Episode Two: How to unmask: defining autistic unmasking

So what does it mean to unmask? How do you do it? And why might you want to?

Before we get into the how, I think it’s a good idea to really know what we mean when we think about this question of unmasking.

Because ‘unmasking’ as a word is kind of vague. And anything that is vague is really hard to implement. Because where do you start.

And yet it’s something that has been in the vocabulary of late-identified autistic people especially, but also any neuro-minorities who identify with this sense of your true self not being fully seen.

And I want to start off by unravelling some of the misconceptions that the word itself leads us to.

Because ‘unmasking’ sounds like you are taking off a physical mask, and revealing this mythical true self underneath.

It sounds like: when you unmask there is some kind of radical difference in the degree of how much you are able to be perceived by others. So it sounds like: when I unmask, people will be able to see me.

Which is what we all need and want. As humans, we are affirmed and validated by being seen accurately as ourselves; we want to feel the connection that being seen speaks to - that yes, human to human, I recognise what you experience and I bear witness to who you are, and I include you in my reality. You reality is real. We share an understanding, we stand under the same reality...

TRANSCRIPT

So what does it mean to unmask? How do you do it? And why might you want to?

Before we get into the how, I think it’s a good idea to really know what we mean when we think about this question of unmasking.

Because ‘unmasking’ as a word is kind of vague. And anything that is vague is really hard to implement. Because where do you start.

And yet it’s something that has been in the vocabulary of late-identified autistic people especially, but also any neuro-minorities who identify with this sense of your true self not being fully seen.

And I want to start off by unravelling some of the misconceptions that the word itself leads us to.

Because ‘unmasking’ sounds like you are taking off a physical mask, and revealing this mythical true self underneath.

It sounds like: when you unmask there is some kind of radical difference in the degree of how much you are able to be perceived by others. So it sounds like: when I unmask, people will be able to see me.

Which is what we all need and want. As humans, we are affirmed and validated by being seen accurately as ourselves; we want to feel the connection that being seen speaks to - that yes, human to human, I recognise what you experience and I bear witness to who you are, and I include you in my reality. You reality is real. We share an understanding, we stand under the same reality.

So we want to be seen, and unmasking sounds like: I’ve been hiding from you, and now I will show you who I really am.

Unmasking also sounds like a single action. I take off the mask. I reveal myself with this one action. And now you can see me.

And it sounds like it’s all entirely within your control and on your body that when YOU take off the mask, then you will be seen by others.

That them seeing you, is all within your control. And that the mask is on your body.

And that all you have to do is unmask, and others will see you. They will get you, understand you, make it feel okay to be you.

And the problem with this thinking is that the whole reason you begun to mask in the first place, is because other people weren’t able to see you when you were being yourself.

In other words: sometimes our masks are not in our own thoughts and actions, but they are in the thoughts and actions of other people around us that are non-affirming.

And so masking might be thought of as ‘remaining unseen’ - regardless of whether you are or aren’t being your whole self.

And what I want to share with you in this episode is the thinking about the goal of unmasking, not as revealing of self, and not as a goal of having other people see you (which is not in your control), but of undoing the habit of self-negating. Undoing the habit of unseeing yourself. Of not listening to and believing your body. Of interpreting your circumstances or sensations as a reason to ignore the experiences that you are actually having.

Okay? So unmasking as undoing habitual self-negation.

And I say habitual, because anything that we thing a lot or we do a lot, becomes automated. So any way that we may have reacted in the past to other people or situations that then becomes how we always react. It becomes habitual.

So unmasking is undoing habitual self negation.

Now to explain what I mean, i’m going to use an example. So let’s imagine you were going to a gathering of some kind, or to work, and to get there you have to take public transport. And that public transport is for you a sensory hell; the noise, the fluorescent lighting, the hustle and bustle. So at the end of your 20 minute journey, you are feeling a reaction to that sensory environment in your nervous system.

So that sensory environment is loading up your nervous system with sensory experiences that are either intense or non-congruent and difficult to process or just take you more time to process.

But when you arrive, there is no place to go to calm your nervous system and process it and come back into a state of ease and calm.

And not only that, you are in a social context where if you were to openly do the things that calm your nervous system, or even just express that reaction, that you have the thought that doing that would draw negative and unwanted attention to you. And that thought is coming from past experiences where you have allowed yourself to have your natural reaction to sensory overwhelm and then others have reacted negatively, or just not reacted in the same way. You’ve experienced other people not seeing you and understanding you and so being excluded from their reality. So your past experiences are playing out in this example as a habitual response where you are seeking to avoid that same reaction from other people.

And this is real. People who perceive and process in the ways that dominant culture affirms, are not going to have the neural pathways and past experiences in their body to identify with and understand what you experience. And because they are in the majority and because the world has been designed in very top-down industrialist structures that suit the majority, and which have led to a narrowing of social cues and rituals for belonging,

as an outlier to those dominant and normed ways of being together, you don’t fit in with those structures and you also don’t have your experiences affirmed in their design. So you having an experience is at odds with what is commonly understood and facilitated.

