feel like i'm interested in them and make the other person feel like i'm listening but that's a personal choice and it's not something that many of you have to do you could wear shades all the time or you could just not make any eye contact and that's perfectly okay but we do live in a in a world and it's it's real life and that has impacts on your relationships and in all areas of your life so being able to learn those social skills and decide and feel confident in them integrate your autistic self into it and then put on you know the best show that you can do um when you talk to people and when you interact you know according to your own gauge of how successful that is that's a really great thing and it's really good and it may be stressful that's another element to it socializing the social anxiety the anxiety in general the sensory distress around in every single corner of this world you know there's a lot of things that can make you know normie masking not autistic masking just masking in general hard and a lot of this it's down to your own personal preference you don't have to do this all the time if you feel like you're you're in a social situation and you feel like you it's draining all of your energy then stop then go do something else or go take a breather you know it doesn't have to be as clean-cut as no masking or always masking everything all the time in creating this fictional character it can be a lot more realistic and can be a lot more personalized for you and if you would prefer to unmask fully in public and not learn the social skills and and do things of that nature that's your choice i don't think it's the best choice i think it's good to learn those skills it's good to mask to a certain degree depending on your situation but that's my that's my choice i guess it's really what way way you want to go with this but make sure in any case when you're putting on a mask when you're changing your outward behavior presentation make sure that it's still you you know it it doesn't have to be another person you don't have to copy people it can still be you and just because it's a mask doesn't mean that you're being fake it's just something that everybody does in all such circumstances in different circumstances and that's okay a little bit harder for us but it's okay i do want to end this video by saying that no i am not saying blanket term autistic masking is bad that's not what i'm saying i'm just saying there's a way to go around it and there's a way to integrate yourself into society and integrate your autistic self into those masks that you put on in those different circumstances so i know this has been a very word heavy sort of um conceptual theorizing kind of video so i hope you have enjoyed it and please if you have any questions on this just just ask and give your own opinion on this i i'm not the the holder of all autism truths you know perhaps there's something that you don't agree with i want to hear about it something that i'm going to agree with you and i definitely won't be looking at it if it's very aggressive or very sort of um sarcastic or anything of that nature but i will take a glance of it if it's not so i hope you have enjoyed today's video make sure to subscribe make sure to to go over to instagram check out my posts you can see all of the written versions of my videos up on there all the time and you can also stay in stay in touch with the kind of stuff that i'm doing in public speaking and things of that nature thank you very much for watching and i'll see you in another episode of asperger's growth it's going to say the four-deity podcast it's coming soon by the way very soon hopefully see you later folks