This thread talks about masking in the most relatable way I’ve seen so far:
One of the cruelest things about Autistic/ADHD masking is that you learn to treat positive emotions as a warning sign that you’re about to do something “wrong” and that it is therefore “safest for everyone” if you maintain a constant, low-key negative internal emotional state.
To feel joy, you have to be in yourself and in the moment. You’re not worried about how you appear to others. You can’t be both hypercritical of your existence while also reveling in it.
Joy means that the mechanism for monitoring/policing yourself for the comfort of others no longer takes priority.
And when being yourself is so often a “wrong” way to be, being yourself without surveilling/”mitigating” yourself can feel perilous.
In fact, we’ve often been told it is perilous – to others. We’re told that we’re “rude”, “weird”, “extra”, “unthinking”, “impulsive”, “over-the-top”, “self-absorbed”, “oblivious”, “annoying”, etc.
We don’t hear those messages when we’re already over-analyzing our behaviours from the point of view of everyone else and adapting them accordingly.
We hear those messages when the connection with that normativity-focused inner critic drops and family, bosses, educators, colleagues, etc. step in to play that role.
That might come from a meltdown or shut down, but it also happens in moments of true unselfconscious joy.
So joy feels dangerous. Joy becomes associated with alienating others, and eventually we come to feel alienated from joy itself.
I realized today that whenever I feel truly immersed in positive emotions (heck, even plain uncomplicated contentment), I am immediately fearful of who or what I must be irritating, neglecting, overstepping, steamrolling, etc.
I have received the message that my joy comes at a cost to everyone else. My happiness is something I do to others.
So I have learned to always keep my emotional barometer just slightly inside of the depressed range.
This is deadly. There is nothing surprising at all about the suicide and self-harm statistics of ADHD and Autistic folks once you understand that we are conditioned in this way. Training people to be depressed is deadly.
Sometimes I say that I am happiest when I am by myself, but I wonder if maybe I am just only actually allowed to feel happy – like truly happy without that lingering soupçon of impending indecorum and fuckuppery – when I am by myself.
(Well not completely by myself. Usually also with my cats. Because they’re always game for a little indecorum and fuckuppery.)
This feeling exactly:
Unraveling my nervous systems trauma responses in the last months has uncovered the exact experience. When I have a sense of safety, much of the time my nervous system has interpreted it as dangerous, as I’m likely to commit a relationship-harming blunder.
Another reason why I find myself trying to “manage my emotional expectations” is bc of the whiplash you get from being kneecapped when only moments before you were truly, neurodivergently happy. It’s a hard fucking landing.
It’s like the physical feeling of getting the wind knocked out of you but on an existential level.
0/10 would not recommend
This thread was brought to you by one of those “find words for your feelings” charts and the jarring realization that I view every emotion listed under “happy” with suspicion and try to limit how much of it I experience. 🫠
Replies:
Not situational depression as much as socially enforced joylessness, yes
I want to add a thought I just wrote this morning in response to someone claiming “real” autistic people didn’t have feelings(!).
I told them that’s totally not true. But one of the reasons some people think so may be this:
If you see my son at home you would never doubt that autistic people have feelings. So much joy when he is having fun! The desperation when something goes wrong!
But I had the oppotunity to observe him at school, and he seemed to me like a different person.
He was so tense because he didn’t want to make mistakes or break the rules. I see that because I know him so well. But from the outside people who don’t know him might say: Look at that autistic kid! No emotions!
They are wrong.
I feel like this comes with a side of feeling defeated by previous disappointments to the point where it feels safer to just not try.
You described my thought process and state of mind to a t. “Joy is bad. You’re gonna pay for it. Joy makes you obnoxious. People hate seing you have fun. Your joy offends others.”
Another thing I get is: whenever there is a situation the outcome of which might go either way, until I know said outcome, I am “preemptively”disappointed and refuse to feel joy, lest the negative outcome arises and all this time I was “irresponsible” by having fun
I pressure myself into shutting down and feeling bad, lest I appear “frivolous” in retrospect. I shame myself into it as a precaution.
