Thrown Under a Fire Blanket

RE: autistic masking and dissociation

I. The Uncanny Recognition

I was in session. A client, late-identified autistic, was talking about how they felt “gone” in most of their interactions. Not shut down, just absent. “I don’t even think I’m pretending. I just disappear.”

I said, gently, “Sometimes masking is inherently dissociative.”

They froze for a second in comprehension. I watched them sit still, then tilt their head slowly like something inside had clicked back into place. “Oh god,” they said. “That is what that is, huh?”

I’ve had that conversation before. I’ll have it again. Every time, it startles something awake in me.

II. Before I Had the Words

I used to get praised for being calm. Even in crises, I could sound professional. People said I had presence.

I remember what it felt like inside. Not calm. Untethered.

I’d track the script of how to appear professional - voice modulated, eye contact steady, hands open and still. But I wasn’t there. I watched myself in third-person while someone else moved my mouth.

I didn’t have the words for what was happening. I thought I was anxious.

Now, I know it was something quieter. I was dissociating - not as a trauma response to a single moment but as the ongoing cost of being watched.

III. Explaining the Mechanism

Masking isn’t just performance. It’s self-surveillance.

It’s tracking every blink. Calibrating your tone in real-time. Editing your face while you’re still speaking. Monitoring not just what you’re saying, but how it might be received.

To make room for all that tracking, something has to go - you.

Over time, masking becomes a kind of split cognition: one self watching, one self performing. The watcher directs. The performer adapts. Whatever part of you was just being? That part slipped out the back door.

It’s dissociation, even if you don’t know it.

Being thrown under a fire blanket when you didn’t even know you were on fire.

IV. The Compassion Frame

I don’t pathologize dissociation. It’s a brilliant strategy.

Dissociation kept me safe until safety required me to vanish. Then, protection became erasure.

When dissociation is the price of entry - when you are required to disappear in order to stay - it stops being protection and becomes erasure.

It’s only lonely when you realize you don’t remember what it felt like to be fully there.

V. Small Ways Back

I can feel it now when I start to leave.

Sometimes I stay gone, because that’s safer or the pain of my body or situation is unbearable. But, I come back. That choice - that awareness - is new.

After our session, my client emailed me. Just two lines: “That thing you said about masking and dissociation. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

I emailed back: “I know. I think about it all the time.”