Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

Friendship gets way more complicated and fraught as a preteen, and so do all the expectations placed on you. The adults aren’t as kind and gentle as they once were. If you take a long time to figure something out, they assume you’re dragging your feet out of adolescent apathy rather than executive functioning differences. If you have problems making friends, it’s because you’re a moody teen, not because neurotypical conversation rules are inscrutable to you.

For Crystal, faking sickness was an essential part of her mask. It could get her out of the overstimulating classroom and provide her some much-needed rest.

I think for most masked Autistic people, there are key moments in childhood or adolescence where we learn we are embarrassing or wrong.

One of the major ways abled society dehumanizes the disabled is by calling our maturity into question. “Adults” are supposed to be independent, though of course no person actually is. We all rely on the hard work and social-emotional support of dozens of people every single day. You’re only seen as less adult, and supposedly less of a person,[3] if you need help in ways that disrupt the illusions of self-sufficiency.

Camouflaging: attempting to hide or obscure Autistic traits in order to “blend in” with neurotypicals.

Compensation: using specific strategies to “overcome” challenges and impairments related to disability.

Camouflage is all about obscuring one’s unique qualities and struggles as a disabled person; compensation is all about crafting little hacks and cheats to help you get your needs met because you can’t request the accommodations you require.

Most of us have to mask everything from our information processing style, to our lack of coordination, to our limited food preferences, to the fact that we require more rest than neurotypical people are expected to.

Masked Autistics tend to arrange our lives around our limitations and needs, and sacrifice anything that might demand too much energy out of us.

Regular life is more cognitively and emotionally demanding for neurodiverse people than it is for neurotypicals, but we have to hide that fact from other people on a daily basis.

To prop up our façade of being “high functioning,” we build a messy, unstable scaffolding of flawed coping mechanisms.

Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes Autistic people easier to “deal” with. It renders us compliant and quiet. It also traps us.

Psychiatrists and psychologists have always defined Autism by how the disability impacts neurotypical people. A more “severely” Autistic person is not necessarily a person who experiences more interior suffering, but rather someone who suffers in a more disruptive, annoying, or disturbing way.

What the researchers found was that parents did not accurately perceive the level of their kids’ suffering. Instead, parents based their ratings of Autism “severity” on how much their kids’ behavior bothered them and required a lot of their time and attention.

ABA is focused on training Autistic kids to fake a neurotypical personality. It’s a behavioral therapy, not a cognitive or emotional one.

ABA therapists train children to camouflage their Autistic traits using a system of rewards and punishments.

Forty-six percent of Autistic adults who underwent ABA therapy as kids report having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the experience.[16]

Despite how loathed ABA is by Autistic people, the parents and teachers of Autistic kids tend to love it, and research broadly deems it “effective.” This is because the efficacy of the program is based on the neurotypical gaze, not how the Autistic child feels. ABA does teach Autistic kids to quiet down and be less annoying and “weird.”

Sadly, the comfort and convenience of the neurotypical teachers and parents are prioritized, so ABA remains the one and only “evidence-based” treatment for Autism that most insurance plans will cover.

Most maskers dodge the massive psychological bullet that is ABA therapy, but we still receive endless conditioning that says our unfiltered selves are too annoying, unusual, awkward, nonconforming, and cold to fit in.

We internalize many of the values of the ableist society we’re living in, and project those values both at other disabled people and at ourselves.[21]

To maintain their masks and compensate for the challenges they’re facing, many Autistic people fall back on an array of destructive and compulsive coping mechanisms, including substance abuse, calorie restriction, excessive exercise, emotional codependency, and even joining cults.

Research shows that Autistics who mask tend to suffer from intense social anxiety,[1] and some of us learn to self-medicate that anxiety with drugs or alcohol. We may also reach for substances to help blunt our sensory issues or help us pretend to be more confident.

Some use compulsive exercise or calorie restriction to make their jittery, unruly Autistic bodies settle down or shrink into a more convenient shape. Some self-harm in order to regulate their anxiety or sensory overwhelm.

They’ve overexercised or drugged their way into social acceptance; some of them have spent years detached from other people, or sought out belonging in reactionary groups. These individuals have come to recognize that in addition to protecting them from social rejection, masking has gotten in the way of them leading authentic, happy lives.

They’ve also begun to reexamine their coping mechanisms, aiming to identify the unmet needs they can satisfy with more appropriate disability accommodations, rather than self-destructiveness and denial.

