Masking in terms of autism and Asperger's syndrome is a way of hiding your true self from others as a means of fitting in and avoiding harm. It can best be summed up as "pretending to be normal". In this post, I want to talk about some of the ways that we mask, why it is necessary sometimes and why ultimately you need to minimize masking in your life. How do we mask? It's often said that people with Asperger's syndrome are great actors because they spend so much of their lives pretending to be someone that they are not. Masking is a very normal activity and everyone masks in some form or other. The teen who loves classical music but listens to rock in front of their school friends is masking their musical taste. The guy who eats all his vegetables at his girlfriends place but never at home is masking for her parents, so that they will like him more. We mask whenever we put on clothing that is not us, wear makeup that we don't like or put effort into making ou
Catchy title aside, I'm not about to suggest that you need to kick all your autistic kids out of home. I want to cover one specific recent instance for us and I want to look at the reasons why we believed that it would work while others thought it might fail. Why we did it anyway and why we feel it is succeeding. Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay Kids who Stall We have a lot of friends and relatives who have kids on and off the spectrum who have "stalled". By stalling, I mean that they've become; Permanently at home Often Unemployed Caught in unproductive routines (TV, Gaming, Extra Sleeping, Overuse of Routine) Often stalling is linked to other obsessions, such as computer gaming but it also appears in non-gamers and active kids. People can get into a stall pattern simply by filling their entire lives up with chores and leaving no room for themselves to forge ahead. There are a lot of reasons why stalling has become common in the last couple of generations in