Masking, ADHD & Autism: Why Unmasking Isn’t Always the Answer

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We’ve been told that masking is the problem.
That it’s exhausting, inauthentic, and something we need to unlearn.

But what if that’s not the full story?

In this episode of Dating on High Alert, we explore a different perspective, one that honours masking as a survival strategy, especially for those navigating ADHD, autism, and trauma.

This is a deeper, more honest conversation about:

•  What masking actually is (beyond the internet narrative) 
•  Why it may not be the thing exhausting you 
•  The role of shame, trauma, and survival 
•  Why “just unmask” can feel unsafe 
•  And what healing actually looks like instead 

Your mask is not your enemy.
 It might be one of the most sophisticated things about you.

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Unmask. Rebuild. Thrive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Dating on High Alert, the podcast about dating, relationships, and life in general when you're neurodivergent and have a trauma history. I'm your host, Ilya Abatista, trauma-informed coach, speaker, ADHD woman, survivor, and someone who has lived the things that I talk about. I have ADHD, I'm autistic, and I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And I have navigated childhood trauma, the care system, exploitation and trafficking. And I have built a life and a career on the other side of all of that. I don't speak from theory, I speak from the inside. And this is a space for honest, unfiltered conversations about what it really means to navigate love, connection, and yourself when your brain and your past make everything feel a little more complicated. And today's episode is one that I have wanted to record for a long time. It's called The Mask Didn't Break Me, The Shame Did. And in it I'm challenging something that gets repeated constantly in neurodivergent spaces. The idea that masking is the problem and unmasking is the goal. And I want to offer a different perspective. One that comes from someone whose mask wasn't just a social habit, it was a survival tool. And I think for a lot of you listening, this one is going to land somewhere deep. And I want to start today's episode with a question. When you hear the word masking, what comes up for you? Maybe you've only recently discovered the word and suddenly your whole life made sense. Maybe you've been in neurodivergence spaces for years and you've absorbed the dominant message: masking is exhausting. Masking is inauthentic, masking is something you should be working to undo. Or maybe, and this is who I'm really talking to today. Maybe you've heard that message and something inside of you quietly resisted it. Maybe you thought, I don't know how to stop. I'm not even sure that I want to, and I'm not entirely sure that the mask is the problem. Now, if this you, if this is you, stay with me because today I want to offer you something different. It's not a contradiction of everything that you've read, but a reframe, a deeper look, a more honest conversation about what masking actually is for some of us, what it did for us, and why the rush to dismantle it might be solving the wrong problem entirely. This is the masking episode, and it might not sound like any masking conversation that you may have heard before. And I'd like to start with the narrative that's already out there because I think it's worth naming clearly before I challenge it. If you've spent time in any neurodivergent communities, whether it's on TikTok, Instagram, in therapy, in books, you'll you'll have encountered a fairly consistent message about masking. It goes something like this. Masking is the act of suppressing or hiding your neurodivergent traits in order to appear neurotypical. It is something autistic people, ADHDs, and those of us who are both Audi HD do automatically, often without even realizing it. We learn to make eye contact when it's uncomfortable, we modulate our voices, we suppress our stimming, script our conversations, mirror the people around us, and perform versions of normal that don't come naturally to us. We do it to fit in, to be accepted, to avoid judgment and to stay safe. And the message continues. This is exhausting. It is a performance that costs you enormously. It disconnects you from your authentic self. Over time, it leads to burnout, loss of identity, to mental health deterioration. The research backs this up. And the lived experience accounts back this up too. And therefore, the solution, the healing, the goal is to unmask, to learn, to show up as you really are, to find the people and the spaces where you don't have to perform, to put down the weight of pretending and finally, finally just be. Not performing a lie. It was just adaptive, flexible, a quick study. And then life got harder and the masking got more complicated and more necessary. And there were periods in my life, significant, extended, dangerous periods, where masking wasn't fitting in at a social event. It was about survival at its most literal sense and about getting through a day, about not being hurt, about keeping yourself together when everything inside of you was screaming. And in those periods, the mask was everything. And if I didn't present okay, if I slipped, if I let what was really happening on the inside show on the outside, the consequences were severe. And so I learned to keep the mask firmly in place. And it wasn't because I was ashamed of who I was, but because the world that I