Masking means hiding parts of who we really are in order to fit in. The word is used most often of autistic people hiding autistic traits, but in Therapeutic Shamanism it describes something all of us do to some degree: we wear a persona, a mask, over our real self. Masking began in the wild, among social animals, and domestication took it to an extreme, so that many people today lose sight of who they really are.
What is masking?
There are two ways the word is used. In autism research, masking, or camouflaging, means hiding or making up for autistic traits in order to fit in. The social psychologist Devon Price writes: “Masking is a labour-intensive, largely unsuccessful process that cleaves us from our bodies and our true feelings”.1 See What can shamanism offer autistic people?
The wider meaning goes back to Carl Jung‘s word for the face we show the world. “In reality, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is a mask.” It is “the face we present to the world. The problem is that we come to think that the mask is who we actually are.”2 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Do we all wear a mask?
Yes, and that is not in itself a problem. A persona is how we meet other people, and “ideally the persona would be the medium through which we express our real-self in the world.” For hunter-gatherers, “The gap between the real-self and the persona would not have needed to be large.”3 The trouble comes when the mask and the person wearing it drift far apart.
Where did masking begin?
Long before humans. Most beings are simply true to their own nature. “With social animals, though, in order to fit in, sometimes they need to conceal their true nature”: “the embryonic beginning of the taming of the Self in order to fit into a social structure.”4 For example, “in a wolf pack, to fit in and be accepted by the group, the individual must learn to curb and suppress their individualism to some degree.”5 It is part of the price of belonging, and worth paying when belonging gives more than it costs.
Then humans arrived: “And eventually, into that gap strides Human, saying, “You call that not being true to your Self? Hold my beer”.”6
How is masking linked to domestication?
Domestication widened the gap enormously. Complex, crowded cultures need many more rules, and each of us learns them as a child, often by learning which parts of ourselves are acceptable: “We learn to turn a ‘condition of worth’ from others into a ‘condition of self-worth'”. We “then learn to repress that part of us and send it away.” What is left is the persona, “the mask that we wear to disguise our true self.”7
Therapeutic Shamanism asks whether what our culture calls normal is itself the result. Maybe “neurotypical” is in fact neuromasking on a mass scale. This is offered as a question. See Is neurotypical the same as the Domesticated Mind? and What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
What does masking cost?
Much, when the gap grows wide. For many modern people, “Their real-self is like a seed that has never had a chance to grow; a potential that was never realised.”8 And, as Carl Rogers held, “the degree of someone’s anxiety is directly in proportion to the gap between what they know deep down to be true on the one hand, and what they are pretending to be true on the other hand.”9
Price says something similar of autistic masking: “to be masked is not to be freed from judgement but to be imprisoned by it.”10 And the parts of us that we hide do not simply disappear. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that sending away parts of ourselves “to ‘fit in’” is now the commonest cause of soul-lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer.11 See What is soul-loss?
Why do people mask?
To belong, and to stay safe. A review of research on autistic people reports a study in which people who felt more stigma also camouflaged more, which, the authors say, “suggests that camouflaging is a response to stigma.”12 In Therapeutic Shamanism, the part of us that learnt to fit in as a child is called the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer: “a part developed in our childhood (to fit in with family, school, religion, peers etc.)”.13 It is doing its best to protect us. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Can we take the mask off?
Not by force: “no deep or permanent change happens without the fort-holder’s consent”.14 Safe company helps too. The same review of autism research reports that spending time with other autistic people gave a sense of belonging, because people “were able to be their authentic selves”.15
Here Therapeutic Shamanism and Price differ. Price writes: “There is no singular true self lurking behind the mask of neurotypicality”, and sees the self instead as always changing, shaped by our lives and relationships.16 Therapeutic Shamanism does speak of a real self underneath: the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul, “the wild and free human being that we were born to be”.17 The aim, in this view, is not to have no persona at all, but one through which the real self can be expressed. See What does rewilding Soul mean, and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
