The Somatic Cost of Masking In Neurodivergent People
The act of masking, or camouflaging one's innate neurodivergent traits to conform to neurotypical social expectations, is often described as a psychological strategy. However, its most profound and enduring costs are frequently somatic, inscribed directly onto the body. The long term performance of neurotypicality can create a persistent dissonance between an individual's authentic nervous system state and the one they must project. This dissonance is not merely stressful. It becomes a chronic, embodied experience that can lead to complex layers of physical and psychological distress.
The most immediate somatic cost is the development of chronic muscular tension. To suppress stimming, maintain atypical eye contact, or modulate tone of voice and facial expressions, the body must engage in constant, deliberate muscular containment. The shoulders brace, the jaw clenches, the diaphragm tightens to regulate breath and voice.
This is not a temporary posture but a permanent armor, held hour after hour, year after year. Over time, this held tension loses its voluntary quality and becomes the body's default state, leading to pain syndromes, headaches, and a pervasive feeling of being locked inside oneself. The body, in essence, becomes a prison of its own making, built to house a performance.
This unrelenting performance demands an extraordinary amount of energy, leading to profound systemic depletion. The cognitive load of monitoring every social cue, scripting conversations, and manually processing neurotypical social rhythms is metabolically expensive. The nervous system, perpetually in a state of hyper vigilance and managed output, never receives the signals of safety required for true rest and digestion. The result is a deep, often inexplicable fatigue that sleep cannot remedy. This is the fatigue of a system perpetually overriding its own operating instructions, a drain that undermines resilience and capacities for joy, creativity, and connection.
When masking becomes a primary survival strategy, a painful fragmentation of identity can occur. The authentic self, with its natural rhythms, interests, and expressions, is sequestered away. The performed self takes the stage. Somatic psychotherapy understands that this split is not just psychological. It is felt as a disembodiment, a loss of connection to internal cues like hunger, emotion, and need. The individual may literally not know what they feel or want because their primary reference point has become external approval and safety. This fragmentation is a wound to the core self, and the body holds the grief of this dislocation, often manifesting as a hollow sensation or a deep sense of unreality.
Inevitably, this unsustainable expenditure leads to burnout, which is itself a full body trauma response. Burnout from masking is not simple exhaustion. It is a systemic collapse where the body mind finally refuses to continue the performance. This can involve autonomic dysregulation, complete emotional numbness, a shutdown of executive function, or a onset of debilitating chronic illness. The body forces a stop where the mind could not.
Furthermore, the relentless requirement to mask, especially when enforced by negative social consequences, is inherently traumatic. It sends the repeated message that the authentic self is unacceptable, unsafe, and unworthy of belonging. This is a recipe for complex trauma, where the source of threat is the social world one must navigate daily. The body remembers every moment of forced inauthenticity, every punished stim, every misinterpreted tone, storing these memories as trauma that can trigger anxiety, panic, and pervasive shame.
Healing from the somatic cost of masking begins with the courageous act of turning inward. It requires creating spaces of unconditional safety, often first in the therapeutic relationship, where the body can begin to relax its vigilant performance. Somatic therapies support this by helping individuals gently notice and slowly dismantle the chronic holding patterns, to rediscover the body's authentic movement and rest states, and to titrate the liberating experience of being present in their own skin, unmasked. The path involves translating the body's symptoms from a problem to be solved into a voice to be understood, listening to the wisdom of its tensions and exhaustions as a record of survival and a map back home to the self.
