ive been seeing a bunch of your posts about unmasking and the conversation around it and i cant find your latest conclusion of them on your blog but i was having the 'masking vs dissociation' conversation a while back and i remember no one seeming to understand the concept that what we see as masking, for some is an involuntary dissociation from their body and its needs, which now years later and doing parts work i see as the creating of apparently normal parts created in order to get through the world. came off the back of a discussion with an old high school teacher that i apparently dont mask much (i dont really do it consciously tho its possible i got so good at it in early years it became unconscious) but damn it's impossible to 'unmask' when masking is a dissociative trauma response (and therefore is Actually A Symptom, a paradox i would love to get more into) and for anyone with certain kinds of early trauma we've got a good deal of amnesia between these parts. I still don't know what my sensory needs are or if I have them because I'm so out of touch with my body's needs in general. and that's the paradox for me, if a symptom of autism is poor interoception but sensory issues are also a symptom and we need interoception to even figure out if we have them... anyway. If my social skills are the result of a more competent part fronting does that mean there can be parts that exist with and parts that exist without autistic symptoms, or is the nervous system that was prone to this trauma the neurodivergence to begin with?
sorry that's long, im super intrigued by the discussion and im super glad you're having it and putting it out there
anyway, if you're comfortable letting me know what you want to study i cant promise it with everything but i have a few courses i have access to pirating the materials for you if you like
i think about this sort of thing a LOT as someone who has a lot of heavily overlapping experiences with people who are plural/systems/really benefit from parts work... often i find that our internal experiences are almost identical but one of us benefits from conceptualizing Parts and one does not (this is obviously not the case with All plural/system/etc people, obvi everyones experiences can vary) but like particularly people who have prolonged childhood abuse? i dont think we currently have either the knowledge of how the developing brain works or the language to name specific experiences to really delineate what any given thing is "really" due to... after all psychiatric diagnoses are just labels/tools for grouping symptoms and experiences, largely. i think the thing that makes this hard is rhat we want two things and often we mix those things up:
1. we want a language that is concrete which we can use to describe What Happened To Us and the resulting long term impact
2. we want to know how this stuff works on a neurodevelopmental level, like, scientifically
the issue is that many people use the language of the latter to try and build frameworks for the former, i think, when if we are all being totally honest psychology is a SOFT fucking science and also REALLY, REALLY new. as is neurology (new, that is) and a lot of autonomic/sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system research. we really know almost nothing about the brain regarding this stuff that doesnt stem from self reporting. our society acts like we understand the brain/mind/motivations/behavior etc much better than we actually do.
so i think for me a lot of talking about this is about the utility of certain terms for communicating with others about my experience (both other neurodivergent and traumatized people and also people who dont experience those things -- and often we need different frameworks for those groups)
i dont find masking to be a useful way of framing my interperosnal social reactions to autism and cptsd. i also question it being used as sort of the primary catch-all currently for related phenomenons just because i think we could be using language with more clarity
i hope this makes a bit more clear where i am coming from with this -- i appreciate you sharing your experience, it definitely overlaps with a lot with the experiences of people i know!
