When Tia started school, she didn’t expect she’d have to mask her emotions in order to simply connect with fellow students. Throughout her life, she’s had to hide her true feelings from loved ones – family and close friends alike. Constantly hiding her true emotions is exhausting, and has a large toll on both Tia’s mental state, and her everyday life.
“It’s something that I have to do in order to get through the day,” Tia said.
According to Psychology Today, emotional masking is defined as ‘when individuals repress or hide signs of a mental health condition to blend in or adapt to the neurotypical world’. This behaviour – also known as both ‘camouflaging’ or ‘compensating’ – can lead to psychological distress in the forms of stress, exhaustion, burnout, or a loss of identity.
For Tia, the emotional masking she’s endured has lasted her life and while she’s trying to prevent herself from camouflaging her feelings, she understands it’s a hard task to overcome to unlearn the behaviour she’s known since she was young. Despite this, she calls it a “coping mechanism,” which is what emotional masking is for a lot of people. It’s a protection for herself against psychological distress.
Additionally, according to Charlie Health, masking can be used for other reasons, including “a fear of stigma, judgement, rejection, or a desire to maintain a sense of normalcy.” In Tia’s case, it was primarily a fear of judgement from others.
“One of the ways I could connect with [friends] was masking what I was actually feeling,” Tia said.
Psychologist Emily Arnold confirms these feelings as valid effects on one’s long-term state. “These outcomes will often build up and contribute to long-term consequences of relationship issues and mental health challenges,” Arnold said.
Tia also understands how emotional masking can be misunderstood by others, saying she wishes more people realised that it wasn’t anything personal. According to Arnold, emotional masking is often misunderstood.
“This oversimplified understanding of emotional masking fails to recognise the complexity of why individuals mask their emotions in the first place.”
In the end, Tia simply wants to live her life normally and happily with her emotions, and wants people to understand what really goes on behind her mask.
