Masking in neurodivergent adults rarely looks the way you’d expect. It’s not the dramatic, obvious kind of self-suppression that gets talked about in clinical settings. It’s the small, almost invisible ways you shrink yourself in everyday moments — and the quiet cost of doing it over and over again without noticing.
This blog draws from a recent Leading with Spirit podcast conversation with Kelley — a spirit communicator, cartomancer, and ritual craft practitioner who helps people connect with their Higher Self and spirit guides. Kelley came on the show to share her lived experience with masking, and what unfolded was a refreshingly honest, nuanced conversation about when masking helps, when it hurts, and how to tell the difference. Much of the wisdom in this piece comes directly from her reflections.
You sit through the sandwich with mayo even though you asked for none. You flip the giant dessert spoon around instead of asking for a smaller one. You freeze at someone’s house but never ask for a blanket. You go quiet at the family dinner table because rocking the boat feels harder than just disappearing for an hour. None of it looks like a crisis. That’s exactly what makes it so easy to keep doing.
This is the layer of masking we don’t talk about enough — the one that lives inside ordinary moments and chips away at your sense of self so gradually you don’t realize it’s happening until you feel stifled, exhausted, or strangely far away from who you actually are.
The Two Faces of Masking
As Kelley described in the conversation, there are really two different things happening when we talk about masking, and they often get tangled together.
The first is code-switching — adjusting your vernacular, your energy, your level of openness depending on the room you’re in. You might be more reserved at work, more neutral at family dinners, more guarded around people whose politics or religion clash with yours. Most people do some version of this, and in moderate doses it’s not pathological. It’s social attunement.
The second is neurodivergent masking — the deeper, more identity-level suppression of how your nervous system actually wants to express itself. Kelley shared that for her, this looks like the instinct to bark back at a dog she walks past. The body that wants to creep around the floor like a spider during a dance class instead of moving “appropriately.” The voice that wants to get loud about something she loves. The way her body responds to nature, to oregano on a grocery shelf, to a moment of beauty — and the way she’d learned to flatten that response so she didn’t seem “weird.”
The conversation around masking in neurodivergent adults is starting to widen because so many people are recognizing themselves in it. They didn’t know there was a name for the thing they’d been doing their entire lives. They thought they were just being polite, just being mature, just being professional. Then someone said the word masking and a hundred memories rearranged themselves at once.
The Body Always Knows First
One of the most useful things to notice — and something both SpiritBird and Kelley came back to throughout the episode — is that your body tells you you’re masking before your mind does.
For some people it’s a pit in the stomach. For others it’s a held breath, a bracing in the shoulders, a sudden bubbliness that doesn’t match how they actually feel. SpiritBird described it as a split-second internal moment where you’re aware of what you want to say or do — and then a second voice steps in to discern whether it’s a good decision. That second voice, the one that overrides the first, is usually the masking voice.
This is where so much of the healing journey for neurodivergent adults actually starts. Not with grand declarations of authenticity, but with the quiet practice of noticing those split-second moments. Tracking what your body does when you’re suppressing. Catching the signs you’re healing not through some external milestone, but through small new freedoms — saying the thing, asking for the thing, leaving the room when the room isn’t right.
This is one of the early stages of emotional healing that almost nobody names: realizing how often you’ve been white-knuckling your way through ordinary life.
When Masking Is Actually Useful
Here’s where Kelley took the conversation in a direction most takes on masking don’t go.
Masking isn’t inherently bad. Sometimes it’s a tool — a way to move through a situation safely so you can get to the other side. Kelley gave the example of walking into a room of people whose worldview is very different from hers, and finding a small thread of common ground (a haircut, something visual, a casual observation) so the interaction doesn’t escalate into something dangerous or draining. That’s masking, and it can be the smart choice.
The shift happens when the mask stops being a tool and starts being a place you live. As Kelley put it, it’s a matter of getting lost under the mask — when you wear it for so long you can’t remember what your face looks like underneath. When your actual needs — for warmth, for rest, for the smaller spoon, for a moment to yourself — start getting buried under the performance of being easy and palatable.
A useful question Kelley offered to sit with: Am I using the mask to move through this moment, or am I getting lost under it?
Sometimes you start with a mask and it’s fine, and then partway through you can feel it tightening. That’s information. You can leave. You can name what’s happening. You can drop the performance and watch how the conversation shifts — often, to your surprise, into something more real and more connected than the performance ever could’ve been.
Self-Advocacy in the Smallest Moments
If you want to know what unmasking actually looks like in practice, it’s not loud. It’s not a dramatic coming-out moment. The story that anchored the entire conversation was about a spoon — Kelley asking SpiritBird for a smaller spoon at an event at her house, and how that ordinary moment became something quietly profound for both of them.
It was just a request. But what made it land was how Kelley asked: neutrally, without diminishing herself, without being demanding, without performing extra gratitude to soften it. Just a real human asking for what she actually needed. SpiritBird remembered it as one of the clearest examples she’d ever witnessed of someone advocating for themselves cleanly.