And we haven’t even got to the part where you are actually in conversation. That brings a whole other set of challenges when cognitive empathy is unavailable because they just don’t have the same perceptive and cognitive processes that you do for making sense. So that then adds another layer - where your perceptions and the ways you process them are different and distinct from most other people’s in ways that lead to a different body language and pace of speech or ways of communicating and reasons to communicate.

And what happens is that a reaction to being rejected in the past, is repeated in the habitual ways of being with others whereby it seems like the only option is to suppress the self, and try to assimilate and fit in with what appears to lead to belonging or approval, or to defer responsibility for how to be to the other person as other people seem to have very strong rules for what is and isn’t correct and what does and doesn’t constitute social warmth and approval to them.

And we are taught that approval is something we need and should want from others.

But if people don’t have the lived experiences to recognise and affirm yours, then it makes sense to conclude that you have to edit and modulate yourself in order to gain that sense of inclusion and belonging another way - a way that is not natural to you.

So you being your whole self doesn’t lead to other people necessarily being able to see you or understanding you. And so unmasking isn’t something that you take off that then reveals you in a way that will guarantee being seen and understood and connected to someone else who understands and includes your experiences in their reality.

So the idea that you unmask and are revealed in all your individual specificity for others to see and understand and believe, is unhelpful to the goal of unmasking.

If you have the thought that other people seeing you is the goal, and then people don’t understand or see you, you will then think you are doing it wrong, or that they are doing it wrong. That something is going wrong. Or that you are wrong. or that they are wrong.

Or that you will use other people seeing you as proof or evidence of whether you are unmasked or not.

So this can happen in the beginning often of coming to realise that autistic traits are something you experience - is feeling the need to have them be very visible to others to try to have the experience of being seen in this new state of self-revelation.

So then trying to unmask becomes another mask; it becomes a performance of autistic behaviours that you’ve read about as recognisability autistic, as a way to try to be visible to others. And then seeking that affirmation of that visibility from how others respond to you. You need them to do something. You might even try to manipulate their reaction to affirm your actions which are coming from a place of trying to convince them of who you are.

So if your idea of unmasking is dependent on other people reacting to you in a way that makes you feel seen, or on changing their thoughts about you, that goal is a fast-track to burnout. Because you can’t actually change other people’s thoughts and trying to do so is not going to feel good to you or to them. It’s only going to create more disconnection.

You will be in the energy of convincing other people, and needing their acceptance as a pre-requisite to you accepting yourself.

Going back to our example scenario, another aspect of this is that how you respond to that social situation might be to have the habitual unconscious thought that you need to hide how you are feeling, to squash down the nervous system unrest, and fawn and pretend that you aren’t having the experiences you are actually having.

So instead of leaving and taking yourself somewhere to recover, you might choose to stay and override what you need.

So the logic of: there is a benefit to me staying in this social situation and to access that benefit I am going to further disconnect from myself by taking actions as if this isn’t the experience I’m having.

Accessing that social situation and the advantages it represents, requires you to be in a state of internal disconnects. You are valuing the social advantages over self connection.

Which is what we are taught - that belonging means to be part of the group and that not doing so is grounds for rejection. Or that having a job that doesn’t accommodate you is something you have to put up with because you are the person that is different, subjugating your needs for the existing structures.

So we see that masking is actually about disconnecting from self and from the experiences you are having, ignoring and over-riding the messages from your body in order to create a false belonging in which you are invisibly doing all the work.

Once we see that masking is a result of how you respond to external circumstances that already don’t see you in ways that internalise external disconnects, then you can begin to see how to actually unmask and what unmasking really means.

Which is that unmasking the practice of reconnecting to self, and to the experiences you are actually having, and valuing your own self-connected state above all else.

Which also means unlearning the habitual reaction from your past, to placate others and try to fit in with their reality, in order to not be rejected or negatively treated or in order to access work. And that the structures which make that seem like the only option have to be reimagined

So unmasking is not about taking off a mask, but about how you choose to respond to social barriers and systemic issues that are beyond your control. Ending the habitual self-negation that may have felt necessary in the past, and may still be necessary in specific circumstances, but isn’t present at all times, especially now that you are an adult and can make choices about your life that are in your best interests and true to you.

So we have to open our thinking to the possibility that this isn’t the only thing available to you.

The measure of unmasking is not how much others see you, but how much you are in a sustained state of self connection.

What this thinking does is it takes the focus off of other people’s reactions to you, or needing them to accept you first, or even paying any mind to their thoughts about you (which are none of your business), or thinking its all about your own body…

And instead to experience how masking is disconnecting from self. Those disconnects may have come from outside, but are now internalised and reproduced by you in your own self-relationship.

And the process of unmasking or being yourself and growing into who you are becoming (which are all the same thing), is making self connection your only goal.

Which is how anyone is able to be themselves - is the degree to which they are able and enabled to stay in a state of self connection.

So if you have a goal of unmasking, know that most of the work happens in your relationship to yourself.

None of the work happens in how other people are perceiving you. You can’t change their thoughts. You can only model your own self-regard and invite them into that in how they are with you.

