5 Masking Skills You Didn’t Know Could Become Your Greatest Assets
How to reclaim survival strategies and translate them into tools for radical self-care and empowerment.
If you’ve spent years—or decades—masking, you’ve probably encountered a familiar narrative:
Masking is bad.
Unmasking is good.
Freedom comes when you stop hiding.
There is truth to this. Masking can be exhausting, painful, and ultimately unsustainable. Yet this narrative is incomplete. Like many binaries, it oversimplifies a complex experience. Neurocomplexity is about dismantling these false dichotomies. It rejects either/or thinking. It insists on both/and.
What if the mask was not a flaw, but a tool? Something you developed to survive—and that you can learn to repurpose.
This applies to masking in autism, ADHD, giftedness, sensory processing differences, and emotional intensity. It applies to the ways we conceal ourselves to avoid shame, infantilization, punishment, or exclusion.
If you are in the process of unmasking, the real question becomes: What do you do with the part of you that learned to survive this way?