 Good day everybody and welcome back to my channel. My name is Thomas Henley and I make a lot of autism, mental health related content. And today we're going to be talking about the reality of autistic masking. What is it really? How can we understand what masking is? What are the components of social camouflage which little tidbit masking is a part of? But we're also going to look at some of the advantages that you might see from masking on a daily basis, as well as some of the very real disadvantages to masking. So let's get into it. What is masking? Masking is a large component of social camouflage, but it's often used as a kind of catch all term for all elements of social camouflage. It's usually in the context of autism, although I have heard some people using it in the context of ADHD. And one of the important things to note about this is the very, very common misconception that people have. It's not the same as shifting your behavior in different environments like neurotypicals would do, non-autistic people would do. We call this term neurotypical shifting because it's not autistic masking, it's not social camouflage. It's the differences that we have in different social contexts. And that's something that goes across every single human being. So whenever you hear the term masking and why it's bad, you're thinking, oh, I'm pretty sure that I put on a mask in a lot of different situations. It's a very, very different thing. What is considered to be masking can be very, very subjective. Depending on who you talk to, a lot of people have different ideas of what is considered to be masking, but it does have a definable term. So let's go into the aspects of social camouflage. When we talk about masking, we're generally talking about social camouflage in its entirety. We're not particularly talking about the actual aspects that masking covers. We're talking about this umbrella term for three different elements, masking, assimilation, and compensation. It's used primarily to hide the social differences and presentations of autism. There are a lot of different ways that we can do this, a lot of reasons why we might do this, a lot of factors that contribute to us being a more highly masking person than perhaps the neighbor next door, the autistic neighbor next door. So let's go into masking. Masking is hiding autistic traits, as well as monitoring and changing your body language to reach a desired outcome, usually to fit in, usually to be perceived in a positive light. It's weird talking about masking because in a sense, it does come across as being fake, as being manipulative in some way. But a lot of the times masking is done to compensate for some level of difference that we may have, maybe in terms of the medical context, we might think, oh, they're compensating for the disadvantages, the social deficits that they might have within the context of a normal social situation, which kind of makes sense. So it's not necessarily good or bad. It's not necessarily done in a very hurtful kind of manipulative way so that you can hide from people and make sure that you craft how you look to people in a very false way for personal gain. It can be sort of seen by that, but a lot of the time it is done out of necessity, especially during childhood. So what does this look like monitoring changing your body language? When I say body language, I'm talking about facial expressions, different facial expressions that we do on a daily basis, but it can also generally just just be body language. So it could be the way that you're sitting, what you're looking at, but perhaps if you're making eye contact, it can also be things related to your vocal tonality. Are you changing the way that you speak in order to appear less autistic? So for example, we have this concept of vocal monotony. A lot of autistic people seem to have a very flat tone to their voice. They might talk like this all the time, whereas usually when you're expressing something, most people, non-autistic people, they have some level of emotion that's going into what they say. They're changing the cadence of what they say, the tone of what they say, in order to express a certain feeling or change the meaning of what they said. For example, if you said, are you okay? It's a bit accusatory, it's a bit like aggressive, as opposed to are you okay? There's differences in that vocal tonality which changes the intention of what's being said. When you are hyper-focused on changing these different elements, it can cause you to become a little bit detached from the situation that you're in, make you feel a bit false. It can actually require a lot of energy to actually do. We will go into that in terms of the negatives very, very soon. I think there's another aspect of masking which I haven't talked about as well, which can be this idea of flat effects. Flat effects, similar to vocal tonality, it's something that autistic people don't generally tend to do as much as neurotypicals. We do do it, some people do, some people just do it naturally, some people don't. It's basically this idea that we don't necessarily express how we feel on our face. One of the best examples of this is if we are feeling really, really sad, but we have this flat effects, so our face just looks normal when we're speaking about something really horrific, or we might have a very flat monotone kind of voice when we're talking about this very traumatic and perhaps quite upsetting thing. But it comes across as not being so traumatic, like saddening bad. The second aspect of social camouflage is assimilation. It's basically the idea of copying interests and behaviors from other people and conforming to social norms. This is something that a lot of people do just