“I came to figure out I have had massive social anxiety and sensory issues all my life, and I was using alcohol to numb them,”

One of the most common and subtly debilitating experiences Autistics have is sensory overwhelm. I’ve already described how the bottom-up nature of Autistic sensory processing leads to us being overstimulated and easily distracted by things like ambient noise and visual clutter.

There is an additional neurological feature of Autism that contributes to our sensory issues and meltdowns in a significant way—our diffic...

The exact opposite is true for Autistic people: the longer we are around a stimulus, the more it bothers us.[2] As I’ve already mentioned, our neurons are also “hyperexcitable,” meaning our senses get set off more easily by small input that neurotypicals don’t even notice, such as a hair falling into our face or a pile of mail being left on our desk.[3]

We’re better at noticing small details and changes in our environment,[4] which can be a real advantage for meticulous work (like programming, Thomas’s profession), but we are also more prone to being startled or distracted.[5]

When an Autistic person is flooded with upsetting sensory information for too long, they enter a state of sensory overload. Sensory overload can look like a temper tantrum or a crying fit, it can take the form of a shutdown or meltdown, or it can present as the Autistic person becoming confused and responding to questions in routinized or nonsensical ways. Sensory overload makes it hard to complete complex tasks, think through things rationally, or manage emotions. When we’re overloaded, we become irritable, or filled with despair; we might even start self-harmi...

What non-Autistic folks often don’t realize is that Autistic people experience intense sensory input a...

Many Autistic adults report problematic drinking habits, or substance use disorders.[7] Dulling our sensory sensitivities is one of the key reasons for this link.[8] Another reason is that substances assist us with social regulation.

Autism isn’t a disorder that needs to be treated, but most Autistic people do have mental health struggles related to living in an unaccepting neurotypical world.

For Autistic people who do have substance addictions, exploring an integrated treatment program is likely to be a good fit.

Since a growing body of research suggests cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches don’t work as well for Autistics as they do for neurotypicals,[13] CBT-based addiction treatment might not be a good fit—at least not without modifications.

“I knew innately from a very young age I find life harder than other people,” they say, “but there was never any reason. It was always just you are lazy; you are being lazy.”

Dorian says they had many clear Asperger’s Syndrome traits. They inhaled books and sat off alone in the corner at family gatherings. They spoke “like a thesaurus” and did well on IQ tests, but found daily classwork hard to keep up with. But like so many other masked Autistics, they were seen as a “girl,” and were assumed to be gifted and a little weird, rather than disabled.

Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services.[18] Our apparent high intelligence puts us in a double bind: we are expected to accomplish great things to justify our oddness, and because we possess an enviable, socially prized quality, it’s assumed we need less help than other people, not more.

Autism and eating disorders are highly correlated, especially among women,[20] trans people,[21] and maskers diagnosed late in life.

Some masked Autistics are drawn to the structure and sense of control that an eating disorder can provide. We often seek out clear “rules” for good behavior, which we then adhere to rigidly, hoping they will keep us socially safe and finally render us worthy.[23]

Clinical research has found that somewhere between 20 and 37 percent of diagnosed anorexia nervosa sufferers are Autistic.[24] Since Autism is underdiagnosed in the populations who are most likely to be diagnosed with eating disorders (women, trans people, and gay men), the actual rate of co-occurrence might be much higher.

Since eating-disordered behavior is at least partially socially motivated for many Autistic people, it may also be beneficial to seek belonging and social structure in new ways that feel less performative and most authentic.

To cope with the pressure of masking, many Autistics disappear into our own heads.

Dissociation is also a means of controlling the social and sensory data we’re taking in, ignoring inputs that have become too intense.

For other Autistic people that I know, including myself, having to mask and socialize for an extended period increases the odds we’ll begin to dissociate or shut down.

Some research suggests that Autistic people have a diminished sense of agency; in other words, we feel less in control of ourselves and our bodies than non-Autistic people do.

A lifetime of being corrected for incompetence and childishness affects our self-concept, and makes it hard for us to develop basic skills of self-advocacy or assertiveness.

Research shows that most Autistic people have a reduced sense of the body’s warning signals, or interoception.[31] Most of us tend to feel like our bodies are not really our own, and struggle to draw connections between the external world and how we feel inside.[32]