was in demanded it, and I had no choice. That became my normal. It becomes automatic, built in part of the architecture of how you function. And I don't always know I'm masking in the moment. Sometimes I only realize that I've done it afterwards. I'll reflect on an interaction on how I handled something, or on how I presented myself, and I'll think, oh, I was masked for that, and it became that seamless. I want to try and describe something that I've never really put into words publicly like this before because I think it really matters. When I mask, when I consciously call the mask into place, it isn't an abstract psychological process, it has a physical quality to it, a felt sense. There's there are different kinds of masks for different situations, and they feel different in my body. One of them feels like a shield, it's invisible but present, and I can feel it settle around me like a layer of protection that sits just outside of my skin. It doesn't change what I look like on the outside. Nobody can see it. It feels like it's fluid, but I know that it's there, and its presence means that I can function. It means that I can walk into a room, tell my story, speak about things that would otherwise undo me and hold myself together. And another mask feels like uh, again, it's an invisible layer, it's on my face, it's on my shoulders, it's a kind of covering, and once it's in place, I can do almost anything. I can stand in front of an audience and speak about the most difficult parts of my life. I can walk into a networking event that my nervous system is absolutely screaming to escape from. And I can do the interview, the presentation, that difficult conversation. And these aren't metaphors I invented to explain masking to other other people. They are the closest that I can get to describing what actually happens in my body when I mask. And I discovered recently that I could even articulate it, and that really surprised me because for so long it was just something that happened, something I did without having any words for it. And what I know about these masks is this: they are not hiding the real me, they are not telling a lie, they are a tool that I have developed over decades that allows me to function in situations that would otherwise overwhelm me. The mask isn't a wall between me and the world, it's more like an armour that lets me step into the world at all. So here is the heart of my theory. The thing I want you to sit with. We say masking is exhausting, and I don't dispute that. Um, and I don't dispute that many people feel exhausted, and I'm not dismissing that experience. But I want to ask a different question. What exactly is doing the exhausting? Is it the adapting itself? The flexibility, the mirroring, the code switching, the management of how you present. Is that on its own what depletes you? Or is it something running underneath that? Something quieter and possibly more corrosive? Think about it this way. Imagine two people, both of whom, mask regularly. Both of them adapt their presentation in social situations. Both of them manage how they come across, both of them present a version of themselves that is considered and contextual. The first person does this from a place of choice and confidence, and they think, oh, I'm good at reading uh situations and I enjoy adapting. This is part of who I navigate the world and I'm proud of that skill. And they go home tired after a long day of social interaction. But it's the ordinary tiredness of effort, not the bone deep depletion of somebody who has been fighting themselves all day. The second person does the same thing outwardly, but underneath a voice is running constantly. If they knew the real me, they would be appalled. I have to keep this up or they will see through me. I'm fooling everybody. Um I don't deserve to be here. What if I slip? What if they find out? And you know, there could be other things going on in your mind, but that person goes home not just tired but hollowed out, not just depleted but ashamed. Same behavior, completely different experience. And that second layer, that internal monologue of shame and self-surveillance and fear of truly being seen. This is what I believe most of us are actually calling masking exhaustion, not the adaptation itself. The shame that makes the adaptation feel like a cover-up rather than a skill. The exhaustion isn't the mask, it's the belief that you need to hide something fundamentally wrong with you. And that is a crucially different problem. Because if the mask is the problem, the solution is to remove it. But if the shame is the problem, the solution is to heal the shame, not to expose yourself before you're ready, not to forcibly dismantle the very thing that keeps you functional, but to do the slow, difficult, necessary work of changing what you believe about yourself at your core. And I need to talk about the trauma here. I think this conversation looks completely different when trauma is in the picture. And for a lot of us, particularly those of us who are Audi HD, where the combination of autism and ADHD seems to correlate with higher rates of adverse childhood experiences, trauma isn't a side note. It's central. My masking didn't begin with a decision. It began in a body that was learning very early that a world was not reliably safe, that certain things had to be hidden, that how I presented myself had real consequences. I was sexually abused as a young child by a close friend of the family. It lasted years. And during that time, I only understand