Autistic Camouflaging (Dr H. L. Belcher)

Self Portrait with Champagne Glass (1919)

Max Beckmann

Extracts from :

Dr Hannah Louise Belcher

TAKING OFF THE MASK

Learning to Imitate

Broadly speaking, camouflaging in autism means using strategies to hide autistic traits to try and fit in with others, and in many ways to appear non-autistic.

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For those of us who have been camouflaging for as long as we can remember, it is likely that as children we knew we were different, perhaps even ‘alien-like’, but that we couldn’t put our finger on why. Camouflaging can start as an unconscious strategy, but as we age and learn more we realise what we are doing and how we are doing it.

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Of course, not everyone will do this, and there are varying degrees as to how much different people will imitate others. Chartrand and Bargh (1999) found that those higher in empathy, that is those better able to understand and share the feelings of others, tended to demonstrate the ‘Chameleon Effect’ to a greater degree.

Imitation to autistic camouflaging

All the research discussed so far in this chapter is about non-autistic people, but so much of it can be compared to the act of camouflaging in autistic people. The goal is the same: to blend in socially and please those around us. It is often unconscious, although many of us, as we get older, become more aware that we are using the strategy.

Also, many of the behaviours are the same: imitating others’ dress sense, gestures and mannerisms, and preparing social scripts in advance. Australian psychologist Tony Attwood describes in his book The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome how autistic children often quietly observe what others are doing, going away to practise these behaviours in private before they are confident enough to re-enact them in real social situations; behaviours often mimicked included gestures, tone of voice, and mannerisms.

In her book on women and girls on the spectrum, autistic independent autism specialist Sarah Hendrickx (2015) describes how autistic women are like ‘little psychologists’ as children, and by the time they reach adulthood they have become experts in analysing social behaviour and imitating it.

A long-held myth is that autistic people lack the empathy to understand the perspectives of others. Historically, autism has always been seen as a condition whereby infants lacked social imitation skills and Theory of Mind. This is often part of the reason why many autistic people who camouflage fail to be recognised and receive a diagnosis in childhood. We’ve all heard the line “but you don’t look autistic”; many of us have also been told that we can’t possibly be autistic because we understand other people’s emotions too well or we have too many friends. But it’s long been argued that primary social abilities, such as the ability to imitate, are unaffected by the condition. In a major plot twist for the field newer evidence is even now suggesting autistic people can empathise too much, which hugely calls into question previous theories around the ‘normal’ development of imitation.

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Being different and facing stigma

We turn now to our last main factor, a key social motivation for camouflaging: being different. Being autistic makes you different in a variety of ways to the rest of the non-autistic population, and that difference goes to the very core of our social existence as humans. If we consider the intolerance many people have for the small differences and variations even within their own section of society, then it is no wonder autistic people face the levels of stigma and bullying that they so often sadly do.

While in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1990), American sociologist Erving Goffman discussed how all humans navigate social situations as a stage to perform appropriately in front of others and to avoid shame, it is fair to surmise that this so-called ‘stage’ is about quadruple the size for autistic people and surrounded by hot lava. Perhaps, as autistic people, we should instead of a stage think of social interactions like the game ‘The Floor is Lava’, whereby we are constantly required to jump out of our comfort zones to meet the social requirements of others, risking life and limb as we go.

If performing appropriately in different social situations is like learning to ride a bike for non-autistic people, for us it’s like learning to ride a bike up a hill while the ground is on fire. The need to avoid shame and stigma because of our different social presentation therefore runs much deeper. Goffman describes how we all need a ‘back stage’ where we can relax and don’t have an audience; however, the issue is that for some even this ‘back stage’ requires a performance. This might just be the crux to why autistic camouflaging is much more exhausting than non-autistic social performing; there is no ‘back stage’, our whole lives are affected by keeping up a non-autistic performance.

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Studies have found that approximately 29 per cent of autistic people reach clinical levels for social anxiety disorder, meaning that quite a number of autistic people aren’t just shy in social situations but acutely fear them. This fear isn’t unjust. In 2002 a research article was published stating that 94 per cent of mothers reported that their autistic child had experienced peer victimisation.

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The research is pretty clear that camouflaging can and does affect mental health. The higher autistic people score on the CAT-Q for camouflaging the worse they score for traits of anxiety and depression (Hull et al. 2019). Even more concerning is the strong association found between camouflaging and suicidal behaviours.

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So what exactly is it about camouflaging that can have such a severe impact on our mental health ? There are two key possibilities here: one is that camouflaging can be mentally quite exhausting, and another is the deeper effects hiding one’s true self can have on self-esteem and feelings of our identity. As I mentioned previously, some of the mental skills necessary, such as memorising social scripts and inhibiting responses, can be mentally draining, especially if you find that you’re around others and camouflaging most of your day.

Authenticity and the loss of identity is a slightly trickier problem to interpret. We are a minority group, albeit actually now quite a large one (Solomon 2014). Like any minority group we have fought throughout history to claim our identity and find our self-worth. In 2007 Dr Nancy Bagatell, from the University of North Carolina, published an interesting case study on an autistic young man called Ben and his process of identity construction. As a young man Ben was increasingly exposed to social skills training and therapy that encouraged him to ‘fit in’ but, rather than helping him become less lonely, he became more and more depressed. He felt that he was failing at being ‘normal’, and Bagatell (2007) explains how this framework of what is ‘normal’ has been constructed outside of the autistic experience and had led to the oppression of Ben’s natural behaviours.

After being exposed to other autistic people, whom he learned were also trying to fit in and become ‘normal’, he started to see autism as part of his identity, something that couldn’t be separated or hidden from his personality. We cannot be our authentic selves if we are oppressing and denying such a massive part of ourselves. That doesn’t mean necessarily denying it is a disability, although some choose to; it’s about understanding who we really are and what we really like, without the constraints of what society expects of us. To live in opposition to our ‘true self’ is quite frankly soul destroying. To deny ourselves the activities we like to do and the ‘special interests’ we want to partake in all in the name of seeming more ‘normal’ to others, is denying us of our right to enjoy our lives.

While autistic people are much more vulnerable to anxiety and depression than the rest of the population, the more positive their own autistic identity is the better their self-esteem has been found to be (Cooper, Smith, & Russell 2017). In their article, appropriately titled ‘Putting on My Best Normal’, Hull and colleagues (2017) found that almost 60 per cent of their autistic participants said that they did not feel like their true selves because of camouflaging. They felt increasingly isolated around others, one commenting “I feel sad because I feel like I haven’t really related to the other people. It becomes very isolating because even when I’m with other people I feel like I’m just playing a part.” Others felt they lost who they really were, one participant commenting, “Sometimes, when I have had to do a lot of camouflaging in a high stress environment, I feel as though I’ve lost track of who I really am, and that my actual self is floating somewhere above me like a balloon.” Goffman too warned that if one’s social performance is not one that is authentic to the person, and may be even at conflict with one’s ‘true self’, then this would lead to alienation.

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