Listening to adults who may have masked for years

Some autistic adults describe rehearsing conversations, monitoring eye contact, copying social cues, suppressing natural responses or holding sensory discomfort quietly. From the outside, this can look like confidence or coping. It may not show the effort that sits beneath it.

Masking, sometimes called camouflaging, is not a universal experience and it is not a diagnostic test. For some people it may be a way of navigating expectations or seeking acceptance. It can also make experiences harder to recognise in a brief clinical, workplace or family interaction.

A thoughtful adult assessment makes room for the person’s history, the strategies they have developed and the impact these strategies may have had. It considers relevant experiences across settings rather than relying on how someone appears in a single appointment.

A useful question is not simply whether someone appears to manage. It is what managing may have required, what support is helpful now and what the person wants clinicians to understand about their own experience.