No.1 Autism Expert: How To Spot Autism In High-Masking Autistic Women
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How can autistic women hide their autism so well they don’t even notice it?
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If you're female, adolescent and autistic, going to secondary school, hitting adolescence, I call it the perfect storm. You're not just somebody's child or in somebody's classroom. You're supposed to be somebody who's heading towards your own individual identity.
What is the difference between an autistic person who has an insight into their differences and intentionally tries to change who they are to fit in and someone who doesn't?
The person who feels they have to camouflage, they might say, well, that's what I've done all my life. And so they kind of feel the difficulties they have might be worth the
struggles they have. If a woman does have ADHD and also autism, but she doesn't know that, could the ADHD make her too talkative, spontaneous, impulsive, to the point where she doesn't fit the stereotype of autism and therefore she gets missed?
Talking to women who have both, they will say...
Can I have just a second of your time? If this podcast has helped you understand your brain or made you feel less alone, can you do me one favour? Can you hit the follow button? And I'll repay the favour by continuing to book the best and most exclusive conversations on this topic. Please enjoy the episode and always remember, you're not broken, just different, and you have always been enough. Professor Gina Rippon, welcome back.
Thank you very much for having me
back. We're going to jump straight in. How can a autistic woman become so good at hiding their autism that even they can't see it?
Well, I think, bearing in mind that the evidence suggests that camouflaging or masking or accommodating different ways of disguising your autism starts very early. So they've had years of practice, effectively. And if you talk to quite young girls, they will... I talked to one girl once, we were sitting looking at a playground through the window and she was pointing to the group of popular girls and pointing out how they laughed. You know, she'd been watching which ones threw their heads back and whether one of them touched the other one. And so... Very, very socially astute at a surface level. And the idea being that somehow if I can learn to behave like that, they won't notice that I'm different. They won't call me weird or other or whatever.
So years of experience and very often even things like watching television programs or reading books. Writing scripts that you then literally practice in front of the mirror, it becomes quite all-encompassing. And then, of course, to not have those scripts with you, but to have to play them out is very exhausting.
Yes, gosh, it sounds totally tiresome.
Yes. But also, as you said, how they don't even know they're doing it because, of course, it's not something you talk about. So some people are really surprised. Doesn't everybody do that? And so it's quite a revelation. When it becomes clear that they're masking the difficulties they've had, somebody needs to ask them the right questions in order to find out what they're doing.
I think this is where it gets really interesting, because I think there's many people going to be listening who relate to that, but they might be wondering, is that me? How does someone tell the difference or know if they are someone who intuitively, intellectually understands socializing versus them just being a brilliant performer?
Well, I think the difference between intuitively and intellectually is interesting because intuitively implies that there is some kind of automatic process which allows our brains to understand other people i mean there's a lot of that in in the autism world talking about mind reading and inverted commas for example so not only understanding how you feel about a situation but how the other person you're talking to the other people you're working with feel
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How can autistic women hide their autism so well they don’t even notice it?
0:00–9:11
2
When does masking start and why does it begin so early in girls?
9:11–24:03
3
What’s the difference between genuinely socialising and just performing for others?
24:03–36:54
4
How do masked autistic girls experience friendships and why are they often misunderstood?
36:54–48:38
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from ADHD Chatter
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