What Is Masking — and Why It's Exhausting Autistic Adults

Masking — also called camouflaging — is when an autistic person suppresses, hides, or compensates for their autistic traits in order to appear more neurotypical. It can be conscious or unconscious, and it's exhausting in ways that are hard to describe to someone who's never done it.

What masking looks like

• Forcing eye contact even when it's uncomfortable
• Suppressing stimming behaviors in public
• Scripting conversations in advance and replaying them mentally
• Mirroring the body language and tone of others
• Performing interest in topics that don't genuinely interest you
• Hiding sensory distress to avoid drawing attention

The cost of masking

Research links chronic masking to:

• Burnout — a state of physical and emotional exhaustion that can take months or years to recover from
• Depression and anxiety
• Loss of sense of self — "I don't know who I am when I'm not performing"
• Delayed diagnosis — particularly in women and non-binary people who mask more effectively
• Post-traumatic stress, especially for those who were explicitly trained to mask through ABA or similar approaches

Why this is relevant to OT

Traditional OT has sometimes — unintentionally or intentionally — reinforced masking. Teaching social skills to "look normal," targeting stimming for reduction, focusing on appearing more neurotypical.

Neuroaffirmative OT does the opposite. We work with autistic adults to:

• Identify where they are masking and what it's costing them
• Explore what they actually want their social and occupational life to look like
• Build environments and routines that require less masking
• Develop self-advocacy skills so they can unmask safely in more contexts
• Reconnect with authentic interests, preferences, and ways of being

You deserve to exist in the world as yourself. That's the goal.