Why does unmasking make it hard to do things?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- Why do I suddenly suck at things I used to be good at? Surprise! The answers not that simple.
What is skill regression? What is unmasking? What happens when I unmask? Does skill regression mean I'm less intelligent? Why am I forgetting how to do things? Why do things bother me that didn't used to? How does unmasking affect me? Is unmasking good? Is unmasking bad? Why don't I enjoy the things I used to? Do autistic people have skill regression? Why do autistic people have skill regression? Why do AuDHD people have skill regression?
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This is INSANELY accurate. I cried. I didn’t know this was actually a thing until now and I was freaking out that something ELSE was wrong with me or I’m back to old patterns now that I’m more aware of sensory sensitivities
I am right there with you. Got fired yesterday for the first time in my life and it's all because I'm learning to regulate after masking for 30+ years. I SO wish my therapist had let me know something like this could happen. I've felt absolutely stupid for the first time in my life for monnnnnths and this video just explained it all 🥺🥺
Wishing you all the best in your job search journey. hopefully you will find a company culture that appreciates you for you and not the mask.
Ever since caring about and unmasking my adhd ive been having trouble staying in jobs. The way ive explained it to people is that bc i know i have a financial safety net (my parents) and wont end up homeless, i dont have the capacity to force my self to suffer through things that i know i can leave or not do. And theough this ive also realized a better career path for myself and what i need to look for in jobs. Ive also resigned myself to the fact that i gotta live with my parents for a couple years so that i can save up money and allow myself to find a job that will be accessible to me
Without this I might never have figured out why I am making less art. Is it my special interest or just an escape from all the stress?
I think it can be both. Perhaps in the past, stress was your body’s cue to make art but now that the stress alarm isn’t there you need something else to prompt you to make art. I think it can still be your special interest even if the motivating factor has changed. Best wishes to you on your journey.
As a “former” artist, I’m right there with you. I used to sing semi-professionally. I’m a writer. I went through school for the visual arts. All in all, the arts are “my thing”. But recently I’ve questioned my entire life’s choices. I’m 3 years into an official diagnosis, and I just stopped everything.
With the arts (and professional organization, etc.), I realized that they were the only things I’ve done in life that ever got me positive attention from people. It started in school when teachers would read my turned-in writing assignments in front of the class and peers would ask me for help, etc. I was a pariah prior, and the arts gave me an “in” with people-it was the *only* way I felt tolerated by fellow humans, and human connection is something incredibly important to me.
So now, I’m assessing everything I do, WHY I do it, and what *I* get out of it.
I’ve deduced that singing is something I enjoy doing constantly-even (and mainly) just for me. I’m a vocal stimmer - it calms my nervous system.
Visual arts is absolutely an escape and something I did almost solely (as my kids call it) as a “flex”-if I needed a pick-me-up of positive social attention, art was a way to get that need fulfilled because even the least creative people in the world can value a skillful drawing or painting (etc.), unlike the more taste-preferential and sensory-sensitivity triggering arts such as writing and singing.
Writing has always been my main outlet and communication tool. I will never NOT do it. It’s an emotional regulator, it’s healing, it’s challenging so I’ll never get bored with it (ADHD, too). But, should it be my career? This is what I’m still trying to answer. And Alexithymia isn’t helping, but I’m getting there….
My therapist recommended I make a list of things I do and don’t like to further chip away at my mask. But I’m adding on a WHY column, too: Why don’t I like something? Why do I? What do I get out of it? Is it solely for my own pleasure, or how much of it is influenced by my desire for acceptance and creating a patch to fill the void left by childhood emotional abuse and neglect?
Big questions. But, as someone who’s masked so hard my entire life that I question who I am even nearing 40, it’s important for me to understand for me and for my health and mental wellbeing. And, if sharing this helps someone else, too, I’m all for it!
HOLY SHIT. I don't game for 10 hours straight anymore because I'm actually listening to my body... holy shit... holy shit... These bite size info dumps are amazing. It's a bit wild, and incredibly intense, admitting that my hobbies might have mostly just been coping mechanisms.
“Maybe you don’t need to self regulate as much because you’re not killing yourself masking” wow.😮
Never thought about that.
Do I want to cook for them or be in a good mood when they come over… I feel this !!
