I experienced extensive childhood neglect and trauma so CW on the following…

I think that there’s a couple of interesting overlaps in your post that I wanted to riff on.

One of them is that children who grow up in abusive households very often end up developing a sort of mask because they learn to hide their emotions and what they are going through at home. This can lead to some pretty big impacts on stuff like identity, depression & anxiety, connection to others, vulnerability to exploitation and further abuse, and difficulty with establishing & maintaining healthy boundaries as well as becoming a people-pleaser.

Autistic folks very often experience this too, although in many ways I’d argue that it’s deeper because the autistic experience of masking is about denying your interests, your aversions, your entire communication style, your way of understanding the world etc. etc. in fact it’s virtually the wholesale denial of the self imo (although comparisons are odious but I do think that autistic masking tends to be much more pervasive in its scope, all things being equal.)

Obviously being autistic and especially undiagnosed/late-diagnosed brings with it a significantly higher rate of traumatisation than the general population for lots of reasons too.

When you happen to exist in the overlap of those particular parts of the Venn diagram then it’s really understandable if you struggle with the things that you’ve described in your post.

Part of the process of growing beyond the obstacles you’ve described is a threefold matter imo:

• Connection to self

• Connection to others

• Unmasking around others

When you’ve been taught to disconnect from yourself and your values and stuff like your gut instinct, whether due to abuse or being forced to mask your autism or a combination of the two, you’re going to find yourself more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation because you’re not going to be conscious of the red flags that your body and your mind are throwing up when someone is being coercive or ignoring your boundaries or gaslighting you etc.

If you are so dissociated from your internal experience and you’re completely fixated on saying the “right” response in the “right” way with the “right” body language, it’s really hard to keep track of how you’re actually feeling or whether the other person is trying to pull a fast one on you. It’s hard to keep track of what you’ve said or what you meant, let alone what they have not to mention how that has made you feel.

It’s really common for high-maskers to have to go back over their past few days in their mind, repeating their social interactions and other experiences, before they stop and realise that someone was being cruel or lying or even to understand how they felt in any given moment. It’s sort of like needing to play back the recording to pinpoint what was going on for you in the recent past.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise if you feel vulnerable to abuse and exploitation with all of that as context.

When you’ve been masking your whole life you tend to have very superficial connections with others that are contingent upon you maintaining your mask.

Typically, most people have a network of friends and loved ones that help them out with identifying their emotional experiences and when they should do things like change jobs or stop hanging out with bad characters and who vet potential romantic interests. This might be small or it might be large but what really matters is the quality of this network.

If you don’t have this support network who is seriously invested in your wellbeing then you often find yourself having to tough it out alone and to figure out your needs/warning signs and your emotional distress alone.

So instead of having people around you telling you “I think you need to speak to your manager’s boss about how they’ve been treating you at work because you’ve described a pattern of behaviour targetting you which is completely unacceptable” or “Are you sure that it’s a good idea to move in with this person who you’ve only been dating for three months?” and that sort of thing, you have to go on your own best instincts which is obviously fallible (as we all are) but this is compounded by the issues caused by being disconnected from yourself, as described above.

Then the third part of this is that when you are high-masking around others, you are very unlikely to tell people what you’re struggling with (e.g. understanding context or implication, conveying your intentions, your experience of emotional distress etc.)

This has major implications for establishing and maintaining that support network, as described above, as well as that support network’s ability to insulate you and protect you from the things that you’re at risk of because of all the above stuff.

By masking yourself, you disconnect from the people who care about you for who you truly are; you can’t extend understanding to someone who you don’t really know, you can’t support someone who is constantly maintaining the veneer that everything is fine and they’re coping perfectly well, even when they aren’t.

So the combination of these three factors is a perfect storm for being isolated, experiencing poor mental health, and being vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

Now (if somehow you’ve made it this far into my ramblings) before you go jumping to the high-masker’s conclusions:

Or

Or

Step 1: Be good at human interaction

Step 2: Don’t be bad at human interactions

Or that sort of thing, it’s important to consider that you shouldn’t just throw yourself into the deep end and expect yourself to cope with the dramatic changes.

Instead I would encourage you to consider it like working out:

You start off small but you push yourself within your capacity. You want to initiate growth but if you go take on too much or you push yourself too far then you’re going to get hurt and you’ll experience major setbacks to your progress.

Instead it’s about small changes that accumulate and consistency over time.

If you don’t have anyone who you trust in your network of friends and loved ones, maybe start with finding a good therapist and use them as your primary support as you gradually work on developing deeper connections to others in your life.

You probably have people who you trust to a certain degree, who you feel are safer than others.

Gently lean on this but make sure that you’re assessing their responses and their actions as well - don’t just assume that they are good and that they have your best interests at heart but check to make sure that they are acting in line with your assessment of them. Over time, try being a bit more open about not understanding something or missing the joke with them. Start small but open up the communication lines with the people who are candidates for being trustworthy over time and you will begin to develop that network.

At the same time you will be unmasking. Make sure that you reinforce that you are doing well and make it a positive internal experience for yourself, even if some people react negatively. Unfortunately that’s going to happen but it won’t happen every time. Some people will be attached to the persona of the mask and they won’t like the entire human being that exists beneath its surface and that’s okay - that’s not your fault and you don’t need to assign blame to yourself if someone doesn’t like you any more than you should assign yourself blame if somebody doesn’t like a particular flavour of icecream; people have preferences and that’s okay. More to the point, people have preferences and you’re okay.

I remember this piece of advice that I came across a long time ago - you know when you have a style when some people don’t like how you dress. The same can be said about having a personality and healthy boundaries; you know that you have a personality when some people don’t like you and you know that you have healthy boundaries when people cross them or take a dislike to those boundaries.

Try to keep in mind the old Lenin adage - better fewer, but better.

So what if most people don’t understand you or don’t like you if you have a small circle of people who understand you and like you for who you are? After all, it is better to be disliked for being who you are than to be liked for being who you are not.

As you unmask to yourself and to others you will gradually connect more with your needs and your internal experience along with those gut instincts, which will keep you safer.

With a small but secure and healthy network—even if it’s just one person—you can check in with things that you’re not sure about. You can expand that circle of trust gradually with them and with others. You can begin to practice unmasking in social contexts. You can start reconnecting with your internal experiences and asserting your needs and boundaries.

As you strengthen one part of this system, you will be able to strengthen the other parts and deepen all three.

It’s a big task but keep at it gradually and eventually you’ll find yourself in a completely different situation.

Try to be gentle with yourself in this process and avoid blaming yourself wherever possible. Autistic people who are lower masking tend to have higher social filters than the average person and that’s okay. I don’t think it’s a bad thing if you filter out a large proportion of people because that means you’re going to get only the best people in your life, the ones who are understanding and compassionate and caring, the ones who are not ableist. In fact, I think that’s exactly what you deserve.