I am not especially fond of the word “masking.”
It sounds socially deceptive, as if we are intentionally putting on an act to fool people. What is actually happening is deeply survival-driven.
I’ve often noticed that individuals described as “high-masking”—especially those with a Pervasive Drive for Autonomy (PDA) profile—are frequently labeled as having "surface-level sociability." That couldn’t be further from the truth. To me, it feels like societal projection.
The reality is that many of our nervous systems intensely crave depth. It’s just that our society only finds that level of depth, including raw connection, acceptable in very narrow, limited contexts. Without real avenues for genuine depth, and with an urgent need for predictability, we resort to scripting, skimming, and skating by in small talk just to get through the day.
When you go decades without being accurately mirrored, mimicking social norms for the comfort of those around you stops being a choice. It becomes a protective reflex to avoid ostracization. Masking is a necessary survival tool—and for many of us, it remains necessary to some degree.
The Crucial Boundary: Unmasking vs. Disclosure
Let’s draw a clear boundary here: Unmasking is a process, and it is NOT the same thing as disclosure.
While these concepts are often discussed interchangeably, they are separate, potentially overlapping processes. For an excellent roadmap on disclosure, I highly recommend looking at the work of Dr. Megan Anna Neff via the Neurodivergent Insights Self-Disclosure Thermometer.
Disclosure usually demands a massive amount of energy to educate, translate, and advocate. That energy is often completely depleted by the time we even realize we are neurodivergent. Many of us don’t start unmasking because we had a spiritual awakening; we start because we have burned clean through our reserves and are simply unable to perform "normal" anymore.
(If you are an AuDHDer who likes to burn things down like myself, my advice is to start with disclosure to your family of origin. I’m kidding, of course—you are probably already exhausted just trying to text that safe handful of friends who reply with a “hard same” and a disgruntled cat meme.)
From Clinical Terms to Lived Reality
Instead of the clinical label “high-masking,” I lean toward “heavy masking.” It honors the massive physical toll of carrying a performance through a standard Tuesday. There is a profound weight in trying to show up authentically and maintain your integrity in a world designed for a completely different kind of operating system.
To look at the data behind this weight, researcher Laura Hull and colleagues (2017, 2019) conceptualized social camouflaging into a three-part model, measured via the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q):
Compensation: Strategies—like scripting or rehearsing conversations—used to bridge communication gaps (common in autism and ADHD).
Masking: Behaviors used to hide or suppress innate neurodivergent traits to appear "normal."
Assimilation: Efforts to blend into social situations and perform regulation within a room that wasn’t built for your nervous system.
There is another heavy layer to this communication gap. Those of us with detail- and sensory-oriented processing are constantly trying to have a conversation in real-time before our brains actually have a chance to catch up. Our systems are processing too much volume and trying to resolve too many prediction errors all at once.
Because the pacing of standard conversation rarely aligns with our internal timing, we rely on stock, scripted responses just to keep up. (I’ll dive deeper into this prediction-error loop in a future post.)
Reclaiming the Choice: A Somatic Return
We never consciously chose to pick up heavy masking as a lifestyle. For many of us, the mask fuses so tightly we cannot tell where we begin and end—not until burnout forces a reckoning.
Unmasking is a slow, conscious reclamation of how you actually want to engage with the world.
For a personal example, I make a practice of softening my gaze and allowing my eyes to wander where they want on my walks. I’ve noticed that when I mask, I get stuck in a tunnel vision of self-monitoring that doesn’t allow me to luxuriate in the birds, trees, and deep greens of the forest around me.
In this way, unmasking is a deeply somatic process. It is also an act of learning to calculate your bandwidth—deciding when to mask because you choose to, backed by the deep compassion of building in recovery time afterward.
You get to put down the weight, piece by heavy piece, whenever you find a safe place to set it down.
Find a Safe Place to Set It Down
If you are navigating the exhausting realities of heavy masking, AuDHD burnout, or a PDA profile, you don’t have to untangle it alone. Therapy can be a space where you quit performing “normal” and can finally show up as you are.
If you are looking for a collaborative, identity-affirming space to slow down, explore your bandwidth, and practice safe unmasking, feel free to reach out today to schedule a consultation.