No idea how you only have a few thousand followers. Your videos are genius….hilarious and informative
Painfully accurate. Literally almost in physical pain from the accuracy of this.
Would you say this could also be related to other skills such as memory? Ever since I started exploring I may be autistic and try to focus more on listening better to my own needs, I find that I have become way more disorganized. I forget things I would normally remember more easily, I also sometimes typo in really odd ways when writing on the internet such as say I would want to write the word "word", a normal typo could be something like "wod", but instead I type completely different words that sometimes don't even sound similar. I also notice how a lot of problems I've always had but had somehow managed to forget or push into the back of my mind have become massively severe. Like I used to feel ok in most social situations and have felt like that for the past years, and while I know this is the result of a lot of time spent observing people, studying social interaction and just practicing it, I suddenly feel like I did when I was much younger where I am much more aware of how much I struggle. Same thing with sensory impressions. It's really confusing.
Is it possible that in the process of understanding yourself better, you've realized you're not a failure; which gave your brain permission to take a break and relax from continually overworking itself??
My theory is that a lot of 'survival skills' we learn to get stuff done while masking heavily also have an effect. A bit like when you try to stop a bad habit, a lot of the times it's a coping mechanism for something, some root cause, so unless you try to make a new habit as a healthy coping mechanism, it just leaves an empty space where you don't know how to deal with the thing. When I was an undiagnosed kid, I would stim by chewing all sorts of things, and I would be told to stop: first clothes and towels, then my hair, then my pencils, then my nails. Over time I was made to stop all those stims but started picking at my lips to the point of making them bleed. Before I was diagnosed, I had no idea why I couldn't kick the 'bad habit' or how I even got it in the first place, but when I started learning about stimming and such after being diagnosed, it suddenly made sense. I was like 'oh, no, I definitely don't do any stims with my mouth', but then I realized... I used to. And picking at my lips is the last stim I had for that sensory need. I'm trying to start using chew fidgets now to redirect that in a healthy way, and so far I've managed to at least stop picking my upper lip to the point where it has healed and doesn't have scabs anymore. Hopefully soon I'll be able to say the same for my lower one too.
But I think some of the coping skills we learn to get certain tasks done, once we take away some of the negative stressors that were giving us motivation (and our brains recognize as the reason for starting the task at all), we realize we don't know how to accomplish those tasks in a healthy manner. I realized that I had to completely relearn how to study once I started unmasking. It was very beneficial, because I've learned that I MUST move to commit anything to memory so I remember stuff much better now, but my habit when I'm struggling to focus is to lean in and go very still and not look away from stuff because that's how I was told to focus (read: look like I'm focusing) by my teachers. It takes a lot of effort to remember to look out the window and spin in my chair and get up and pace and use my fidget toys, even though those things feel more natural to me while at rest. It's really a weird feeling to do something you know you _should_ know how to do, but in an entirely different manner. Like if you suddenly found out your dominant hand wasn't your dominant hand. It would feel off and a little out of control, even if you're writing the same words and by all rights it should be 'easier'. It's still an entirely new skillset, and it takes some time to settle into and make it your brain's go to method for accomplishing that task, because it's still used to reaching for the old way and doesn't know quite where else to reach yet. And sometimes we just don't know how to do something in a healthier way to do things.
If I use guilt as a tool to remember to do a task, and then start working on improving my mental health and being kinder to myself and feeling less ashamed for... existing, I might not get that guilt, and regularly forget to do the thing because I don't feel guilty anymore. But a lot of the time these things are really interconnected and subconscious, so we might not even realize guilt (or whatever else) is something we may actually rely on, because it just feels like 'the normal way to do stuff'. It's hard to predict why/how we'll be so impacted when we start working on something that's affected us for our entire lives, even if it's a net gain for our mental health.
this is so real
with the social stuff, it's not so much a regression but more like loading a previous save file and trying again now more aware of what's going on in the interplay between your inner and outer environment
Omg the ending! Having an epiphany, but time's over & you get thrown out - story of my life *lol
This is how I explain it to folks. It's like sledding down a hill, the more you do the same route the faster you go but also when you hit a bump it hurts more and more because the compact nature doesn't provide the cushioning I need. So when I unmask, I'm taking a run down the hill but on a slightly different path but of course the first time I try I end of waaaay over shooting my goal and having to climb back up the hill to try again i.e. making new pathways in your mind takes time (I say this like I don't struggle with this truth 24/7) so be kind to yourself.
