What is Masking?

For many people, especially those who identify as neurodivergent or anyone who might have needed to adapt quickly know that masking is a survival skill. Masking involves camouflaging, suppressing, or hiding parts of yourself like your emotions, needs, and personality in order to fit in and feel safer when around others. On the outside, it can look like calm and confidence, but on the inside it can be deeply uncomfortable, exhausting, and inauthentic.

What Masking Can Look Like in Adults

Masking is often invisible to those on the outside, but internally it may be:

• Smiling while feeling overwhelmed

• Saying “I’m great” when you’re not

• Being the responsible one, the helper, the fixer

• Downplaying your own needs so you don’t feel like a burden

• Performance even when you feel burnt out

Many people who do mask may not identify with the idea of masking or that they were struggling since it’s been their default way of operating around others because there was no other choice if they wanted to feel safe.

Why Masking Develops and Works

Masking often forms in environments where identity and emotional expression is unsafe, unwelcome or unsupported. For example, if crying was met in a home with anger or “you better stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” then it was learned that expressing certain emotions meant harm and it becomes an emotional truth instead of an option. Other examples can include:

• Growing up with emotionally unavailable caregivers

• Hiding natural reactions like stimming because it wasn’t considered “normal”

• Having to keep up with social expectations to avoid stigma or discrimination

• Learning that love was conditional with how you acted

• Living in households where high expectations and conflict shaped how you showed up

Although masking keeps you safe, it still comes at a cost.

The Cost of Masking

Long-term masking can lead to an internal distrust between body and mind which can feel like:

• Chronic burnout that doesn’t get better with rest

• Anxiety without a clear cause or event

• Emotional numbness and/or disconnection from your body’s cues

• Feeling unseen even in close relationships leading to withdrawal or isolation

• A persistent sense of performing for others 

• Not knowing who you are, what you want, and what you need for yourself

Unmasking and How To Do It Safely

A common fear is that when you stop masking, everything falls apart, relationships change, you’ll disappoint others, you’ll lose control. While some of those may hold some truths like relationships changing, there are ways to start unmasking slowly and with intention. Unmasking in a supportive way can look like:

• Taking an inventory of what your values are, what you don’t like, and what you don’t want

• Learning to notice your body’s cues and prioritize those before what anyone else needs or what you may perceive they expect of you

• Allowing yourself to rest without justification (I know, this one is gonna be hard)

• Naming your needs without over-explaining yourself (needing rest is reason enough)

• Letting yourself authentically be seen gradually (for some people, letting yourself be seen authentically by strangers may be easier than letting yourself be seen by loved ones even if they’re safe people because with strangers there are no pre-conceived expectations to how you’ll behave)

This is not about reinventing yourself, but coming back home to the parts of you that have felt neglected.

How Therapy Can Help

Trauma-informed therapy offers a space where masking is not required and all parts of you are welcome. Through approaches like somatic awareness, EMDR, and parts work, clients can explore:

• When and why masking developed

• When masking started for you

• What parts of you learned to stay hidden

• How to liberate those parts that were hidden

• How to build safety both externally and internally 

• How to show up more authentically at your own pace

Healing does not require white knuckling, but it does require compassion for all versions of yourself and understanding of why these protective mechanisms were needed in the first place. If this resonates with you and you have more questions or are just curious, contact me here. 

• Sam Villarreal, MS, LPC, LCDC