this in retrospect. I learnt to disassociate, to be present in a room whilst also being somewhere else entirely, to keep the surface calm while something underneath it was shattered. Is disassociation a form of masking? I think it might be. I think they're at least cousins. Both are about the gap between what's happening on the inside and what you're able to show on the outside. Both are adaptive. Both are intelligent responses to circumstances that a child has no other tools to manage. Later, I lived in care and at 17 I was exploited and trafficked across Europe. I don't say these things for shock value. I say them because they are the context in which my masking was forged. Because you cannot understand why the mask is so deeply embedded in me without understanding what it was protecting me from. During the trafficking period, masking was not optional. It was the difference between getting through the day and not getting through the day. I had to present as okay, constantly, repeatedly, to people who would hurt me if they sensed weakness or resistance or a self that was trying to hold on to itself. Every single interaction was managed, every face I put on was deliberate, even when it felt like breathing, automatic, necessary, not a choice. I learned in that period that I could do it, that whatever this capacity was, it was reliable. It was mine, even when everything else had been taken. The ability to manage my presentation to function in the face of something unsurvivable, that was something that they couldn't take. And when I came out the other side, the masking came with me. Of course it did. It was part of who I am now. And what I want people to hear, especially those of you who have trauma threaded through your neurodivergent experience, is this to tell somebody to like me to unmask without meaning to, asking me to remove the defenses that formed around the most painful and dangerous experiences of my life without creating safety, without first addressing what those defenses were responding to, you wouldn't tell somebody who survived a war zone to stop looking over their shoulder the moment they arrived in a safe country. The nervous system doesn't work like that. The healing has to come first, the safety has to be established, and then slowly, on their own terms, the armor can begin to be set down, not dismantled, set down, and there's a difference. And I also want to zoom in on something specific for it for a moment. Being Aud, both autistic and ADHD, is not simply having two conditions side by side. The way they interact creates something distinct. Autistic masking tends to be effortless and conscious. Forgive me if I'm wrong with that. But it's a learned performance of neurotypicality. ADHD masking often involves different things, managing impulsivity, appearing more focused than you are, compensating for the executive function gaps that other people don't share. And when those two things combine, you get a person who is masking on multiple levels simultaneously, often in ways that conflict with each other. The autism wants routine and predictability. The ADHD craves novelty and becomes dysregulated by boredom. The autism wants to prepare and script. The ADHD interrupts the script mid-conversation. The masking required to manage both while also appearing functional to the outside world is extraordinarily complex. And when you add trauma to that, particularly early, repeated relational trauma, the kind that shapes your attachment system and your nervous system before your brain is even fully developed. You get a person whose masking has been operating at a level of sophistication that most people never need to develop. We are, in some ways, experts in human behavior. We have studied people, we have read rooms, we have predicted reactions, manage dynamics, not as a hobby but as a necessity. And that is not something to be ashamed of. That is a form of intelligence born out of circumstance. The neurodivergent discourse doesn't always make room for this. It treats masking as a single thing with a single cause and a single solution. But for those of us sitting in at the intersection of Audi HD and complex trauma, it is something far more layered. And we deserve a conversation that honours that complexity rather than flattening it. I can hear some of you pushing back, and I want to take that seriously because it's a fair challenge. And there is research showing that long-term masking is associated with burnout, anxiety, depression, and even reduced quality of life. There are accounts, many of them, of people who managed who marched for decades and eventually hit a wall, who couldn't keep it up anymore, who collapsed under the weight of performance. And I'm not dismissing that. I'm asking, what were those people carrying underneath the mask? Because I don't think the research is measuring the mask in isolation. I think it's measuring the mask plus the shame, plus the self rejection, plus the years of believing there is something fundamentally wrong. With you that needs to be hidden. And I think the burnout is the cumulative cost of that inner war, not simply the cost of being socially adaptive. And there's also an important distinction between masking by choice in contexts where it's useful and masking because you genuinely don't believe you're allowed to exist as you are. And the first can be sustainable, even energizing in the right circumstances. And the second will eventually cost you everything. And I'd also say this for those of us with CPTSD, burnout is not