Camouflaging?

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Is it common for people with autism to pretend to be someone else when dealing with autistic traits that cause stressful situations and/or anxiety?

I was told that this may not be considered "masking/camouflaging". I'm talking about actually pretending to be someone else (whether it be a tv or movies character or someone in real life) in order to successfully "overcome" difficult to handle autistic traits such as social interactions, eating quirks, need for routine, etc. I'm wondering if this is common and if there is a term for it. If it actually is common, how do you deal with it?

Not sure. I've certainly taken my cue from fictional TV and movie characters in real-life situations, mostly to project a likeable persona when I've been stuck for an original way of doing that. But I've similarly borrowed phrases and interpersonal style from real people if I've similarly liked the way they've dealt with situations. I suspect something of the kind is pretty normal though, and I don't know how to compare the frequency with which I did it with the frequency with which the average person does it.

I think many people role play as a form of masking or camouflage, or simply our understanding of "what to do" from seeing others in what we might understand as similar situations from real life to movies, videos, comics, tv or other situations .
Viewing behavior as role modeled by others, whether in real life or in fiction, and comparing can help us understand how to respond to similar situations in our own lives. I believe this is a common way for humans to learn.

We imitate what we have seen others say or do in what we judge to be similar situations.

I am not sure that this is camouflage or masking so much as adaptive use of input we have absorbed from comparable situations or our understanding of what we believe is similar in our understanding of any event we bring to mind.

Yes I think it's innate in humans and many animals. Babies learn to talk by noticing the people around them talking, and imitating what they hear.

And just to confuse things, there's this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation#Autism

What it means is to play the part of a neurotypical.

I don't do much of that. If I personally approve of another person's behaviour, I might try to emulate it in some way, but not just because I think it's neurotypical, unless it's to get me through an encounter with potential hostiles until I can find the exit door. With friends, I'd do what I felt was right rather than what I felt was NT.

There was two guys in university that were very socially successful, so I was drawn to them and started dressing like them, listening to the same music, appreciating the same political views, etc. I even imitated their accents and pretended to like the same colors they did. They let me do it without ridicule and by association my social capital increased somewhat, but it all led to a spectacular collapse three years later so it's not something I'd recommend. If you have to "camouflage", do it sparingly and in situations where it matters.

This is very close to what I'm talking about. It doesn't seem that imitation of other people, real or fictional is the most common way of masking, but it does seem to happen nonetheless. I wonder if it is because the more common way of masking seems less authentic.

From what I've read so far online and in the WP forum... (and thinking about my own tendency to people-please and "make nice," as my mother always puts it)... There seem to be a lot of different reasons for and approaches to camouflaging.

I especially liked Martin Silvertant's highly detailed (and heavily researched) article on the excellent "embrace-autism" blog. For what it's worth, this might provide a good place to start looking into the topic more deeply to see where your own approach to it might fit:

https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-camouflaging/

(This is one of my favorite go-to sources for hard information written in a sensitive and respectful way. They also have a ton of informative articles on a whole range of topics under the umbrella of autism.

There's also a online test called the CAT-Q designed to attempt to quantify how much you camouflage in various interactions: https://embrace-autism.com/cat-q/

i can't seem to disguise myself to save my life. i wear who i am on my sleeves.

I try to balance this all out, between not feeling like a fraud, a follower, or not being true to myself, VS dealing with situations at work or with extended family, to ensure I don't get myself in trouble or make a jack ass of myself.

Outside of work and some extended family(whom I don't see often thankfully) I have no problem being myself, albeit I'm high functioning so it does take a minute for people to notice my quirks. As I have progressed throughout adulthood, I've learned to filter what I say and that's helped a lot.

The best way I can sum it up is, sometimes you have to BS your way through certain situation's but at the same time, trying to be someone else is an awful way to live.

there is nothing more exhausting than living a lie.

