Social Masking

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I'm curious about other people's experiences with social masking, and perception of Self.

Do you relate to the notion of being a 'chameleon', and trying to blend in as best you can? Do you have a sense of your 'true self' vs. 'false self' (a role that you play to satisfy other people's expectations?)

Do you relate to your 'real' name, or feel that your biological body is in fact 'you'? Or just a puppet that you're stuck in, with others dictating how that puppet must behave?

I find myself very confused by all this, would appreciate any insights.

I've learnt manners and consideration, but if you talk to me for more than a few minutes you can tell I'm autistic. I can't mask,ie avoid detection. If that's what you mean as masking.

That's helpful, thanks. I know that I have trauma issues that cause an additional layer of identity confusion, so I'm really curious to hear what is typical for ASD.

For me, I feel that my physical body is a puppet, and I can try to make the puppet try to blend in socially - but not very well, not for more than 30 seconds, before it's obvious I don't know how to respond, or continue the conversation. I have a basic "how-are-you-I'm-fine" script, but beyond that, I don't know what to say.

So my "puppet" self is awkward and devoid of personality. But my "true" self has all sorts of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that the "real world" doesn't want to hear about. (So I talk to fairies instead.) I find role-playing the "social puppet" utterly boring and pointless, and do it as little as possible.

I do relate to the chameleon analogy. Whomever I’m with I watch and listen and try to copy their speech patterns, mannerisms, even accents to a degree. Either this or withdraw. I don’t know how else to be with other people. My natural place in the world is as an observer watching and listening. I am happiest to sit quietly and not participate in conversations and general social interactions. But it’s not always possible to do this. Other people talk to me or expect interactions, and I am driven to try and get this ‘right’. So I try super hard to do and say the right things which I can only figure out by copying. The more I have to do this, the more confused I become about who I am and what is really me. In the past I wondered if I really existed as I didn’t seem to be living life the same way everyone else seemed to. Lately I’ve found that spending time alone in nature allows me to reconnect with the me underneath the acting, as I don’t feel I have to change anything about myself when I’m with the trees and birds and earth and sky. It’s been a valuable lesson for me. I know that I can’t really understand other people’s social interactions in a way that allows me to respond naturally and spontaneously but I can understand the natural world and I am at home there.

Oh yes I was just saying a few months ago something similar.
I come across as incredibly dull and maybe even creepy because I'm pretending to be this inoffensive person.its not authentic. I wish I could be more authentic but I'm not sure how.
I can be my real self around friends who are similar enough to take my weirdness.

Sometimes I'm around someone and thoughts pop into my head but they are too offensive,childish or outlandish to say,so i end up saying nothing.

I feel there are different types of masking. I suspect many females use social masking to try and fit into society. But as a male, I use a different type of masking. I am a child at heart. I am in my "pleasing 5" stage of childhood development. So even though I am 71 years old, I wear the mask of an introverted adult in order to hide by real internal age of a five year old. I do not use a social mask. I generally ignore social conformity and rather expect society to accept me as I am. It is rather easy to mask as an adult and I feel very little stress in doing it and I have learned to do it quite well.

I do not feel like a puppet. I am the real me. And I have developed an INTJ personality to go along with my INTP personality to protect me. I am a non-conformist.

I have masked most of my life and first learnt to mask when I was around the ages of about five onwards... Well. There are different types of masking. I masked in a few different ways. The earliest masking I did was through being told off for various stimming like behaviours I had. (Various ways to stim as well from pen clicking to rocking back and fore, to bouncing ones leg up and down to rapping ones fingers on the desk etc)...
Then on top of this, I also had to learn to copy other peoples behaviours so I fitted in. This may not seem like masking, as to some extent most people learn to do this, but for me, some of it was a learning curve... Much of this took place as I got older because certain behaviours I had as a child where I may have fitted in well, were felt as childish as a teenager. Yet I naturally wasn't ready to naturally act in teenage to adult ways, so I had to force myself to stop, which is another form of masking, as it takes some effort to train myself to over ride my natural playful and childlike nature. (I am not mentally immature. This is different).
Now the above are the "Acting masks where I tried to mke myself look as normal as possible. Also comes trying to copy "Normal" people walk and gait etc" Try to conciously do all this bit by bit manually every day until eventually it becomes a "Glued on mask".

