By Austin Newcomb, M.Ed., LPC, NCC
Picture this: It’s 8pm on a Tuesday. You’ve just returned from a “fun” dinner with colleagues where you spent three hours maintaining the appropriate amount of eye contact (painful), laughing at the right moments (exhausting), and keeping your hands firmly planted on your lap instead of flapping when excited (nearly impossible). Now you’re home, door locked, shoes flung across the room, and you’re lying face-down on your carpet making the weird noise that actually helps your nervous system regulate but would’ve earned you concerned glances or worse at dinner.
Welcome to the complex world of social masking, where we’ve all become masters of different shades of inauthenticity. There’s the light gray of small talk, the charcoal of forced laughter, and the midnight black of completely abandoning your own needs to please others. And if you’re neurodivergent or have a trauma history? Congratulations! You’re playing in advanced mode with fifty extra shades nobody told you about, and you’re expected to know exactly which one to wear in every situation.
The Elaborate Theater Production You Never Auditioned For
Let’s be real: social masking is essentially an unpaid acting gig with terrible hours, no benefits, and a director who keeps changing the script without telling you.
Your day might look something like this:
8:30am Meeting: You’re nodding thoughtfully (your neck hurts) while maintaining precisely 2.7 seconds of eye contact (your brain is screaming) before looking away (but not for too long or people think you’re distracted).
Noon Lunch: You’re eating the crunchy food you hate because it was the only option, filtering out fluorescent lights, the smell of someone’s tuna sandwich, and trying to follow three overlapping conversations (your auditory processing has left the building and is currently sipping margaritas on a beach somewhere).
3pm Presentation: You’re suppressing the urge to rock or bounce your leg, resulting in an internal pressure cooker that feels like you’ve swallowed a live hedgehog.
By the time you reach your car at the end of the day, your nervous system is doing the neurological equivalent of lying on the floor surrounded by empty ice cream containers while crying to breakup songs.
When “Nice” Is Actually Your Brain’s Personalized Danger-Avoidance Software
Here’s the spicy truth that nobody serves at the politeness buffet: what looks like “being nice” is often your nervous system running sophisticated safety protocols it coded during your darkest moments.
Let’s decode this neural programming:
Social Code: Always smile when criticized
Behind-the-Scenes Processing: “When Dad’s face looked like that, smiling prevented the scary yelling escalation.”
Social Code: Apologize when interrupted
Behind-the-Scenes Processing: “Accepting blame = faster conflict resolution = less time in threat detection mode.”
Social Code: Never express preferences first
Behind-the-Scenes Processing: “Unknown variables = unpredictable outcomes = potential system crash.”
Your fawn response isn’t just being a doormat. It’s a sophisticated survival algorithm running in your background like antivirus software that’s gone rogue and now flags EVERYTHING as a threat, including that harmless email asking your lunch preference.
The cosmic joke? These trauma-optimized behaviors get you Employee of the Month while your authentic self can’t even get past the first interview. Your survival mechanisms get gold stars while your genuine needs get sent to detention.
Your Body: The Rebellious Accountant Tracking Every Fake Smile
While you’re out there collecting social approval points like they’re limited-edition Pokémon cards, your body is quietly maintaining a spreadsheet of authenticity debt with the meticulous precision of an accountant who’s also a little bit vengeful.
This balance sheet eventually demands payment in the form of:
- Jaw tension that makes your dentist wonder if you’re secretly training to crack walnuts with your molars at night
- Mystery stomach issues that baffle gastroenterologists but magically intensify before social events (your gut literally cannot stomach one more fake pleasantry)
- The infamous “Sunday Scaries” that are less about Monday and more about putting your authenticity in a storage unit for another 40+ hours
- Sleep that’s more elusive than affordable housing in a major city
- The legendary post-masking collapse that turns you into a human-shaped puddle capable only of staring at the ceiling while questioning every social interaction you’ve had since middle school
For neurodivergent folks, suppressing stims is like trying to hold in a sneeze while also doing complex math. Technically possible but physiologically confusing and increasingly uncomfortable until something’s gotta give. That “something” is usually your well-being, which exits dramatically through the gift shop of your nervous system, taking all the souvenir dignity with it.
The Gaslighting Funhouse: When Your Reality Gets Voted Off the Island
The most twisted part of this whole masquerade ball? The way it convinces you that your actual, lived experience is the problem, not the impossible standards you’re trying to meet.