just a masking phenomenon. Our nervous systems are wired for high alert. Our baseline threat is baseline threat detection is different. We are exhausted by life in ways that have nothing to do with whether we're presenting authentically or not. Conflating that exhaustion with masking exhaustion muddles the picture considerably. And I'm not saying masking never contributes to burnout. I'm saying it's not the whole story. And treating it as the whole story leads people towards a solution that may not address what's actually hurting them. And I know some of you are sitting with a very practical question right now. Okay, how do I know which one it is for me? How do I know if I'm exhausted from the masking or from the shame? And it's a good question. And I want to try and give you something useful. And here are some of the things that I'd invite you to notice. When you've been in a social situation and you've come home feeling depleted, what is the quality of that depletion? Is it more like tiredness you feel after a long run, an effort that cost you but didn't diminish you? Or is it more like a feeling after you've been holding your breath for hours, a tight, anxious exhaustion that feels closer to relief to have survived than satisfaction at having managed? What is the internal monologue that runs whilst you're masking? Is it more like a director? Okay, this situation calls for this. I'll approach it this way. I've got this, or is it more like a critic? Don't slip up, or they can't see the real you, you don't belong here. Hold it together. And when you imagine being seen, I mean, really seen, no mask at all, what is that feeling? Is it more like a vulnerability and openness that feels risky but also possible, or is it more like terror? Like the thought of, is it genuinely unsafe? And there are no right or wrong answers. These are just windows into which part of this is doing the work. And here's one more question, maybe the most important. Do you believe at your core that you actually, that who you are actually is acceptable? Not perfect, not easy, not neurotypical, but acceptable, worthy of being in a room, worthy of taking up space, worthy of love without the mask earning it. And if the answer is yes, or even maybe your exhaustion might genuinely be about the energy of adapting, the and and finding more spaces where you can adapt less might be the path. If the answer is a sharp, immediate no, that is the work, not the unmasking, the shame underneath it. And I want to be clear about something because I don't want this episode to become an excuse to never examine anything. I'm not saying masking is perfect, I'm not saying it should never be looked at, never reflected on, never allowed to evolve. I'm not saying you should never have relationships where you're more fully known. What I'm saying is that the order matters and the framing matters. And if you go into this process believing the mask is the problem, you will try to remove it. And for many of us, that is genuinely destabilizing. And definitely not because we're fragile, but because the mask is load-bearing, it's holding things up. You can't pull it out without understanding what it's supporting first. The work as I see it goes something like this first curiosity, not judgment. Get to know your mask. When does it appear? What does it feel like in your body? Because for me, it has a physical presence, um, an invisible layer that settles into place. And what is it responding to? What threat, real or perceived, called it into being in this moment, second. Start to separate the skill from the shame. The skill is the adaptability, the social intelligence, the capacity to read and navigate complex human situations. The shame is the story you tell about why you need to hide. Begin to notice which is which. And third, address the shame directly. This is the part that usually needs support. A good therapist, ideally somebody who understands both neurodivergence and trauma, and who is not going to immediately tell you that unmasking is the goal. The shame lives in the body as much as it does in the mind. And it needs to be worked with at that level. And fourth, let safety be the indicator, not ideology. The question of whether, when, and how much to unmask in any given relationship or context should be driven by genuine safety, emotional, relational, physical, and not by what the internet towels says that you should be doing by now. Unmasking into unsafe spaces is not healing, it's just a different kind of harm. And fifth, allow for that possibility that who you are includes the mask not as a performance, not as a lie, but as a genuine part of you, a skill, a tool, a layer of selfhood that was forged in difficult circumstances and is now, in some contexts, simply how you move through the world. That is allowed, that is real, and you're not less authentic for being adaptive. And I imagine that some of you sitting with a quieter, sadder question underneath all of this: if I keep masking, even from a healthier place, even as a choice, will I ever really be known? Will anybody ever actually see me? And I want to sit with that for a moment because it deserves more than a quick reassurance. And here's what I think is true. There's a version of being known that requires total exposure, every edge visible, every vulnerability on the surface, nothing managed or filtered. And there is another version of being known that is about shared history, about trust built slowly, about someone understanding how you think, what you value, what