generally, especially during teenagehood. But for autistic people, we can often hide a lot of the interest that we have for fear of social rejection. We can hide a lot of the things that we enjoy to do. We can hide the way that we generally think about life, the values, the opinions, the meaning behind the things that we do from other people if it doesn't particularly fit into a certain social group. It's not fun either, like hiding what you are, what you enjoy, doing things that other people enjoy just to fit into a group. But let's go on to the third one, third aspect of social camouflage, which is compensation. And this is, it's kind of a little bit similar to masking, but it's the idea of mirroring body language and vocal tonality, facial expressions, in order to build rapport. And this can be done, interestingly, consciously or unconsciously. So this means that when you're speaking to somebody, you may mirror how they're speaking to you, mirror the energy that they're putting out, if it be, mirror the things that they're talking about, the reactions that they have, the general attitude that they might have towards certain things. It's a very interesting one because quite often it can kind of come across as being like too faced to a lot of people, because depending on who you are talking to, you may be unconsciously or consciously mirroring that person and then going to someone else and that they're being a completely different person then you're mirroring exactly how they're interacting with you. One of the key parts of that is that it can be conscious or unconscious. Consciously, you may be wanting to build rapport. This is something that is actually done by a lot of psychotherapists when they're trying to build rapport, trying to connect a little bit more with the people that they are helping. It can also be done unconsciously. So it can just be something that you learn to do. Over time, you become this kind of emotional sponge, this mirror, whereby you just naturally mirror the energy of the person that you're speaking to. So those are the three aspects we have. Masking, assimilation and compensation. Let's go into the reasons to why we camouflage. Why do people do it? One of the main ones is making friends and fitting in. Despite the fact that autism is kind of this characterization that most people would assume is quite a lonely thing, quite like a diagnosis where the autistic person doesn't particularly want to spend a lot of time with people, that they don't value social connection, that they don't value having a friend group and having people to talk to and socialize with. That's not true. We might have a little bit less of a social battery in terms of our bandwidth for having those interactions, but it's still something that is very enriching to us. It's still something that does have a positive impact on our mood. It helps us feel validated socially, which is, you know, validation is kind of this weird word that's been changed wholly into something that's negative. But one of the reasons why we do socialize is because we want to be validated by another person. It's why we share things with other people. It's one of the reasons, of course. There's many reasons. And there's also this feeling of fitting in, especially within a community. If you're a part of a community and you really value it and it's a place that you spend a lot of time in, it's going to be in your eyes beneficial to be able to get on with just people in general, whether it's group settings, where it's like one to one, where it's like transient conversations that you have with people within your local area, or within like a group, a community group. These are all reasons to camouflage. One of the main things that I think comes up a lot specifically at school during teenage hood is blending in and avoiding negative experiences with others. Now we know from the statistics that a lot of autistic people, we struggle a lot with the more negative side of life. We have a lot of instances of bullying, discrimination, essay, a lot of harmful experiences with people, you know, we have things like make crime where people take advantage of advantage of us in order to get some kind of gain from from being kind of like a false relationship with us. There's a lot of things that can happen to autistic people much more than perhaps the general population would. And so being able to avoid sticking out, being able to avoid kind of painting a target on yourself by being different, interacting different, presenting different, we try to mask that for safety reasons. We might not want to be picked out by bullies as being someone who can, you know, they can just walk all over. So yeah, we have a lot of negative experiences in life. If we manage to mask the fact that we are different, it's going to help us avoid those situations a lot more, especially during or in those kind of closed social environments, things like work, things like school, the places where you're around people on a regular basis, the kind of the same people, and you don't have choice over interacting with them. You just kind of put in this scenario, this environment. And if things happen and you don't get on with people, it's on both of you or on the workplace to try and make that situation better. It doesn't always happen that way. And it can lead to sometimes workplace bullying as well. So there's some of the reasons why we would want to blend in. There is an aspect of achieving success. Even in jobs that aren't solely social focused, like you can imagine a really highly social focused job like sales, you know, there's a lot of social components to that which go into helping you achieve in the workplace. But there's also just general social