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Sigarni
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23 Sep 2017, 7:17 am

My situation - I was not diagnosed until last year (I'm 42). My diagnosis is unofficial but accepted by my GP and other government agencies. The person who diagnosed me specialises in aspergers. I have, however, had a psychologist have a conversation with me and then state after 5 minutes that I did not have aspergers.
However, since my diagnosis I have told a number of people (mainly my friends), those who know me now and those who knew me as I was growing up. The response has been "well that makes sense" "that explains alot" ... from pretty much everyone.
There was one thing that might have made a difference for me. I was part of a speaking school where I had to give talks in a conversational manner with other women (mainly adults). Each talk had me working on a specific aspect of speaking (eye contact, conversational manner, gestures (physical and verbal),pronunciation etc). The talk was publically graded (needs more work, improved, pass) in a kindly manner. I think this particular program probably taught me how to converse and as I was primarily talking with adults I learned fast. I definitely know that at times I am just going through the motions - I do not always know how to respond in conversations. Is this viewed as masking?



hurtloam
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23 Sep 2017, 7:56 am

I'm assuming your demo conversations were scripted. An adult probably helped you at first and as you got older and more experienced you'd write it yourself.

I find it easier to write a training materials or talks (I've done training as part of my job and wrote out instruction manuals and have given presentations), people tell me I'm good at it. I am less able to cope with small talk in real life. My mind goes blank. I can give a presentation, but don't ask me to try and talk to anyone afterwards.

I still don't understand what masking actually is.

I assume it's pretending to be interested in stuff other women are generally interested in like home decor, beauty, kids and talking about other people.

I tend to make friends with women who are interested in stuff uninterested. The news, history, music and the outdoors. I can't be bothered pretending to be someone I'm not.



BirdInFlight
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23 Sep 2017, 8:20 am

To me, masking is not about pretending to be interested in stuff I'm not interested in. I have never done that; just like with NTs, it's not necessary in life to pretend about things such what you like, what you are interested in, etc. Nobody should have to do that, not NTs and not NDs.

I am a person who masks my autism but this is not the type of "masking" I do.

When I say I mask or camouflage, my definition of that, for myself and what I know I'm doing, is that I am suppressing things like sensory irritations, environment preferences, what I can tolerate and what I wish I could get accommodations for.

I'm also suppressing stim impulses.

I'm also to some extent suppressing some social impulses -- or should I say anti-social. When I am required to be in social interaction, I'm aware that I make a conscious effort to do the thing I don't want to do -- by which I mean even stuff like eye contact, and some degree of rote small talk understood by the NT world to be the grease that oils the wheels of most interactions.

So this is MY meaning when I say I'm a masker and camouflagers.

Mine has nothing to do with pretending with other women, in fact I've never done that.

I'm true to myself in terms of what I am in ways OTHER than my ASD -- because lets face it, we are not JUST our autism. We are other things too.

I am still "Myself" even when masking, because my masking is more about trying not to start shouting angrily in public because I cannot take the noise around me anymore.

I am still "Myself" even when masking because my masking is more about consciously employing a smile and eye contact when meeting a new client for the first time, instead of mumbling, looking away or not showing up at all -- which what I REALLY want to do.

Masking my autism is for ME, actually not much different from a lot of things NTs do just to make things go smoothly in life. An NT may not really feeling like smiling and making eye contact and shaking a hand in the right way either some days, but they make themselves do it.

An NT may also sometimes feel they just want to scream bloody frustration in the middle of a loud, horrible party they didn't really want to go to, but they don't.

My masking is about suppression of behaviors most of the world frowns upon.

My masking is about using the small things that grease social wheels so that I can get hired for work and stay independent.

My mimicking is not about "Ooooh I LOVE your dress is that Versaci!???" But instead about noticing how others conduct a smooth conversation and learning from standard body language and conversation conventions.

I felt the NEED to learn about this stuff at the tender age of 11 or 12, because I was undiagnosed and yet knew there was something off and broken about me. I was hanging around the self help section of the Psychology shelves of my library before self help was even a thing. I was trying to apply Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie stuff to myself at 12. . .