Oh so THIS is why whenever I have a genuinely happy experience I lie awake afterwards feeling horribly anxious about what I could have said/done wrong
This is something I’ve recognized in myself since childhood, but I thought I was the only one. Anytime I get genuinely excited over something, I screw up somehow, whether that’s being too loud, or accidentally hurting someone, or just being disproportionate.
I used to be criticised and mocked for outbursts of joy so much as a child, especially around family members, and still feels the same way even with more permissive family and friends nowadays.
If I’m too comfortable with someone who isn’t family I feel I make people uncomfortable. I mess up somehow. I speak too much or I’m too loud or I don’t know. But then they back away from me. I feel it.
As a kid my emotions were “too much” so I learned not to show them. Then I was “not enough”.
Now I’m really good at neutral, which people interpret as “disinterested”. Can’t win.
… it strikes me every time I am not actually depressed, that the world wants me to be depressed and likes me best then. Somehow the “toned down” minimal effort me was socially acceptable and ppl praised me for it
An entire lifetime spent unable to truly experience joy and pleasure because of the constant demand to keep all my “Bad Kelsey” thoughts front and center, lest I “forget” all the endless lists of things that I have already or will inevitably fail to do.
My first thought when getting excited about something and wanting to tell ppl is, “will this inconvenience them or seem attention seeking?” And a lot of times I suppress that thought because I can’t cope with my joy being unappreciated or ignored. I’ve learned to filter joy.
It makes me sad when I reflect on the fact that my fairly constant internal narrative is “For the love of God, DON’T let anyone see your REAL personality.” We deserve to be our true selves but that way lies negative consequences.
… it also makes it so that I’m unable to relax bc I tie joy and relaxation together, and always feel like I’m letting someone down if relaxing.
Being happy and carefree is a dead giveaway I am or am about to be ‘too much’ for someone.
… this is why I’m most content when I’m alone, either allowed to sink into my thoughts where every single expression is internalized, or even better, isolated enough that i won’t be observed talking to myself.
I’m ‘content’ in the middle-ground emotionally, the euphoric-high usually is an indication that I’m about to do something impulsive. (It’s also quite draining to present-perfect all the time.)
So this is why I feel like, whenever I’m happy something bad’s bound to happen? Or like, it’s dangerous to be happy
The feeling of “being on guard” all the time to keep yourself from being too into the moment as being too happy will always lead to someone angry with you should be on the damn diagnostic chart for adult autism 😕
If I “catch” myself being really happy or excited abt something, I stop that in its tracks so something bad doesn’t happen to spoil it. I am & can be happy/excited if it’s an internal thing (like I solved a problem or a mystery or something). The explanation is sad.
Being happy or excited makes me anxious. Especially if I’m around people. Forcing myself to find flaws in things so I’m not happy in the “wrong way” is fucking exhausting.
especially when that feeling when hyperfixations kick in and you desperately want to share it with someone but you bully yourself into silence because time and time again RSD has shown you its better if you dont share your excitement
… is that why I have wild anxiety immediately when I have a positive social interaction? If I start to feel excited or happy talking to someone who I’m not close with, I start expecting them to hate me or at least criticise me heavily.
At least once every outing with friends or family, I find myself doing or saying something with either an awkward delivery or too much enthusiasm, which ends up eating at my brain for years after. Safety is tension. :(
It’s like I can’t ever be spontaneously who and how I am without constant neg feedback, but also disliked, shamed, when I try to mask and “behave” appropriately.
I have had an entire lifetime of this and it’s never something I’ve been able to put into words so that others can understand it. I can count the number of times I’ve felt truly unabashedly happy, safely, around others on my fingers and I’m over 30 years old now.
I often say I need to recharge my social battery after being out with others so I can be at home, I wonder if it’s not just being social that causes that but also because I had to hide part of myself. It’s exhausting.