Autistic and Communication and Masking

To an autistic, Neurotypical relationship and communication patterns are often like a foreign language.

Communication/ Relationship Patterns and rules

This is one of the easiest ways to spot someone who has autism by noticing that they don’t quite fit the “normal” ways of speaking and relating. In learning a language look at the below as an example: 

The human brain is set up to absorb your first language as you are growing just from being around it. It’s like it already has a computer program set up in the brain with open files just waiting to be filled. The brain automatically starts filling in these files with information it picks up from those around them. A lot of it is done intuitively, without much of the hard work that goes into learning a second language. 

To a non autistic person (allistic) this is the same with communication and relationship patterns. The brain naturally picks up these patterns and rules such as when to speak, when to stop, taking turns, reading body language, tone of voice, sarcasm, etc. These are mostly picked up naturally and go into the program that the brain already has set up for it. It’s done mostly without thought and in many ways because it is intuitive what goes on inside the program is inaccessible for examination as allistics just do these things without examining the rules or the code of the program, much like in the example native speakers are likely unaware of the rules governing the ordering of adjectives.

Many autistics learn to mask by studying people and how they act and copy these things. 

I learned to mask pretty well (to myself as well) through three main things

1. My brain processes things really fast (partially from my ADHD side and partially from giftedness which often is a part of AuDHDers)

2. People and relationship patterns became a special interest. Autistics have special interests for which they never tire of (often seen as obsessions to the allistics)

3.  A part of my autism comes with hyper empathy. I can feel the feelings of others in a very loud and overwhelming way

For those who are high maskers like myself it's a lot like these memes

Now there are positives to this that make me a better relationships and psychology teacher

• The code for interactions is more visible to me as I wrote it based on observations

• Due to my hyper empathy I also am very aware of the emotional impact of different patterns

• Due to my high pattern recognition (another autistic trait) I spot patterns in human behavior and can make predictions on future results in a way that’s higher than typical 

• Because of the above and being able to see the code in the program it makes it so I can teach the code and the patterns in a way that’s not typical. (I’ve come to see that a large part of what I teach is pattern recognition) 

The costs

• Not having an intuitive program in the brain is very inefficient 

• It’s high energy intensive leading to exhaustion

• It’s still not quite natural and often seen as quirky 

• I’m constantly rewriting the program with more input that I gather from observations. It’s very exhausting and distracting. 

• It’s easy to fall into autistic communication patterns such as info dumping (this post is an example). This leads to putting people off and making them uncomfortable.

More resources:

 https://neurodivergentinsights.com/blog/what-is-masking-in-autism