Next we come to the things which are needed to socially connect. This is a whole new ball game then acting normal. Oh boy! Is this the most difficult part to do.
So one has trained oneself over time by first manually day by day trying to act normal...And bit by bit over many years this eventually becomes "Glued in position". Now on top of this one then has to manually add ways to communicate in ways which are socially acceptable. One may have a wierd laugh one needs to work on where one has to manually stop onesself laughing where one would have burst into laughter and one has to teach ones self first to become emotionless (Straight faced etc) and then one builds up the masked laugh and smile etc in a manual and calculated way to appear normal.

Now I had some major extra masking techniques I needed to learn for a condition I did not know I had until I was in college and it came as a shock to me. I realized what it was as I knew my Mum has it, but though I had it before I never knew I had it until one day it hit me and hit me hard. Prosopragnosia. In other words faceblindness. I had been masking to cover the effects of this from an early age but never knew why... But I had to really make an effort to manually try to override the issues faceblindness was causing. I found that naturally I never used to look at people in their face as I spoke to them. I naturally avoided eye contact. I came to believe that maybe this is why I had a hard time in recognising people that I knew so here came an embarissing manual override which I had to learn to change over time. So naturally I was not making eye contact, so I made a concious effort to make eye contact. (Oh how I laugh now about rhis but at the time I was soo nurvy and touchy about it when people complained)... What I did was I tried to override the lack of eye contact by placing my head about three or four inches away from ths other persons head I wanted to talk to to try to force eye contact as I spoke. I dis this for several weeks while in college which really spooked my classmates out! Especially as I found I could not really talk at the same time as looking at them in the eyes. I must have been told off by one of the teachers through not making eye contact as well to be doing this.
After many complaints I realized that my technique needed to be refined, and up until recently, where now I have reverted back to only making eye contact if I need to but not so much when I'm speaking, I find that I will be at a normal distance from the other person and I will purpously turn my face towards them, but turn my eyes to look slightly to the left of them or the right etc so it seems like I am giving them the eye contact they desire, but I am not actually doing it.
And other ways I have had to mask with prosopragnosia are to learn to smile at everybody regardless of who they are in a public or social setting just incase I may know them and I tend to aknowledge anyone who looks at me. This way, anyone I may miss due to the faceblindness that I may know is not upset with me if I don't realize that I know them.
If someone comes up to me to talk to me I will keep them taking by using expertly places phrezes and words to try to manipulate the conversation to give myself clues as to who they are. I have had entire lengthy conversations like this and they have walked away happy and I still don't know to this day who they are, as I connect people to where I expect to see them.
Now on top of this, I once worked as a train conductor for nine years. The longest time ever I have stayed in a job. I eventually had burnout and had to leave (I handed in my notice when I realized I had becomd somewhat suicidal..., and I also had a miraculous sign from God that it was time to leave the job...).. But the railway job was dealing with up to 1000 passengers on a single longer buzy train so I had to find ways to work out who had a ticket and who had just boarded. I had to memorize where every person was sitting on every train I worked, and what colour clothes every person was wearing etc, so every stop I would watch rhe people leave or get on the tein and need to work out who I had done and who I had not... And I was rarely out. What did used to throw me was people who changed where they sat where I had not seen it. I would try to sell them a second ticket! Haha! But on top of doing this I had to remember where most of the passengers were going as manynof our stops were request stops. So you see, I must have quite a good memory even if my memory for facial recognition is not too good.
Now here is the last of my masking techniques which I learnt towards the end of my schooling years and perfected in my college years. Acting thick with a senee of humour. This did well for most of my time in collage as it made people sympathise and help me. I was getting daily doses of serious anxiety which would effect my ability to think, so I learnt to do this as a way to connect and also to slow down the work rate so I could try to grasp it. Anxiety would blank my mind or prevent me from learning/remembering things. I was full force stimming by bouncing a leg up and down etc... All went well until towards the end of my second year, fear started to errode my masking and when the mask came off and I was exposed, the other students in my class started to pick on me and I became a target. I once nearly jumped straight through a classroom window when the whole class turned on me. The class was at a height which spanned a road so was about three stories high. I stood on my desk, and was ligning myself up to run from desk to desk to crash through the window when the teacher returned and told me off. (My plan was to land in the tree below and climb down).