It's ridiculous and sad.

It's also unfair that I would even feel the need to have to do ANY of this stuff. It's not fair that the rest of the world can make me feel a world of discomfort if I start asking for a quieter environment or if I'm having a meltdown that turns out to have been triggered by something which to THEM is trivial.

But I've found that my life is not good if I don't mask. I went so far as to calmly and nicely share with a friend that I find it extremely difficult to try to have a conversation while loud music played. That's just a TINY step into the territory of being honest about what my ASD makes me be as a person -- I'm a person whose brain cannot cope with this scenario. Instead of deciding this one TINY change would actually make me function happily instead of find myself struggling to ope and extending energy on trying to cope, he now makes it worse by turning up the music, like he things it's some kind of tough love.

I'm 55, I think I know by know that I've tried and failed to just "get used to" stuff.

However, I still have to just put up with what the world expects me to put up with, and that's part of masking too.

I'm not saying I'm happy this way, I'm not, but it's been my only route to survival.

It also makes one HELL of lot of difference if you are alone in life or not.

If you have friends, family, a spouse/SO or a work situation that knows and accepts your ASD and the difficulties you experience, you are living in a COMPLETELY different world to me. Of course it's going to be easier for you to say you don't care who knows you are on the spectrum, it's their problem not yours.

I'm alone in every department of life. I have no support and I really mean NO support. Nobody's got my back if my disclosure or my freer expression of my autism causes an issue for me.



hurtloam
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23 Sep 2017, 8:47 am

Thanks that's interesting.

I would say that small talk is pretending to be interested I things one isn't interested in. I don't mean like the Versace dress example. Like the pleasantries of asking how's your family and stuff. I figure if anything interesting has happened they'll just tell me.

I have a friend who hardly knows my family. She's only met my mum once, but whenever I see her she goes through this rota of questions about them. It bores me. Yes, theyre fine and yes theyre fine too. Still just carrying in as normal. If anything interesting is going on i'll tell her. No news is good news.

Mostly I will just be myself. After church I just go home. I don't force myself to make small talk and ask people about their kids n stuff. I'm just not that interested. The person I get on best with is a 70 year old guy who likes to tell me about his special interests.

This is why I don't have many friends I guess.

I do suppress my annoyance with sounds. Sounds are my biggest sensory issue. So i guess I do mask a bit more than I thought I did. Yes it's very tiring to pretend you can cope with something when it completely drains you.

There are certain tasks at work that I push myself through. Especially phoning people. I have to psyche myself up to do it.

I love the invention of email.



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23 Sep 2017, 8:59 am

Maybe I've been lucky but I don't really know many people who ask the really banal questions in the small talk; I can't recall lately having to fake interest in how their family is, etc. I know the type you mean, though.

The small talk I mostly see is usually a bit more relevant; one aquaintance asks about how my business is going and I just say meh it's okay. But only because I've learned that people don't want the real answer unless they are closer to you. I don't mind following a small social convention like that -- it never really turns into an entire conversation of similar shallowness. So I just go along with it because a small bit of it is relatively painless.

Some of it is also a thing that helps a client not think I'm such an unpleasant person that they do not want me in their home. My job takes place in people's home, their haven and sanctuary. People feel differently about what that person is like who they invited in, than people in a general workplace. You can get by maybe being the strange person who doesn't do small talk in an office, but if you just walk in and grunt to someone whose home is where you are about to work, you open yourself to their free market choice to just not have you back, and find someone who at least says a few pleasantries.

Not saying that's fair or RIGHT -- if someone does good work, most reasonable people wouldn't care about what else they're like. But this world is not entirely populated with reasonable people, as we know.



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03 Oct 2017, 1:29 am

“Linguistic camouflage” could complicate the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder in girls

Quote:
We all find ourselves filling our sentences with “ums” and “uhs” when we speak; in boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these subtle language patterns may indicate severity of social impairment. New research published in Molecular Autism explores how girls with ASD might use “um” and “uh” as a subtle form of linguistic camouflage, potentially complicating efforts to identify girls on the spectrum.