you've survived, what you're capable of, even if they never see you completely undone. And the second version is available to you with the right people, in the right relationships built over time. You don't have to dismantle yourself to be loved. You don't have to remove the armour in the middle of the room to prove you trust somebody. Real intimacy, that kind that actually holds, is built more slowly and more quietly than that. The people who truly know me know me not because I've removed my mask for them, they know me because they've watched me over time, because they've seen what I choose, what I protect, what I return to, how I treat people, what breaks through, even when the mask is firmly in place. And you can be known with your armour on, and it just takes longer. And the right person will understand why the armour exists without needing you to prove it by taking it off. And I want to speak directly to a few different people who might be listening right now. If you are somebody who has masked your way through childhood trauma, who learnt to disassociate, to perform okayness in situations that were opposite of okay, who kept the surface calm while something underneath whilst was being broken. I want you to hear this. What you did was not weakness, what you did was survival intelligence operating at a level most people will never understand. You did not betray yourself by hiding, you protected yourself, and you get to honour that even as you heal. And if you are someone who read about unmasking and felt a flood of dread, you know, not the healthy discomfort of growth, but the genuine terror, the feeling that taking off the mask would mean standing exposed in a world that has hurt you. Please listen to that feeling. It's it's information. And it may be telling you that work isn't masking yet, the work is safety first. The work could be the shame, the work is building an inner foundation from which one day you might choose to be more visible on your own terms in your own time. And if you are somebody who masks daily and doesn't see it as a problem, who finds it useful, who takes a kind of quite pride in your ability to navigate, who has made peace with the adaptive, layered, complex person that you are, you are allowed to claim that. You are not failing at being neurodivergent, you are not doing your healing wrong. You are a person who has developed a sophisticated set of skills from for moving through a world that wasn't built for you, and that is something. And if you are somebody who is exhausted, who genuinely can't keep the mask up anymore, who feels like it's costing you more than it's giving you, and not dismissing you. For you, the work might look different, it might include finding spaces and relationships where you can let some things go. But I'd still invite you to ask, is the mask what's exhausting you, or is it the shame running underneath it? Because the answer changes everything about what you do next. And I've been sitting with this theory for a long time, longer than I've been able to articulate it. And it wasn't until recently, until I found words for the physical reality of my own mask, the invisible layer on my face and shoulders, the shield that settles into place when I need it, that I realized how much I wanted to talk about it publicly. The neurodivergent community has given us so much language, validation, community, a way of understanding ourselves that has been genuinely life-changing for so many people, including myself. And I am not here to take that apart. But I think we owe each other more honesty about the complexity, about the people for whom masking isn't just a social habit to be unlearned, but a survival skill forged in genuinely dangerous circumstances, about the way trauma changes the masking conversation entirely, and about the possibility that shame is the wound and the mask has just been taking the blame. I don't think that your mask is your enemy. Your mask might be one of the most sophisticated things about you. And what I'd invite you to do, not as a task, not as homework, but as a gentle act of curiosity, is to start to get to know it. To notice when it appears, what it feels like, what it's protecting. Not to remove it, but just to understand it. Because understand it, understanding it gives you something precious. The beginning of choice. The possibility of wearing it consciously as a tool you control rather than a reflex that controls you. That's a big difference. And I think between masking as a wound and masking as wisdom, not the mask itself, but your relationship to it. That relationship, slowly, carefully, with the right support, is something that you can change. The professionals may tell you to unmask. And today I'm going to ask, what if it's the wrong question entirely? And if you're a therapist, a psychologist, or a neurodivergence specialist listening to this and you disagree with me, I genuinely want to hear from you. Come and find me, let's have that conversation publicly because I think our community deserves it. And I want to thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting me with this conversation. And if this episode brought something up for you, whether you agree, disagree, felt seen, felt challenged, I would really love to hear from you. Come and find me, and this community exists because of real conversations we're willing to have. And this one matters to me more than most. Take care of yourselves out there. I'll see you next time on Dating on Higher Let. And as always, until next challenge.