Interesting - here's what I got, along with the average scores for NTs and autistics (I hope the positions of the numbers aren't too different in different browsers, it was quite hard to get the table looking straight and if there's a better way to align a table in ?HTML, I don't know of it):

autistics:.........Female.....Male........Non-binary
Total score........124.35.....109.64......122.00
Compensation...41.85......36.81........43.50
Masking.............37.87......32.90.......36.06
Assimilation.......44.63.......39.93.......39.88
neurotypicals:
Total score........90.87.......96.89.......109.44
Compensation..27.18.......30.06........35.48
Masking............34.69........36.34.......38.70
Assimilation......29.00.......30.48........35.26
Me:
Total score.......................103
Compensation...................40
Masking.............................35
Assimilation.......................28

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 18 Feb 2022, 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^
So it seems I score slightly above the NT male for the total, rather high for compensation, slightly less than NT for masking (it seems that male and non-binary Aspies mask less than NTs, assuming I've transcribed the date correctly), and I have slightly less assimilation than NTs. Whether those (mostly) small differences are significant, I don't know. The author has certainly made it a very detailed subject, and has extended the definition beyond what I'd previously figured to be camouflaging, though I'd need to do a lot of thinking to decide whether or not those extensions are justified.

My own CAT-Q scores came in like so:
-125 (Compensation 41, Masking 42, Assimilation 42)

From what I understand, this quiz is used by professionals in conjunction with others like the AQ, etc, as a way to provide an explanation for how an autistic person might score lower on the standard autism tests... Lower scores may not necessarily indicate lack of autism, but instead, taken together with a high CAT-Q score, may indicate autism plus extensive masking/camouflaging.

From the stats you posted, ToughDiamond, my scores come in right around where the female autistic average scores seem to be. (I'm not yet formally diagnosed; at this point I'm smack in the middle of the self-discovery/research phase and am becoming ever more and more certain that I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum.) That said, I consistently score well above the cutoff point on other autism online tests like the AQ, the RAADS-R, and the Aspie Test... And I get along well enough in everyday interactions (albeit with a degree of internal awkwardness that I hide well or not-so-well, depending on how much I care about the specific interaction and/or how much power the other person has over me). Masking seems to explain that "mismatch" pretty well, especially since I so often feel like I'm "pretending" to be a confident, competent person when out and about town, or at work. (Inside, I'm generally hoping to complete interactions as quickly and "successfully" as possible so I can get back to the more comfortable state of being unseen, overlooked, or unobserved.)

I agree that the Martin Silvertant article on Masking/Camouflaging breaks things down a bit too much and over-analyzes them to the point of splitting hairs that have already been split several times, but the overall gist of the article remains relevant.

For me, the most unnerving implication of the concept of camouflaging is... How much of my public-persona behavior is down to pretending to be what people expect, and how much is based on my own true self? Would love to hear where other folks stand on this topic, where they are in this ongoing internal debate that seems to be a huge one within the autistic community.

cat-Q=71
comp=12
mask=16
assim=43

I'm still not sure what this means, can somebody here PLEASE enlighten me? (begging emoji here)

but the paragraphs below linked to earlier in this thread stood out at me like a beacon-

"Children with autism exhibit significant impairment in imitation skills. Imitation deficits have been reported on a variety of tasks including symbolic and non-symbolic body movements, symbolic and functional object use, vocalizations, and facial expressions. In contrast, typically-developing children can copy a broad range of novel (as well as familiar) rules from a very early age. Problems with imitation discriminate children with autism from those with other developmental disorders as early as age 2 and continue into adulthood.

However, recent research suggests that people affected with forms of High Functioning Autism easily interact with one another by using a more analytically-centered communication approach rather than an imitative cue-based approach, suggesting that reduced imitative capabilities don't affect abilities for expressive social behavior but only the understanding of said social behavior: Social communication is not negatively affected when said communication involves less or no imitation. Children with Autism may have significant problems understanding typical social communication not because of inherent social deficits, but because of differences in communication style which affect reciprocal understanding.

Individuals with Autism are also shown to possess increased analytical, cognitive and visual processing, suggesting people with autism have no true impairments in observing the actions of others but may decide not to imitate them because they do not analytically understand them.

Imitation plays a crucial role in the development of cognitive and social communication behaviors, such as language, play, and joint attention. Children with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation that are associated with impairments in other social communication skills. It is unclear whether imitation is mediating these relationships directly, or whether they are due to some other developmental variable that is also reflected in the measurement of imitation skills."

^^^it was like "EUREKA!! it was GD'ed IMITATION i was failing at the whole GD'ed time!! i can't emulate or imitate people. i knew from an early age i failed spectacularly to try to imitate others' behavior. i can't even do an accent to save my life, at least not until very recently.