Objective measurement tools like 3D motion capture have the potential to circumvent potential biases in traditional assessment approaches. One recent study suggests that girls with ASD may consciously or unconsciously alter their hand and arm movements to look more typical while gesturing. This type of “masking” or “camouflaging” behavior could help girls with ASD blend in with peers that don’t have ASD, but it could also complicate efforts to identify the disorder and link girls with interventions that have been shown to improve long-term outcomes.

In our study, we explored a new kind of objective behavioral metric based on natural language. We asked whether some girls with ASD employ subtle gender-typical language patterns in ways that may serve as “camouflage” for their social communication difficulties.

Some variations are extremely subtle. For example, speakers use words like “um” and “uh” to fill pauses that occur during normal conversation. Although “um” and “uh” are small words that may seem insignificant, they are used in surprisingly systematic ways across a variety of languages. For instance, “um” is used to signal a longer pause than “uh”, and women use “um” relatively more often than men, who use “uh” relatively more often than women.

How does this relate to the question of whether ASD is expressed differently in girls and boys? In recent years, some studies suggested that using “um” (rather than “uh”) to fill pauses is associated with less severe social impairment in children and teens with ASD. However, these studies did not consider population sex differences in patterns of filled pause use, and didn’t include enough female participants to analyze sex differences.

In our study, we analyzed filled pauses produced during 20-minute conversations between clinicians and children with ASD (49 boys and 16 girls matched on IQ and autism symptom severity, aged 6-17 years). Our results revealed that, consistent with prior research, boys with ASD produced fewer relative “um”s than typical peers. Importantly, however, the filled pause patterns of girls with ASD differed significantly from the patterns of boys with ASD, and were in fact comparable to typical girls.

research can be misleading when findings from male-heavy samples are generalized to all people. Although it is harder to test factors like sex or education level than it is to ignore them, our research adds to mounting evidence that these factors may be critical to understanding ASD. In this case, prior findings about “um” and “uh” were true for boys with ASD only, not girls.

The results of behavioral research can be misleading when findings from male-heavy samples are generalized to all people.

“Linguistic camouflage” may be a continuous construct, and is likely just one small component of a larger set of behavioral dimensions that could be subject to camouflaging. Future research is needed to determine whether the results of our study generalize to girls with more/less severe autism symptoms, adult women and men with ASD, people of different IQ levels, and to assess how camouflaging works in the real world.

Subtle motor problems have been proposed to underlie some social communication differences in ASD, and examining speech disfluencies might be one promising avenue for testing this hypothesis. From an oral-motor perspective, “um” and “uh” are different from one another. Little is known about how oral-motor integration might influence disfluency rates in ASD, and even less about how oral-motor factors might differ in girls and boys with ASD.

In summary, “camouflaged” behavior, combined with biases about how girls and boys should behave and true biological sex differences, likely complicate efforts to effectively identify and treat girls and boys with ASD. The findings of our study, wherein we identified one potential mode of “linguistic camouflage”, highlight the importance of continued commitment to tackling factors (like sex) that likely influence how ASD emerges and presents.



Linguistic camouflage in girls with autism spectrum disorder
Quote:
ASD experts make diagnostic decisions based on observable behavior, and subtle differences in how a child moves or talks will influence the way they are perceived. Gender socialization or social mimicry may lead to “camouflaged” behavior in girls with ASD, which, combined with widely held gender biases about how girls and boys should behave and true biological sex differences, likely complicate efforts to effectively identify and treat boys and girls with ASD. Recent attempts to reduce bias by directly sampling behavior and using objective, computational measurement tools hold promise over existing parent report and clinician rating scales [48], but even these new tools will likely be influenced by variables such as age, sex, gender socialization, socio-economic status, physical and mental health, and home and cultural environment. The findings reported here, identifying “linguistic camouflage” in girls with ASD, highlight the importance of continued commitment to understanding the complex web of biological and environmental factors that influence ASD emergence and presentation.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman