PDA masking

no I'm sorry cat I'm an adult video author and artist I'm also lucky enough to have a nine-year-old DD a cup of my own is called Milly the topic I'm going to speak to you about today for the positive TV a virtual summit 2020 is masking masking means hiding your true feelings often season to appear calm and happy a form of masking is social mimicry this means copying what you think of the right behaviors to fit in and get along with people before I get stuck in I should point out that while many PDAs including myself and Milly do mask some PVAc that we do not mask at all for local PDS masks awareness that many PTA children mask for example in school has lately been growing if awareness to my mind is a very very high importance because if educators as well as diagnosticians and other practitioners are not aware of masking and how expensive it can be they will be bound to assume that the child has no real issues I had direct experience of this for my daughter Millie was assessed for ADHD last year the local Child Development Center had updated her autism diagnosis through food PDA when she was five I then requested them to assess her for co-occurring ADHD the position who assess her pronounce that mili could not be ADHD because her teachers had observed no hyperactivity at school despite to extreme hyperactivity at home the physician said that ADHD traits cannot be masked so her behavior at home was due to autistic sensory seeking it took me a long time by eventually overcame my demand avoidance and asked my GP to request a second opinion on account of the extent of Millie's masking not having been considered one of the center's belief clinicians phoned me in April and agreed that milli does need to be reassessed by one of our team observing her in school the lead clinician I spoke to was aware that teachers are unlikely to be able to spot the subtle signs of Master ADHD masking school children are therefore vulnerable to being denied support and accommodations even if they have autism diagnosis with all about the description of PDA school staff are likely to focus their attention on extroverted children however massed PDA tips like Millie are actually very anxious and stressed behind their masks a third of older masking PDA school kids have attempted suicide or gone into effective nervous breakdown and he's completely shut down and been unable to interact with the world but or even leave our bathrooms yes with lasting children do need support for not having an easy time their PJ is not mild it is merely hidden from view I spent the majority of my own school days locked in the mirth of daydreams and desperately unhappy and depressed another major issue botanico and professional stunt understand masking is that if parents report that their child is loud and unruly at home perhaps having meltdowns while their mouths like model peoples in school professionals have been known to assume that this is caused by bad parenting they are perfectly well behaved in school so if mum says they smash their house up and scream when they're in her care is obviously all her fault perhaps worse still parents especially mothers can be accused of FII applicated or induced illness for new temperament chosen by proxy and then behaved asked by social services as a result instead of a PTA child being given appropriate support this is really really not good or remotely helpful awareness and understanding of PJ masking is therefore in my opinion vitally important now although masking is not a universal PDA trait it does seem to be a very common one and where it does occur this is often to an extreme extent I believe that PDA masking is quality fully different to the type of masking but support by many autistic people I think it's important for this to be understood as I've said I'm a PDR who'd birth mask social mimicry was the trait that jumped out to me on a female order some traits first I saw back in 2013 I was shocked I've always done this but never before seen it described as a recognized human behavior I realized some reflection that I fitted all the other traits on the list well ask my GP to refer me for an adult autism assessment and was diagnosed a few months later enthusiastically sought fellow autistics conversa Vaughn line I was then highly confused to find that masking and facial mimic we were considered to be very very bad things that neurotypicals wanted autistic people to do but that autistics hated how could this be known had told me to mask my masking felt like a natural thing but I wanted to do yes I was unhappy devastated in fact whenever I messed up socially and after frequent occurrence but it was me who wanted to learn how to improve my social communication I noticed signs of my autism and Millie was 2 at the time and succeeded in getting her autism diagnose despite her nursery manager and senior health visitor firmly appalling but she was no way autistic when you all about autism and that she was just shy I came across PDA at the time of Millie's formal assessment for autism and 2015 I realized that PVA described essential parts of a that autism alone did not a meeting adult PDAs online the only resource at this time for adult PDA was a Facebook group run by fellow PDA Julie adorned I found that connected instantly with the community as never before integrated this felt anywhere including what we call in real lives as in not online following hundreds of hours of online chatting both with PDAs and general autistics I've picked up that PDA seemed more likely to consider masking to be natural and less likely to think badly of it however nearly all general t6r spoke with as well as a few PDAs so my thing is an evil thing brutally forced onto them by unaccepting parents and society they described it is it the source thing and unhealthy unnatural many talked of having liberate themselves by dropping their masks this intrigued me I run an informal study which backed up my supposition that PDAs are more likely to see their masking as natural I spoke to grace Brundle a forensic psychology PhD student from Nottingham University who specializes in the adult PDA grace went on to explore this with formal research her results suggest that actually PJs do carry out more social memory a mask England general autistics are excited to say that we're going to work together in the future to explore this in more depth in the meantime that is I think a likelihood that many PDAs have an instinct to mask as opposed to many non PDA autistics only masking Orvis what we say if coerced to do so and feeling miserably oppressed as a result now I think the very important point to bear in mind here well autistic children might appreciate being told that they can express themselves as they wish the same message may confuse a PDA child I want to reiterate that not all PDA and general autistic children are the same far from it but there does seem to be evidence for a significant proportion of PDAs mask and believe this to be a natural thing to do and that this differs from what general autistic people have reported merely for example communicated to us her parents from the moment that he could do so which is about two years old that he was okay when she clearly wasn't on medication for example she had fallen and bashed her head against the doorframe she a gash on her forehead and tears were streaming down her face be rushed to comfort her but this course of a panic in his shift that she was okay we didn't want to panic her and we wanted to agree with her and say open it you're okay but we also wanted to comfort her for the physical pages adamantly denying it was very hard to parent I was altered to hold you my arms wide and sitting calmly so chic accused to come for cuddle which he did now in case you're wondering we never reacted negatively to Millie for crying in expression paint the precise damask it appears to have been a natural instinct I actually had a conversation of her about this couple of weeks ago I told her about how when she was a toddler she used to deny having had painful injuries and how this had been difficult to parent she thought this was funny we've gotten to talking about how we both want wanted to hide things as we were hurt and we shared stories of childhood injuries who tried to conceal I told her about how when I've been about six from the school playground and eaten one of those hard teary sweets you get and it got stuck in my throat and the corners had dug in really painfully and I could hardly breathe but my instinct had been to act as if I was fine and I didn't want anyone to see but I was hurt but I have no idea why I've been driven to react that way she told me that when she'd been in year one she tripped over in the playground and cut her knee so it was breathing and it really hurt but she just pulled her sock up to hide the blood on her knee but her sock had gone dark of a blood so she pulled her skirt down really not wanting anyone to see what she'd been hurt she said but on another occasion this time in our garden at home just fallen into something and bashed her face and her nose it started bleeding she said she sneaked up segmented onto her bed and let me stood that patch of blood on the carpet bare I asked if he knew why she did this she shrugged her shoulders and speculated that maybe it was because she didn't want the attention I said to her I've been wondering about masking I think we discussed this before it's where some people such as myself want to hide what we feel and look calm and happy she cut me off very quickly and said it's definitely that so the type of masking we do myself and milli that is is driven by not wanting other people to know or see what we really feel if a well-meaning teacher came up 2 million told her that they could tell she was masking and but she doesn't never do it I think milli would totally panic and be upset that her masking had been spotted and that should be confused by the teacher telling her but she could just stop doing it I'll now describe to you a bit more of what my masking is social mimic we feel like to me my experience may not match everyone else's but I hope it shines a little bit of lightens what did a masking can feel like I'll also be exploring the positive side of masking I personally do not see my last thing as a bad thing at all I hid his natural helpful and fun times at see great fun but before fun comes what I call the fear wall the fear wall is not fun at all it is a horrible paralyzing bubble of Terror but leaps up to engulf me when I would to speak to people I've been cursed with this fear wall since I was a very small troll I never wanted it nor knew how to make it go away it meant I couldn't talk easily to people even though I longed to I remember as a nervous young adult with low self-esteem being lonely and depressed because of it to only ever a few people any one time though I could talk to easily my fear wall blocked me from communicating with everyone else however it wasn't always possible to see the few people I was comfortable with and loneliness that set in this was often also panic blurriness I used to be terrified of being alone sometimes I summoned a resolve to expand my social circle and visit someone who wasn't one of my faith people the two or three people I was relaxed with I chose people I've been able to talk to a relative of Eve in the company of one of my safe people I'd bravely arranged to meet this person determined to overcome the paralysis of my fear wall but every time I fear will clamp down on me leaving me panicked and scared April to speak at it there awkwardly wishing very hard I was happy and relaxed and able to enjoy their company but I couldn't it was excruciating and very disappointing - I wanted to say the right thing but I had no confidence in myself to know what these things were in my early 20s there's one friendly girl who's too old for me who had known since my teens and we often walked up a hill together I'm pretty sure I did more than this but this is what I recall anyway every time he walked up a hill together I found myself saying it's a long hill then ink regretting having parented myself from every other time we walked up Burrell together I'd wanted to talk freely and spontaneous view of her but well I just couldn't okay now let's look at how Marvin has been able to rescue me I have crappy picked up here and there throughout my life phrases mannerisms expressions and other snippets of social communication that people have appeared to respond well to I've never been good at small talk but my Stabbin communication toolkit has given me confidence but I can hold my own socially enough to permeate my fear wall see where I could as was fun desire interact with others now how great is that now some people view masking as shady and dishonest of glory if Intel's hiding one's true feelings behind a calm happy facade however for me masking enables me to break through my curse available and communicate full stop and despite the back of our mask I do actually seek to communicate my true feelings it is an odd word I've become aware of this as I've searched for words to describe her masking works for me my masking enables me to communicate deep genuine feelings that is not otherwise described at all I'm a trained person such as counselor what emerged most in this training was being taught how to actively listen a community empathy and having specialists to to feedback about how I came across this was perfect for me I was also highly encouraged to be informed with my self-awareness as well developed I felt could pop out at the end of the training schedule is a working counselor I've got his far as the first term of level 4 and for his vehicle permitted to call myself a qualified persons counselor but quit because of health and PDA avoidance issues however the social communication skills I learned have been a massive boost to me and have completely been transferable into my everyday life my ability to most broadly so to communicate with most people I meet with relative ease has been massively boosted by this training and as I mentioned earlier masking can be a very pleasant thing to do for example with a family holiday tour about in Morocco a couple of years ago where bat is not a touristic place and I was ultra conscious of it being a deeply Islamic community in which women are required to be demure and keep their bodies covered dressed conscientiously I thought to deport myself in a demure manner although this might sound like the antithesis of a freedom PDAs need actually had both the fun structure my wings and diverse new mosque without liberating and deeply satisfying I think that the PDA traits have been comfortable roleplay and liking novelty came into play here so lift light masking can perhaps be thought of as an aspect of a PDA trait of life in roleplay or is it the other way around so in conclusion I'll say that masking for PDAs may not be universal but does seem to be common and also country to the evil masking many generalistic people speak about PDA masking can actually be experienced by perhaps many of us as a positive thing which is a social communication tool and feels natural thank you for listening I should also add if you want to see more of my illustrations the victims PDA offered a Facebook page called psychic apps PDA page which you can look up and I also have a blog sorry cap PDA co dot uk' thank you for listening

Channel: Sally Cat

Views: 3,098

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: -DYD7yFOknI

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021