Kindness to self will always get you further than anything else you can do.
I thought I stopped a lot of things due to depression. Which still is the most likely reason why. But now I'm healing myself and going through unmasking, feeling better then what I was and... Im barely doing anything. I feel like doing absolutely nothing a lot of times. The most I get excited about is taking a walk or hiking. But other then that, I just want to sit and do nothing. And it is so boring! I just would like to be excited about doing some other things again for myself. Which I am trying to do.
Yessss! I had some discussion on the AuDHD Reddit a while back about loss of skills and we focused on *what* the experience was but this helps fill in some of the why!
Just had a conversation with my team Daughter today about stuff like this… She and her dad are most definitely on the spectrum (she’s almost done with her assessment. I’m wondering if I should get one…)
But yeah, we’re trying to be aware of masking and this is really great to be aware of. She definitely is pushed to do things because of wanting to connect and please others but it’s at a cost.
“Maybe you don’t need to self regulate as much because you’re not killing yourself masking” Hm. I am going to need to chew on that for a long time. I have missed the deep dives. Where I just slip into a creative thing and melt down into it for a few hours. It feels so much like losing something now that I don't do it as much any more. But I don't come home from work completely flattened. I am more aware of my body and the need to move or eat and so the long focused binges have more breaks in them. Which is probably healthier but it still feels like a loss. This phrasing is helping me wrap my head around it.
Oh my god. This is so accurate
This one is very topical for what I'm trying to work on now.
Holy shit I feel like I probably would have had to spend $1,000 I don't have on therapy to learn what I learned in this video
Wow! Thank you! That was Aha moment, helped me a lot.
So it begs the question, how does counseling them to stop masking actually help the autistic patient? Unless they come from a wealthy family, or can get disability from the government, you're making them less able to hold down a job and support themselves. And at least here in the United States, we do not have the proper infrastructure or funding in place to make sure that people with developmental and neurological disabilities will be guaranteed to have housing, groceries, etc., just from the government.
I thought it was the burnout.
Vert Accurate indeed, I'm struggling on how to adapt this to my own life while thinking god where shoud I work now I know all that. Difficult choice.
This is so good
maybe explains why I don't cook anymore.
I needed to hear this
The content of this video is so good I didn't become distracted by the irritating music until the second viewing 😂
Weird. I seem to have the opposite problem. I can do really cool stuff for myself all the time and the moment i try to show off my work turns out like crap. It's not even the pressure of performance or anything.
Cooking is a great example here: I've screwed up extremely easy meals that i cook for myself with consistency all somehow because i was serving it to someone else.
Maybe my unconscious loathing of other people is leaking through.
I needed this!!!
Ohhhhhhh that’s what this is. Thank you, needed this.
So do you ever recoup the acquired skills? Is skill regression just a phase? Can we pick these skills up again?
Your patreon is way cheaper than a therapist 😅
Oh my this is a huge download all at once.
As a sidenote, the answer is yes I might actually want to hang out with an 8000 pound gorilla 😂
Gotta save this to for later so i remeber zis information
I am a software engineer, that's my job. I don't think i am on the spectrum, but i think this idea of unmasking and skill regression is a key to understand loss of so-called passion and skill regression. I don't write code on my spare time i much as i used to do, and i feel like in some area i am no longer as good as i used to be. But i realize i was not enjoying writing code and doing pet project as much as i thought. It was a mask to fit it and feel secure in my job and confident with my competence
Oh my word thank you for this! See, I am an extrovert, it’s just more trauma keeping me from people!
what is masking
Almost hiding your own character just to fit in. It’s related to autism but neurotypical people could masks too
Neurotypical people can mask for social advantage and gain with little to no effort and is usually healthy but autistic and adhd folks do it to survive and fit in, avoiding being judged as weird or odd, or avoiding having panic attacks and anxiety spirals, but all at a great cost as it takes an enormous amount to energy and dedication keeping up the masks. Eventually masking becomes untenable and we burn out and lose all the skills we acquired from a life of masking and compensation.
😮
I feel this with queer masking…….
Lose the music.
£800 Gorilla, you say?