Now I used jokes and humour to connect with passengers on my train. It worked well. I met some lovely people!

So i hope this explains ways how I mask. Manual masking takes a lot of mental strain to keep up. One is absolutely exhausted mentally after doing it.
After years of this, I am a bit mentally vunerable to shutdowns these days.... And rarely am I able to completely unmask... And when I have and I am in a non social setting... Maybe in the countryside etc... I feel soo liberated and free! But if the masks fall off in a social setting I am in fear for my life! Every person that approaches or aalks past me or I walk past them I feel like they could suddenly turn and attack me due to my past college experiences. I failed the final exams as I was in survival mode so I just could not retain information or remember mathematical methods/formula etc...

Thanks for the perspectives - maybe I'm not so different after all, in essentially keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, and doing my best to follow proper social etiquette.

I think a major part of my problem is simply not being able to think quickly enough, in social settings. To process what the other person is saying, and come up with an appropriate response. I can do it on a forum, when I have a minute to think about it, but I find back-and-forth conversation overwhelming.

(Mountain Goat - I'm astonished by your memory, that's a handy talent to have!)

I find as I am fragile these days masking is harder and also short term memory is effected when anxiious or when on the fringes and during a partial (Or a full) shutdown. My deep inner long term memory works fine though.
It was only thinking about it... How I managed to do the job for so long. It was while I was writing about it I was able to explain it, and as I was explaining it I was thinking "Wow. I used to do that". It is only now looking back where I realize a reason why I may have been shutting down now and then, though an overload of anxiety can cause strings of partial shutdowns. Never used to get them like this.

I also am a slow thinker. I think very deep thoughts. I am not a quick thinker. My deep thinking can go on for months or even years sifting through a certain subject... i have a very visual deep inner mind. I use this in maths to count. I think in multiples of dots of a dice where I count them in visual patterns... E.g. 5 on a dice gives a visual pattern where I think that pattern when I think of 5. After the number 6 I then go back to 1 on the dice etc... I stack the 1 on the six to make a 4 and a half 5 or a 3... I see 3 as a half five triangular pattern rather then a straight diagonal line. This is so that the 3 is easy to slot ontop of a 4 or a 5 or a 6 number pattern.

My problem is that I can find the right answers in maths exams but no way can I show the workings out. I have to first find the answer, and then go back to write workings out in the standard form to get the exam points!

I was definitely a masker, not knowing that it had anything to do with autism, just knowing that I did things the wrong way if I didn't try to please people. I actually got to a point where I was pretty good at masking and people in general liked me, but it required an extreme state of hypervigilance and concentration that could never slip. It was also degrading. I had to hide my intelligence, subtly insult myself to make other people feel good about themselves, and basically suppress every instinct. There were times when I literally sat on my hands and bit my tongue.

I couldn't keep it up for very long, which is why I'm back in another burnout phase. It wasn't at all satisfying to be generally liked and treated like a regular person when I had absolutely no time to enjoy it. I was constantly terrified that anything I did would make everything fall apart completely. Without knowing who I was or what quality it was that I was actually suppressing, I was certain that someone was bound to discover me and reveal me to everyone else.

Only I really don't have a me. Maybe there's bits and pieces, but for the most part, my life has been a series of performances. What or who am I really? How would I be if people had let me be? I may have crippling social anxiety now, but I remember that as a child, I loved being the center of attention. I loved my birthday then. I absolutely hate it now. Loathe it. Wish the date would be eliminated from the calendar.

