I think I get what you mean because I have a very dominant personality yet hardly ever got any respect from others until one day, I shut myself behind my own kind of mask, which is that of an aggressive alpha male type and that's how many people still see me. The mask itself caused a collateral problem, obviously. Whenever I demonstrate wit, culture, sensitivity and sympathy people raise eyebrows because they don't expect me to act like that. The real me exists in a gap taken by two (or more) different personalities.
Maybe not related but ... oftentimes, I'll be executing tasks or talking to others by imitating characters that I have seen in a movie, or someone from real life whose actions were stuck in my mind. The resulting behaviour is someone who acts and sounds like Charles Bronson but when the words come out, they are the words of a completely different person.