[Raw & Uncut] Autistic Women Reveal the Truth About High Masking – FULL INTERVIEW

I can relate a lot to Sharon

Thank you all. This is very interesting and helpful.

Oh my goodness, I relate so much to many of the things you guys have been saying! Thank you all for your time and energy in making this video.

The masking question / concept brought me great distress…getting diagnosed at 49 I started to explore and for a long time felt lost, who am I ? Why have I lied to myself ? Am I lying to myself? It felt like I went through a process of dissecting my whole life. I'm still trying to put the pieces back in some coherent way that makes sense to me? Maybe it's a lifelong process! A very eye opening webinar thankyou to all participants.

Thank you!!!! This is such an incredibly helpful, useful, validating, informative resource. I have never felt so …. just like everyone, in my life! So many experiences I've written down in my years of questioning, second guessing, and now exploring my experiences in a new, more suitable lens, were spoken here so eloquently. Thank you to all the panelists and to Paul for organizing and beautifully moderating this event.

as a very rough generalisation, I think autistic women are similar to non-autistic men, and autistic men are similar to non-autistic robots, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong

This was great to watch, much appreciated! I wonder if we could invite all of these ladies back to allow for more questions and possibly collaborate with a therapist or another lady who has known for a long time and had a full diagnosis. This stream was a great effort! We just want more, please

oh, I relate to that — masking around negative role models.
I also started early… I was maybe three when I asked my mother the purpose of eye contact and decided to learn how to make it in a way which allowed people to feel heard.
But the mask wasn't separate. I incorporated the mask as "rules" and would apply them 24/7 or whenever I was in a particular context. I wasn't very successful, as a result, because (a) I was never myself, not even when I was asleep, because I was always meeting the perceived expectations of others and (b) my contexts were too broad, and I was unable to discern how to narrow the contexts because I needed to have some of the factors explicitly explained and one of the first things I internalized was that asking clarifying questions or asking for someone to accompany me into a social situation and debrief afterwards were not acceptable. I learned a lot of lessons no one meant to teach me, and that made it impossible for me to learn what they WERE trying to teach.

on the topic of leveraging femininity:
I think a great deal of the reason it took longer for women to be recognized as autistic is because we had more generations during which it was widely accepted and even expected for us to stay in the home — where we could laregely structure our lives the way we needed and had interaction with a limited circle of people for most of our hours. I come from generations of almost-certainly-neurodivergent, quirky, overcontrolled/overcontrolling women who remained competent by structuring their households and social engagements, and generations of men who succeeded at academic and/or highly solitary professions. I was taught, from the cradle, how to manage a household, host a party (when you set up the structure of the event, there are fewer unexpected and poorly defined elements to be threatening), and how to do school. Both my family and society taught me how to be a successful student and manage a household. Then I was shoved into the workforce — and I received essentially NO explicit education on navigating professional life, learning new skills as an adult, and problem solving. Also, women (at least white women) are allowed to express a wide range of emotions, but men (particularly white men) are primarily allowed to experience anger and happiness, but nothing else.

I can relate to everything. Hating Girly stuff, not being able to advocate for myself in conflicts, putting on the smile, having to skip the networking/socialising and therefore limiting my career chances, not being able to be smart because it's interpreted as arrogant and blunt, and many more. Thanks for this talk!

Thank you so much for sharing this conversation. It is so reaffirming hearing other women explaining the stuff that goes on in my head so clearly.
Such a helpful video 🙏🏼

I'm struggling with close personal relationships in which I was high masking because they now believe that I was lying. That's a big issue.

Thank you… so very valuable to me…💙💜 HFAW; i see myself in many comments shared.

totally relate to people thinking you are trying to be funny when it's what you are truly thinking.