dynamics, general workplace politics that interplay into how well you do in a workplace is not always based on how good you are at the job. It might be based on how well you get on with your boss, how well you get on with the other team members. There's little little bits of social components that come in here that really do matter when it comes to progressing through the workforce. Even even if you're a self-employed individual, it might be about building relationships with other businesses. It might be about, you know, there's so many different aspects to work, even if it's not this highly like social focused job, which definitely are benefited from adopting more of a non-autistic way of being aka masking. There's also internalized ableism. And this is something that has become more apparent over time just from looking online, getting questions from people. A lot of people feel like they're behind in life, that they're not achieving certain goals that they should do. We have a lot of things on social media, a lot of stuff to do with hustle culture, making us feel like we need to rush and we need to constantly work and work and work. And the thing is is that for a lot of us, if we're undiagnosed and we just learn about autism, a lot of people do have negative connotations to the way that autistic people interact. Even for yourself, you may find that a lot of the stuff that you do, you stop yourself from doing it because you feel like it's weird. You feel like you shouldn't be doing it. You feel that it's bad. You feel, you know, you generally feel negatively about your autistic expression. And so you try to rein it back. This is one of the more pernicious sides of masking because this has an impact on a daily basis at any point during the day because you're always with yourself. This is always this self-talk in the back of your head, you know, stop stimming, you're being weird. Make sure that you engage with this social event because if you don't engage with it, you're not being social and that's a bad thing. You haven't interacted in a week and although you have had a lot of stuff on and a lot of stress, a lot of low mental health, you should still go because that's what people do on the weekend, people socialize. You know, there's all of these different thoughts that come in from this idea of internalized ableism, this belief that you as a disabled person, you as an autistic person are not good enough and you need to improve and you need to become less autistic. That's a really big factor when it comes to camouflaging. The last one which I want to pay a little bit of attention to is dating, especially if you are dating people who aren't autistic as an autistic person yourself. You know, there is a lot of aspects of indirect communication that go along with like the neurotypical idea of dating, the neurotypical idea of flirting, a lot of these different aspects of autism like having less eye contact, having more of a monitoring voice, perhaps not expressing as much on the outside. There is a lot of ways that make dating as an autistic person hard and some of these presentations that we have, particularly the stuff around eye contact, actually does show to be quite, you know, important in terms of dating, like making eye contact with somebody when you're out on a date with them. It's a little bit more intimate. People get different ideas of who you are as a person when you don't make eye contact, when you don't have that kind of open body language. It's just something natural that people do. It'd be nice if it wasn't like that. And so sometimes during the dating process, you might want to mask, not saying that's the prescription that I'm putting out, but that might be some kind of internal thing that you recognize. You read some stuff about dating, it's like make eye contact and do all of this kind of stuff that's not natural for you, perhaps isn't very autistic, but you do it anyway because you want to succeed in this dating scenario. So there's a lot of reasons, a lot of benefits actually to masking, which, you know, quite important for overall living, overall socializing in the world, working in the world, succeeding in these different areas is quite important for a lot of people, just in general. And so you can see why people would want to mask. But let's look at the harmful side because there are two sides to this coin and masking definitely does have a very, very large impact on someone's life, someone's well-being, someone's sense of self. Socializing can be a lot more draining. Masking, it's compensation, assimilation, all of that stuff. It can make things a lot more draining because you're pretty much putting on a front. You are monitoring yourself. You are changing yourself actively, as well as communicating and socializing with another human being. It's a very cerebral process. Use up energy when you think. Use up energy when it's kind of like trying to multitask, like you are exponentially increasing like the energy demand on that social situation because you're not acting naturally. You're trying to put something on, you're trying to change something, you're monitoring yourself. These are all things that are going to cost you energy and make socializing a lot more draining than if you weren't masking. It's also harder to really, truly connect with people because when you put out something that is not true to you, that is not genuine, even if it's for very understandable reasons, you often find yourself around people who perhaps aren't like you, who don't really understand you and what you value and who you are and how you actually are. It can be very, very difficult to connect with people when you put out a front and you're attracting all of these