[CW: mild discussions of child abuse used in the context of analogy]

Sure, I’m about to sleep and I’m a bit flat today so if there’s anything I have realised that I’ve missed I’ll post another comment so you’ll get notified but also feel free to ask if I’m not being as clear as you need.

I’m going to put the explanation for the process here. I guess spoiler warning(?) but tbh there’s nothing that will get spoiled by understanding the process better unless someone is planning to intentionally sabotage a self-conducted exercise but if that’s the case then there’s bigger stuff to worry about than encountering a spoiler for this.

So the heart of the exercise is based on the understanding that masking is a fundamental disconnection from your “authentic” self (I hate that term but we’re going to use it for shorthand in this case.)

This fundamental disconnection from yourself leaves you feeling a variety of negative things - being without direction or purpose, feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness, depression, anxiety etc. and ultimately doing things not from a place of what you need, what you want, and what is in line with your true values but instead it’s doing things from a place of internalised expectations placed upon you by others (individuals, family, community, society, the media etc.)

The opposite of this is feeling a strong connection to your authentic self and doing things that are in harmony with yourself, your needs, your desires, and your values.

What comes from this strong connection to your authentic self and acting upon it is feeling enlivened, something that is likely quite rare for a late-diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic adult.

To try to connect a person who is high-masking to their authentic selves is difficult because each facet of their masking is typically very strongly associated with external expectations, even if they’ve been internalised by the individual, and so asking a high-masking autistic person “What is most important to you?” is a bit like asking an abused child what a healthy relationship looks like - you’re going to get answers that are primarily filtered through their experience (either of abuse or of masking) and what has developed in response to that rather than something deeper.

So for a high-masking autistic person, if you asked them straight up what they value then they’re very inclined to give you answers that come from a place of meeting the expectations of others or ways to avoid experiencing rejection/ridicule/humiliation etc. from others.

This isn’t really a connection to the authentic self, however. This would just be an exercise in articulating the necessity for masking and the reasons why masking is important. (Obviously this is the complete opposite of what the exercise is supposed to achieve.)

As an analogy, an abused child might tell you that a healthy relationship is one where neither party has arguments. This would be because they’ve associated arguments with threat and suffering. But if we took that child and they used that as their basis for achieving a healthy relationship then you end up with an adult who will constantly compromise on their own needs, who will avoid conflict at any cost, and who doesn’t know how to achieve conflict resolution but only appeasement; they might have achieved a relationship that is minimal-conflict but that alone is not a recipe for a healthy relationship because there is necessarily going to be a degree of conflict that comes from asserting things like needs and boundaries, and so it’s not unusual to have arguments in relationships. In fact a relationship where there are never any arguments is usually a good indication that there’s something really amiss.

So to circumvent getting answers about values and purpose “from the mask” and instead from the authentic self, the exercise asks you to identify times when you felt strongly connected to your authentic self on an experiential level - hence the question about moments when you felt really alive.

Once a few experiences have been identified from that place of feelings very alive - from being connected to and acting upon your authentic self - then the next step is to develop an understanding of what values were being enacted or embodied during these experiences to draw out what really matters to you as a person so that you can start to find ways to reconnect with yourself and to embody your authentic values in your life.

If masking is basically like method acting (and in a lot of ways it really is) and you ask the method actor what they are feeling, they’re going to tell you what their character is feeling. In a similar way, if you ask a high-masking autistic what they value they’re going to tell you what is important to their masking. A method actor is capable of switching all of that off though. On the other hand, a high-masking autistic person might not even realise that they are masking or understand what’s beneath the mask. So the exercise is designed to try and catch those (often rare) moments when you haven’t been performing the mask but rather embodying and enacting your authentic self and connecting to that outside of masking (even if you aren’t able to identify that you weren’t masking at the time) in order to draw out what that looks like so you can set about actively pursuing this in your life going forwards.

It’s important to note that the exercise is like a short summary of what the process really is and the process is something that ideally takes place over the course of more than a few hours of discussion and self-reflection and stuff like that.

Anyway, I hope that makes some sense.

It’s difficult to describe an experiential process like this, especially because it’s necessarily going to be different for each individual, so apologies if it still seems vague or confusing.

If you are struggling with this process I just want to let you know that you aren’t alone, there isn’t something wrong with you if you’re having difficulty doing this exercise, and that everything is okay. You won’t miss out on getting stuff from reading this book even if you struggle with this exercise or if you can’t do it at the moment. The process of unmasking can be confronting and challenging; if it was easy then we’d already be doing it instead of needing to read books and exercises on it even just to get started on our unmasking journey.

Anyway, that’s a lot of rambling on.

I’m going to try and check in on how you’re feeling about this exercise in about a week’s time but I’m terrible for forgetting things and letting them slip off my radar. I’d encourage you to reach out to me if you don’t see me replying to this comment in about a weekor if it’s between then and now and you would appreciate some more input from me.

I hope this has helped clarify things a bit!