The lady from Ohio who would you recommend to get officially diagnosed???? I was diagnosed with ADHD and Tics at 10. During that time early 2000’s you had either one or the other. I really do believe I have both too. I’ve just started on this Journey this past fall because of my son people keep saying he has autistic, red flags. My family keep saying he dose the cute little quirky stuff you used to do. I heavily mask my symptoms.

This is extraordinary! I'm male, and autistic, yet I identify with so much of what these women describe. I too spent years trying to figure out what was "wrong" with me. I recieved so many diagnosises my head spun. Generalized anxiety. Depression. ADHD. Panic disorder. Agoraphobia. Refractory major depressive disorder. PTSD.

Oh, and I was tested and identifed as "Mentally gifted" (very high IQ) as a child. Talk about masking! My repeated failures in social, academic, and employment settings were attributed by my mother to "Boredom, lazyness or simply poor character. I was shamed by her and others constantly for being "brilliant but unmotivated" unless I was "interested in something." When "interested in something" I quickly became an expert in it, which created all sorts of social problems, and ultimately burn-outs, shut-downs, and withdrwal, depression, extreme anxiety, shame, withdrawl, and even suicidal thoughts.

I took an online autism assessment about 10 years ago, and almost maxed it out, yet dismissed it, because back then, autism was "rare and disabling" A couple of years ago my girlfreind, who I suspect is also autistc suggested by way of love and acceptance that autism was central to my personality. It took over a year, but ultimately I was formally diagnosed by an autism diagnostic specialist earlier this year.

Wow – what a revelation. It all makes sense now.

The final thing I'll say to anyone suffering from anxiety, depression, and especially suicidal thoughts is that ketamine infusion theraphy stopped all of that for me in 2018. Stopped it almost immediately – within hours. One treatment – though most people need a series of them. It was an absolute miracle in my case, and there's mounting evidence that autistic people in particular benefit enormously from the treatment. Dont take my word for it. Google "ketamine infusion therapy for depression" and dive in to the massive amount of research supporting it. If you are suffering, I urge you to consider it. It's safe and it's the most effective treatment for anxiety, depression and sucidal thinking ever discovered.

Huge thanks to Paul and the poarticipants here for sharing their experiences and insights into how autism and masking affect them. You are making a critical difference for people like me, who thought we were alone. Keep it up!

One thing as an autistic female I find particularly uncomfortable is the performance of 'femininity'. For a few years, I heavily questioned whether I had gender dysphoria and perhaps was trans because I felt so wrong and alien with being 'a woman'. I feel kinda squirmy even being called that way. However, I finally realized that I am fine with being biologically 'female', it's with the behaviours, appearances and presentation of 'femininity' that I have a problem. It feels like a complicated fancy costume to me, not natural. I feel like an animal, basically we don't look at a tiger or wolf and think "oh it's a GIRL or BOY", we think "it's a WOLF".. I wish I could just be seen as a person, a Me, without thinking about what's 'feminine' or not.

Thank you for this! So nice to see people like me represented. However, it would be great to also include people of color in this conversation to hear their perspectives and have that representation as well.

Something that came up here was so good for healing and I would love to have see an autism group that discusses bad therapists! Autism is traumatic in a neurotypical world and therapists that impress what our experience is and gaslight us by saying we don't know due to our autism is so wrong but also those who gaslight us and say they don't believe we are autistic when they fully disclosed they don't know a lot about autism in adults..and then further the therapists who gaslight trauma and say they don't believe the depth of trauma autistic adults have or can experience

Thank you SO MUCH! I grew up being told that I was just overly sensitive and highly intelligent and I got into so many toxic relationships because no one taught me how to avoid them (and my family’s treatment of me growing up primed me for them.) My children had all been diagnosed with ADHD or autism before I ever even considered it, and I remember telling my oldest that I thought maybe I should get assessed because I thought I might be autistic. When she, and all of her teenaged siblings, finally finished laughing hysterically they said “Mom! We thought you knew!” So yeah, at 48 diagnosed autistic and adhd. This explained a LOT.