people to this front rather than the true self, the true you. That can be sometimes very dissociating, very disillusioning. You might get to a point where you have this friend group and this relationship or you have this job, this working kind of environment and it's just completely not who you are. When you come out of this environment and you're by yourself, you see that as like, okay, I can finally be myself and that's not good. That's not how anyone should feel, especially in those more intimate relationships, those best friends, those romantic partners, those familial relationships, those are really good places, really important places to really, truly be yourself. So you will attract people to a false version of yourself. You may be a lot more prone to burnout, overwhelm, mental illness. It may be a large contributor to that. Now burnout is this large period of exhaustion. It does happen for people who aren't autistic, but it also just happened for autistic people and it looks a little bit different. If you are wondering, you can check out one of my videos, I'll link at the end of this video, which talks about the autistic burnout roller coaster. Highly recommend that if you find yourself going through burnout quite a few times, you will become more overwhelmed because you are expending more energy. You are becoming a lot more sensitive stuff. You may even find yourself getting quite paranoid, like thinking, oh, how did how did people interpret this, this change that I did? You know, it takes up a lot of headspace trying to put on a front and it's not always like beneficial for yourself in the long run. You can develop more social anxiety from being so like, lasered in on like the reactions that people have to different changes that you make. It can also really impact things like depression when you feel like you're very alone, you know, around all these people who connects with this person that you're projecting. But it's not really you when you feel bad about that and you know that inside. And it can really, really get you especially in the long term. You may not be able to self advocate or you may not self advocate just in general for your needs, the needs that you have as an autistic person. You may not cancel on plans because, you know, even though you're having a shutdown and you melt a meltdown in the morning, and you are exhausted from a week of work, and you just really can't do this. And you would feel, you know, you probably be able to go to this event, hold it together a little bit. But when you come home, it's just going to have so much more of a negative impact when you get home and you're in a safe place. Really, really bad. You may not self advocate some of the adjustments that you need. You might find that, you know, this kind of idea of internalized ableism, you're like, I shouldn't be asking for help for this. Oh, if I ask for help for this, they're going to know that I struggle in this area. So you'll try and find different ways of getting around it, hiding it, you know, instead of saying, I think it was the stream that I watched from the aspie world and Charles tattoos, whether we're talking about social anxiety in women. And one of the ways that you can hide like some of the things that you find difficult, perhaps making a phone call, is that you could say, Oh, would you mind taking this phone call? I just really need to go to the toilet or something like that. You may make excuses to try and hide the facts that you find certain things more difficult than most people. So self advocating for your needs really, really important. It could just be little things like turning a lot the lights down if the lights are too bright, turning the music down if it's too loud, little things like that, perhaps putting in earbuds, you know, people might go, you know, why are you listening to music? Well, when we're in a social event, like that's really rude, you shouldn't do that. Even though that putting in your earbuds really helps kind of lower the amounts of sensory input that you're getting, little things like that. And also people pleasing, trying to fit in, trying to be validated by other people by acting less autistic and somewhat seeking, seeking approval to the fact that you are normal or trying to project that you are normal to other people because that's, that's the way that's most pleasing to them. Kind of a roundabout way of, you know, characterizing that, but you are definitely like, you're thinking about what is the standard here? What are people expecting of me? How can I meet these expectations? Even if really the ideal for you is not to do that. One of the reasons why I haven't really masked very much because I didn't tend to be a lot of a people pleaser, I very much did what I needed to do, did what I wanted, what made sense to me for a lot of my life, not in my early 20s, but I might go into that in a bit. And lastly, big, harmful side here. When the mask slips, for example, if you're in a dating situation, you've been dating someone for a few months, perhaps things start to get a little bit more serious, you start to feel more comfortable, perhaps you don't mask as much, perhaps you just want to be yourself in their presence a lot more. Maybe they don't like that. Maybe they don't understand the way that you are because you haven't been that way. You've been putting on kind of this neurotypical mask to try and convince them that you're not autistic. And so when you, when you feel comfortable and you feel like, okay, I feel safe in this relationship, you like the mask slip, they may not like it. They may not get on with you. Perhaps some of the things that really drew them to you were false. It could very well be the idea of what being with you would be like in the long term could be completely different to the reality of the situation. