For many Autistic kids, learning to obscure your pain often becomes a primary survival strategy; for masked Autistics, this isn’t taught within ABA therapy, but as part of regular life. I didn’t go through ABA, but friends’ parents did yell at me for squirming awkwardly in my seat. No one forced me to rehearse “normal” conversational scripts, but kids laughed and walked away from me when I spoke in an inappropriately loud voice or quoted movies to express how I felt.
