On emotional authenticity and masking as an autistic person

Originally posted as a thread on Mastodon, starting here.

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This thing happens that I attribute to being autistic and having poor cognitive empathy.

When someone tells me something, I know that I am expected to express an emotion in reaction. But I also know from experience that some of my emotional reactions are inappropriate.

NTs seem expert at knowing which of their emotional reactions are appropriate, so they can effortlessly express the appropriate emotions and suppress the inappropriate ones.

It’s unsafe for me to react authentically to anyone.

And it’s not like there’s an easy rule! If someone tells me they’re moving house, I’m meant to express sadness that they’re going, but a hope that the move is positive for them and will be good. But the degrees of each are meant to reflect the depth of our relationship and how I feel about that person. It’s a balancing act. I have to formulate all of these consciously, while also judging which will be considered inappropriate, in real time. It’s exhausting.

Because I’m autistic, my first reaction to something you say will never be an authentic emotional experience, and this makes me feel very sad. Everything you see of me will be from the other side of a wall, no matter how well we know each other. If I love you and care about you but I don’t feel safe to immediately express anything with you without fear of judgement or hurting your feelings accidentally, chances are I will always be unable to express my emotions authentically with you in real-time. This means we’ll never get a deep level of emotional intimacy in our relationship, which hurts a lot.

This is why autistic spaces like Autscape (UK) can be so powerful. When a space is by and for autistic people, the majority of people are autistic; there is an understanding that immediate emotional reactions might not reflect the full range of an emotional response to a situation, and might be a bit odd! You learn to understand that your first impression of someone’s emotional reaction to something won’t be the whole story, and it is important to wait & let someone continue to process and express.

This is also why a lot of autistic people come across as robotic - we lack a sense that others have, and have to compensate with conscious thought. That sense is cognitive empathy. It’s similar to how the physical movements of someone with poor proprioception will come across as robotic. We have to process everything consciously, where most people do everything intuitively and automatically, like breathing.

Imagine if you had to consciously process every breath. It would seem stilted and robotic. You wouldn’t be able to fully concentrate on anything else. Imagine how exhausting and disabling that would be!

So when an autistic person has enough energy and understanding to know that our emotional responses are sometimes inappropriate and get us unto trouble, but we don’t have the spoons to formulate an appropriate emotional response in real-time, we might respond to pretty much everything without emotion. And that’s when we seem robotic and lacking emotional affect, fitting the autistic stereotype. Our emotional response might come a few moments later, or a few minutes later, or a few days, weeks…

My ideal situation is to express authentically anyway, and deal with the fallout as best I can. I am happier and calmer. But it’s sort of swings and roundabouts - I don’t really save any energy because the energy that is no longer used on real-time processing and masking is displaced to emergency fallout repair as I flail to reassure or save a relationship when a NT person is very upset by something I’ve said. I can only express authentically in real-time if I (very quickly, at the beginning) assess the situation and my energy levels, and find that I have enough energy to patch things up afterwards if I say or do something wrong.

But masking/being a robot is exhausting too. Whether I am masking or expressing authentically, I can misjudge how long a situation will continue for. When this happens I run out of steam and crash before the end, so I either become a zombie or have to leave abruptly!

There’s a lot of gumph in the media right now about autistic people and processing time/speed, but I don’t think I think slowly. I think maybe my processing power is occupied by compensating for the lack of senses that NTs have.