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you really want to attract people who like you and like being around the natural you. So that those can be some of like the harmful ways that that masking can contribute to someone's life. And you know, lastly, I just really want to touch on this idea of unmasking. And in a future video, I will definitely be going into the ways that we you can unmask if you want to. But what are some of the benefits? This is the idea of shedding this front that you put on, shedding this neurotypical mask and being your autistic self removing the mask has a lot of benefits. The issue here is here. And this is something that catches a lot of people off guard is that the benefits generally come with time. You can't just immediately switch off all of these mechanisms that have been ingrained into either by other people or yourself. It's going to take time. Initially unmasking as well can be difficult because you get a lot of judgments from other people and a lot of disapproval to a lot of other people. Perhaps being more yourself, being more autistic in their in their rise can be seen as regressing in some people's eyes, especially with parents who are very like forcing you to mask, forcing you to be normal, forcing you to not be autistic, trying to push you more into this idea of what a non autistic person should be like. They can be very disapproving of that. And you've got to be aware of that. And you've got to be strong enough in your center in your desires to unmask in order to get through that because you may not get that positive reinforcement from the people in your circles. You may have to seek that somewhere else, perhaps online. With unmasking, you don't change who you are. It may appear like that on the outside or even to yourself to some degree. You're not taking on more autistic things. You're learning to be yourself. You're learning to be the person that you were all along. The person that you've been hiding, the person that you've been, you know, hiding behind this, this neurotypical projected mask. You're learning to be your true self. As I said through this video, there are a lot of benefits to it. There are a lot of disadvantages to it possibly. And one of the things that people get wrong about unmasking is that if you want to, you can unmask all the time. This does not mean that you shift your behavior. You don't do this neurotypical shifting in different situations like you don't adhere to the work code because that's not you unmasked. It doesn't work like that. There are things that you need to change. The way that you interact with a romantic partner is going to be very different than the way you act with a friend, hopefully. It's very dependent on the social context in terms of neurotypical shifting. When it comes to masking, it's a little bit different. People will characterize masking as different things. I'd say really look at the things that make the most sense to you and try and start off by unmasking those. There is also a lot of different processes behind the scenes that are not actually to do with physically like changing the way that you approach life or the way that you present or appear. It could be a lot to do with processing a lot of the background feelings that you have about yourself, the internalized ableism, a lot of different aspects to your life that you haven't necessarily processed in a healthy way up until this point or from an autistic perspective. It's not just this outward like you're shifting the mask, your presentation solely. There's a lot of different things, a lot of different factors that come into play and you don't always have to mask and you don't always have to unmask. It's about finding a way of moving towards a place where you feel more genuine without compromising other aspects of your life. If you work in sales, perhaps, you know, if you really want to succeed in that side of life, it's really, really important to you. You feel like you can manage it and you know that you're being false, but you know that afterwards you can relax and you can be yourself and you can unmask in the comfort of your own home with people that you really generally connect with, then great, then go for it. But just be aware, it could cost you more energy in the long term. It could make you more prone to burnout and not unmasking at any point during your life is definitely going to have some massive negative impacts like 100% in the long run. So it's about finding where your balance is. Where do you want to stop unmasking? Where do you want to mask? What do you want to mask? A lot of different aspects that I'm definitely going to cover in a future video. Let's go on to some of the conclusions to this. As I've said, social camouflage, a lot of benefits, a lot of very large downsides that really need to be considered. Masking is a component of social camouflage that is often defined very, very differently depending on who you talk to. We mask for many reasons. If you've been masking for a long time, it may be very, very difficult to stop. A lot of autistic women, people from different backgrounds might mask in different ways or especially autistic women tend to mask a lot more than men in general. Autistic men do do I hope you have very much enjoyed this video. Make sure to like, subscribe and consider becoming a member for only 99p a month. It's the lowest price that I could put it at, but it really does help me, help encourage me to make more of this content, put it out for you guys. So thank you very much. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day and I'll see you in the next one.