It’s like living in a world where everyone insists that lemons are sweet, and when you mention they’re sour, people look at you with that special blend of concern and judgment reserved for someone who’s just announced they can communicate with household appliances.
Take eye contact, that special form of socially-mandated soul penetration. For many neurodivergent folks and trauma survivors, sustained eye contact feels anywhere from distractingly uncomfortable to actively threatening, like someone’s performing unauthorized downloads directly from your brain.
Yet society has collectively decided that avoiding eye contact means you’re shifty, dishonest, or not paying attention. The underlying message is crystal clear: Your lived experience is invalid. Your discomfort is imaginary. Your natural way of being is fundamentally wrong and needs an immediate software update to version “Normal Human 2.0.”
After years of this funhouse messaging, you might stop trusting your own internal signals altogether. Like a phone that’s been dropped too many times, your internal compass starts giving you directions to places you’ve never wanted to go, like Perpetual Self-Doubt Island and the Land of Maybe I’m Just Broken.
The Museum of Selves That Never Got to Exist
There’s a peculiar exhibition of grief that opens when you realize how much of yourself never made it to the showcase. It’s not just about individual moments of discomfort. It’s about the cumulative loss of roads not traveled, expressions suppressed, and versions of yourself that never got their debut.
Imagine the you that might have emerged if:
- Your enthusiastic body movements had been seen as expressions of joy rather than behaviors to suppress
- Your direct communication style had been appreciated for its clarity rather than labeled as “too blunt”
- Your intense interests had been recognized as valuable depth rather than weird obsessions
- Your sensory needs had been respected rather than dismissed as inconveniences
Who might you have become if you hadn’t been constantly translating yourself into a more “palatable” dialect of human?
The particularly cruel plot twist is that the better you’ve gotten at this translation, the less anyone understands what it costs you. Your struggle becomes invisible precisely because your performance is so convincing, like a duck that looks serene above water while paddling frantically underneath, except sometimes your feet fall off and no one notices because you’ve gotten so good at floating.
Breaking Up With Your Mask: A Messy But Necessary Divorce
So what now? Should you dramatically unmask like a contestant on a bizarre social reality show, yelling “THE REAL ME HAS BEEN HERE ALL ALONG!” at your next family gathering? (While I would pay good money to witness this, perhaps there’s a gentler approach.)
Consider these steps for reclaiming bits of your authentic self without setting your entire life on fire:
Create a Masking Map: Document when your masking intensity cranks up to eleven. Is it specific people? Certain environments? Particular topics? Like tracking wildlife migrations, observing these patterns helps you predict when you’ll need extra energy or recovery time.
Establish an Authenticity Savings Account: Identify what resources would help you mask less. Maybe it’s financial security, supportive relationships, a more accommodating workplace, or access to community. “Complete freedom” isn’t a practical goal, but “two people with whom I can stimmy freely” might be your starter authenticity investment.
Practice Stealth Authenticity: You don’t need to cannonball into the authenticity pool. Try wading in with small experiments. Say “actually, I don’t like that” once in a conversation, decline one invitation, allow yourself one genuine reaction, or find stims that could pass as “normal fidgeting” if you’re not ready for more visible forms.
Design Recovery Habitats: Create deliberate spaces and times where masking is optional or unnecessary. This isn’t self-indulgence. It’s essential maintenance for a nervous system that’s been running in emergency broadcast mode. What environmental conditions help you shed the performance and return to yourself?
Find Your Fellow Folks: Seek out others who speak your native neurological language. Whether it’s neurodivergent spaces, trauma-informed communities, or just people who appreciate your particular brand of human, finding your folks reduces the translation burden significantly.
The Authenticity Revolution Will Not Be Appropriately Behaved
Perhaps the most subversive act available is questioning what “appropriate” actually means and who benefits from its current definition. Instead of a behavior rubric designed for one neurotype, what if we expanded the acceptable ways of human-ing?
What if stimming was recognized as the sensory regulation tool it is rather than behavior that needs correcting? What if direct communication was appreciated for its clarity rather than labeled as rudeness? What if sensory needs were respected rather than dismissed?
The path forward isn’t about torching all social guidelines. It’s about renovating them to include more ways of being human. It’s about creating spaces where authenticity doesn’t require trading your nervous system’s well-being for a counterfeit sense of belonging.
Because the truth is, real connection doesn’t happen between carefully curated performances. It requires the courage to be seen in your messy, imperfect, wonderful uniqueness and the compassion to truly see others, even when their way of being in the world follows a different neurological map than your own.
