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[personal profile] greenstorm
Masking in the autistic world is acting like someone else in order to survive within society. It may look like keeping your body in uncomfortable shapes, or uncomfortably still, to imitate other people's behaviour. It may look like professing different interests or emotions or thoughts than you actually have. It may look like imitating the people around you, or not participating much, rather than understanding what is going on. There are lots of kinds of masking.

A therapist said to me a couple weeks ago that autistic behaviours are innately human behaviours. They're just scaled differently and those shifts in scale are clustered differently.

Some research I haven't fact-checked says that parts of autistic folks' brains are more entangled, that we experience some things as connected that others do not, including experiences and physical pain. That seems to be true.

PDAers are often excellent maskers; part of our profile is that we are "manipulative" because we "use social strategies" to get what we need. The difference between a PDAer and a neurotypical "using social strategies" is that a PDAer "lacks understanding". This is the diagnostic criteria, which is pretty hostile towards the survival of PDAers (obviously if we didn't use strategies to get what we need we would not have what we need, but it's considered manipulative to act like a neurotypical while not being one I guess).

I've been an excellent masker in the social strategies department. I feel a lot of emotions and experie3nce a lot of things, and if I can get someone to tell me a little bit about what's going on for them I can empathize. Until recently I thought that was because my emotions were pretty similar to other folks'.

Now I think my emotions are much bigger than other folks'. My masking has basically involved turning the volume down on my emotions before sharing them, and selecting which set of emotions to share. I thought this was a social thing everyone did -- there's all this stuff floating around in the culture about how it's healthy to open up to friends about your emotions, which implies that many people do not open up, so I thought I was just like normal people in that regard.

With more data, though, I'm not so sure anymore. On the one hand I have a lot of folks around me who have trouble sitting with a friend's emotion: they would be uncomfortable with any expression of "negative" emotion I think if they couldn't immediately shut it down and end it? But on the other hand when I express my full internal sense of emotion, even if it's just through language and with no body or tone involvement, folks get really worried. People who know me more often have a better sense that this is my norm, but just regular folks? Not so much.

Thinking about this is unsettling and weird. It explains a lot about the world and people's choices? I don't know, I'm still chewing on this one and will be for awhile.

Date: 2022-08-20 04:26 am (UTC)
chemicalcain: a dog with a knife. there is a red glare in its eyes (Default)
From: [personal profile] chemicalcain

obviously if we didn't use strategies to get what we need we would not have what we need, but it's considered manipulative to act like a neurotypical while not being one I guess

I feel this. I've been thinking a lot about the ways society defines manipulation and communication lately. A lot of definitions seem to write in a contextless, clear-cut dichotomy between what is and is not manipulative, which is rarely true in my experience. And most definitions I've seen can be weaponized against neurodivergent people in this same way.

The one you quote in particular also assumes that neurotypicals all understand the consequences when they manipulate someone. Which doesn't seem to be the case to me. Understanding is not the dividing factor here, because it is possible to understand without harm, and to harm without understanding. I dunno. There's a lot that feeds into it.

It's so difficult to understand the internal landscape of someone else's experience, and just as hard to communicate one's own. I even struggle to compare the intensity and hue of my emotions to experiences I've had in the past; comparing to other people is a whole different beast.

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