And some of the reasons why you might want to unmask is because in the process of learning these habits of self-negation, the impact is in your energy.

Your energy is what suffers. It’s not just the not being seen. But it’s how when you aren’t seen by others AND you aren’t honouring who you are here to be, then you aren’t in connection to your energy in a sustainable way.

It’s using up energy towards actions that are not for your own sustenance, but for the sustenance of what harms you.

Masking is exhausting.

Not just because you are having to bottle up nervous system reactions, but also because to do so you have to over-ride your natural instinctive way of being. to do so.

And to do that involves mis-using part of your pre-frontal cortex.

Which is the very human part of our brain that is able to imagine consequences and plan for them and make decisions.

So it’s the part of your brain that can imagine and exit the present moment.

But it gets tired quickly. We only have a number of decisions we can make in a day before that part of our brain gets tired.

So this is what is being used when you are pre-planning how to be, or what to say, and rehearse who to be ahead of time, checking your own thoughts against what other people might think of them. Hyper-vigilantly monitoring other people’s reactions and then modulating your actions accordingly so as to present a certain persona to others.

It gets exhausted quickly because masking is an incorrect use of this part of our brain. We aren’t supposed to use it this much and in this way.

It’s also depleting your sense of self.

Because it involves making choices that go against what is a true reality for you.

So your body withdraws energy for that.

And it’s really hard to know who you are when you aren’t experiencing who you are, but instead are experiencing who you are not and paying all your attention to what other people might think of you and practicing this false ego and getting rewarded for it, checking yourself against how you imagine others might think about you, instead of being in the experience you are having, having your own thoughts, being in your own body.

You aren’t actually in the present moment because you are second guessing yourself and other people. Which means that you aren’t present to receive and experience the truth of what you are experiencing, instead you are in the calculation of how to be.

You also can’t experience being seen and being connected to others, which is energising, when you aren’t connected to yourself.

Sometimes we get so good at masking that we forget how not to, and that there are other options.

Or we haven’t experienced an alternative for a long time, so the thought of socialising means we are preparing for that hard mental work, which in of itself creates anxiety, which is also exhausting.

So not unmasking is signing up for a lifetime of mis-used energy. Mis-used because you’re putting it into actions which don’t re-energise you and allow you to stay in sustained self connection to your own energy source.

It’s unsustainable over the long term.

So you might think to yourself: I just get through it and then recover - but I want to suggest that maybe there are other options available. Even if you don’t know what they are right now. And even if they take years to find or create. That is still worth it.

So the reason to begin this journey is to reclaim your own energy as your own.

Your energy is not just ability to get things done. It’s the being aliveness that comes with being in integrity. And it’s the vibrancy of your being, and power you have to put towards shaping your life. It’s the sense of being connected to your life force and to the meaning of your existence and the intuition for what is for you.

It’s the opening up of what your life could be, instead of a dulled sense of deferring your life until tomorrow - until you have energy, until you have courage, until you meet whatever requirement you’ve learned to believe is necessary before you are acceptable.

And it’s the possibility that there are places on earth or with other people that don’t require this of you.

Consider that every tiny step into protecting your own energy and learning how to be present in the experience you are actually having, grants you a bit more energy, and that starts to build momentum.

It means levelling up your self-regard to a much higher degree where you put it above everything else that you think you can only get if you mask.

Unmasking unlocks your energy, and inner clarity, which means you start to make new choices that honour instead of deplete that energy in ways that you’ll never get back.

So unmasking is not ‘taking off a mask’.

Unmasking is making self-connection your only goal, and for that you have to undo the habits of disconnecting from yourself and negating self, in order to try and fit in.

You aren’t here to fit in but to do incredible things that require you to be able to think outside of and beyond the limitations of what other people think and of dominant industrialist structures.

You already know how not to fit in, and how not to follow the crowd, you might have just forgotten how to to judge yourself for it, or make yourself try to fit in because you think that will feel better.

The only reason we do anything is because of how we think it will make us feel.

Consider that masking hasn’t actually led to the feeling of belonging, or what you want.

Consider that there might be another route to get there that doesn’t mean you have to negate yourself self, your energy, but could do it in a way that energises you.

And consider that you can only experience that feeling when you aren’t masking and have your full energy and presence at your disposal.

And finally, unmasking is also about a collective work to shift the culture in ways that lead to new structures, new ways of doing things and designing social rituals and making visible that there are other ways of being that are legitimate and that are sources of other kinds of knowledge and other languages and other insights.

This is not about sensory processing disorder, but sensory processing in another order that hasn’t had the tools and resources that dominant sensory styles have.

Unmasking is also a cultural uncovering of possibilities evidence by the full range of human experience. It is rejecting the imposition of meaning imposed on our bodies without consent. It is rooting down into the knowing that there is so much more to you than the misrepresentations and misunderstandings of others. And that you begin to access that more, when you start to make self connection your only goal.

That the culture shifts required for unmasking at large start within your relationship to yourself.

The goal of unmasking is not to be seen by others or within dominant culture, but to create the structures in our own thinking and our own lives that enables sustained self connection.

So that’s it siblings, talk to you next week.