Conceptualizing Masking
Masking. You’d think it would be a simple concept, but it isn’t, is it?
As clinicians, we’re routinely faced with the fact that we may be teaching our clients to mask. If you’re like me — and I know many of you are — you worry about its repercussions. But we can’t prevent or solve a problem if we don’t know what it is, so let’s define it.
By “define”, I mean go over “A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and the Illusion of Choice” by Amy Pearson, PhD and Kieran Rose.
In this article, Pearson and Rose discuss how the literature on masking is relatively new so there isn’t a cohesive definition or term being used, but the definition they’re using here is a “conscious or unconscious suppression of natural responses and adoption of alternatives across a range of domains including social interaction, sensory experience, cognition, movement, and behavior”. You may come across research that refers to masking (in the way autistic people use it to describe their experiences) as camouflaging, compensation, or adaptive morphing. This might look like refraining from stimming while at school, laughing when others are laughing even though they don’t find the topic funny or understand why others find it funny, downplaying special interests, etc. Note: It looks different for each person, so we can’t go off what something “looks like” to determine if masking is happening
Research shows that autistic adults mask across different contexts and higher levels of masking are correlated with higher levels of stress — being disconnected from your identity causes cognitive dissonance*. Autistic people have also reported that the energy they use to mask can “detract from their already impacted ability to self regulate”. These issues can be compounded by alexithymia and interoceptive disconnection, which would make it hard for them to identify the level of stress they’re experiencing. Following is a framework Pearson and Rose suggest for understanding masking:
So now we have a definition of masking and an idea of how bad it can be for psychological well being. The next question is, “how do you identify it?” Well, that’s not so straightforward. The fact is that while some autistic people may view masking as helpful because it can help them avoid things like stigma and bullying, the act itself is just as often unconscious as it is intentional. This means that many autistic people aren’t even aware of if they are masking and when they do so. From the outside looking in, we have to understand that what masking looks like for an individual depends on that person. A person whose behaviors don’t match the stereotypes of being autistic isn’t necessarily masking. How they appear to others is a result of a number of factors, including how their traits are externalized or internalized and the expectations of the person observing them.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the article about how to avoid putting our clients in situations that cause them to mask without the ability to decide against doing so. Given that masking is often a trauma response, I guess we’ll have to make do with continuing to improve our trauma informed practice.
The article is worth a read if you’ve got some time. They also talk about being against the idea that masking is primarily a female autism thing, and I think their reasons make a lot of sense. It’s free to read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992880/
*Cognitive dissonance is when someone has ideas and/or actions that contradict each other, causing psychological stress that pushes the person to either change what they think/do or find a way to justify what they think/do. For example, if I say all snacks with added sugar are bad for you and you shouldn’t eat them but I start eating protein bars with added sugar, I might say “well…the taste of whey protein on its own is gross so something has to be added to make it more palatable”.