So yes, I can relate. I'm so busy trying to be what I'm supposed to be that I don't have an "am," and whatever was going to be "am" is something bad, anyway. I don't have any sage advice for you, because I have no idea what's me and what's the puppet, but I'm on your team, whoever I am.

I can relate to that. Losing the sense of who the real you is... Also the fear that comes if the masking starts to break. I realize that when this happened, I would look for another job so I could begin masking again... And the time it took before I found a new job and the leaving the old one while being exposed was aweful!

And only a few times I have been able to totally feel free from masking. I was able to unmask on my last birthday as my Brother and his wife took me to a local beach and there were not many there.. And I became childlike and free. It was such a beautiful experience and a real joy!

I don't know how to unmask of my own doing. I wear so many "Stuck on" masks. I often feel when I am around people "If only they know the real me!" but what is the real me? Even I don't know. I only know bits of the real me... But God knows me.

In terms of the not thinking fast enough, I'm starting to believe that we've been too hard on ourselves (or rather, the people who researched us have severe myopia). What if the difficulties in processing and working memory were caused by its overuse? My brain starts going long before the conversation even begins, and an fMRI of me is would probably light up like a Christmas tree in the seconds before I interact. When I enter a social setting, I'm mapping out every likely scenario that I can think of and determining how I should act in each one. At the same time, I'm trying to make the face that is most appropriate to the situation, taking in the bright light, and trying to drown out the background noise. But beyond that, we are thinkers. It's very easy for us to have something in our minds other than the thing that's in front of us. Though this happens to be very good at times (Einstein probably wasn't employee of the month, but society has forgiven him), it often affects our concentration in a way that NTs find offensive. And when NTs are offended by people on the spectrum, they are not being over-sensitive or whiny (nobody in the world would even consider such an absurd notion); when NTs are offended, autistics are wrong. That's how we wind up having a processing "disorder."

An interesting thought experiment, I suppose. Ooh, that's kind of meta.

I've certainly felt as if I'm not quite sure who I am since being diagnosed and realising the extent of my masking. I don't seem to know how I should go about deciding what I want from life - it always seemed a moot question in the past; flying under people's radar was my vocation in life. My masked persona seems to be thought agreeable when I'm having a good day; but he's bland; two-dimensional; a visitor from the uncanny valley. Not feeling like a true self, but also only a shadow of the persona I thought I was aiming to project. My interests and beliefs define me to a certain extent, but a lifetime of being excessively cautious about my behaviour means that I've never really learned how to project them socially.

What you described is very much how I think about it. The search for certainty about which action will lead to which outcome can lead to an outpouring of possibilities that leave me stuck in "analysis paralysis" sometimes. And I'm absolutely certain that consciously mimicking NT behaviours, suppressing autistic behaviours, and blocking unwanted sensory input all take up huge amounts processing power, distract our attention, and jam up our working memory. It's no wonder that masking is so exhausting. I'm sometimes listening to someone while still trying to work out who or what all the pronouns were referring to in something said a couple of sentences ago; or trying to work out why someone's demeanor changed when a new person joined the conversation and wondering whether it means that I have to behave differently now.

I think sometimes, we may also be hard on ourselves when we say that we're no good at multitasking. Having all that to do at once sounds like some pretty nifty time-slicing if you ask me!

I can relate to this, my brain is not capable of what is used to be. Perhaps thankfully... as I would probably be still aiming for "perfect" and living a lie if my brain still allowed it lol.

I must mask socially for work, as I need to remain independant, cant secure regular fulltime employment, so I'm always stuck in new job/interview mode and must do this due to zero support for adults until their mental health collapses.

I do this all the time... Thinking about what the person must be thinking about how I look so I kind of end up copying how the person I'm talking to acts and what they talk about to avoid being "annoying" or looking odd... As long as I can remember tho I get comfortable with one or a few people but as soon as someone else enters in I get worried and confused as its a whole new person to figure out how to act around....

Yes. And even thinking about thinking how the other person must be thinking adds another third thinking dimention to things. I stop myself and think "What am I doing!" Haha!