These moments sound trivial. They are not.
Each one is a tiny act of self-trust. A tiny moment of telling yourself: my needs matter enough to take up the space of being spoken aloud. And each one rewires the deeper pattern underneath — the one that’s been quietly teaching you, for years, that your needs are too much, too weird, too inconvenient to mention.
Heal from within isn’t a poetic phrase here. It’s literal. The healing happens at the level of the nervous system, in the moment your hand goes up to ask for the small spoon and your body doesn’t collapse in shame afterward. The work of healing yourself from within is the work of slowly re-teaching your system that you are allowed to want what you want.
Self-healing techniques for masking in neurodivergent adults don’t require special tools or rituals. They require a willingness to notice the pit in the stomach, the held breath, the moment of self-override — and then, sometimes, to do the thing anyway.
Kelley also noted that for her, the courage to advocate often arrived first when she was speaking up for someone else in the room. Asking for the thing she could sense others wanted but were too afraid to say. That practice — of being the one who breaks the silence on behalf of others — became, over time, the practice of being able to break it for herself.
The Misperception Problem
One of the hardest pieces of unmasking is making peace with being misperceived.
You’ll say something authentic and it won’t land. You’ll do something that feels natural to you and someone will look at you like you’re crazy. You’ll ask for the thing and the person will be visibly annoyed. This will happen. It is part of the deal.
And here’s the part that’s worth sitting with: the goal is not to stop caring how you’re perceived. That’s a different game, one that often becomes its own kind of mask — the “I don’t care what anyone thinks” performance that’s just as constructed as the bubbly-at-the-networking-event performance.
The goal, as the episode landed on it, is more like this: feel the tension of being misperceived, breathe through it, and stay. Not collapse, not panic, not over-explain. Just stay with the feeling that yes, there is tension here, and yes, it is still okay.
This is one of the most underrated stages of emotional healing — the stage where you learn that being misunderstood doesn’t actually require you to fix yourself.
When the Mask Slips and Something Real Happens
There’s a moment, when you let yourself be authentic in a small way, where everything shifts.
Kelley told the story of smelling oregano at the grocery store and saying something out loud about how good it smelled — and a stranger lit up and started telling her about her own neurodivergent love of plants. She told the story of barking back at a dog on a patio and her friend laughing instead of being embarrassed. She told the story of falling asleep in dance class because that’s what her body needed, and other people coming up to thank her — because watching her listen to her body gave them permission to listen to theirs.
Connection lives on the other side of the mask. Not always — sometimes you ask for the thing and the room stays cold. But often enough that you start to learn: the parts of you that feel “too much” are often the parts that other people are quietly waiting to meet.
This is what people miss when they treat masking purely as a wound. Yes, it’s protective. Yes, it’s exhausting. But underneath it is something specific to you that the world is genuinely poorer for not seeing. The way your body wants to move. The way your voice wants to sound when you’re excited. The questions you actually want to ask. The weird, specific, alive thing you are when no one is editing you.
What This Means for Your Healing Journey
If you’re recognizing yourself in any of this, here are a few things worth knowing — drawn from what Kelley and SpiritBird shared in the conversation.
First, awareness is the whole first stage. You don’t need to fix anything immediately. Just start noticing — in the next conversation, the next family dinner, the next networking event — where the mask comes on and what your body does when it slides into place. That noticing alone is one of the most reliable signs you are healing.
Second, ways to heal don’t have to be dramatic. You don’t need a retreat or a new program. You can practice in the smallest moments — asking for the napkin, naming the discomfort, taking the audible exhale instead of the silent one. Start where you are.
Third, give yourself permission to use the mask when you actually need it, without guilt. The work isn’t to become someone who never masks. The work is to become someone who chooses when and how, instead of disappearing into it automatically.
Kelley’s closing reflection was simple: think about what brought you the most joy as a kid — the things that made you feel most like yourself — and go do those things. Let yourself fully enjoy them. That’s the door back in.
Masking in neurodivergent adults is, ultimately, a story about the gap between who you’ve learned to be in the world and who you actually are underneath. The healing isn’t about tearing the mask off in a dramatic gesture. It’s about a thousand tiny moments of letting the real you peek through — and discovering, slowly, that the world has more room for that version of you than you’d been led to believe.
You don’t have to keep performing your way through your own life. The body underneath the mask has been waiting for you to come home to it.
✨ If masking has become so automatic you can’t always tell where the performance ends and you begin, there may be a deeper pattern shaping how you show up — and how you hide.
👉 Take the Free Archetypes Assessment and uncover the blind spots, recurring patterns, and hidden dynamics that may be shaping your reactions, relationships, and life experiences.
👉 https://pages.holtonhealingarts.com/whatsyoursacreddirection
Hear the full conversation on masking, self-advocacy, and the body underneath the mask in 👉 Leading With Spirit [Episode #]: Masking in Neurodivergent Adults (And Why You Might Not Even Know You’re Doing It)