"If My Face Has Gone Neutral, It's Bad", or Flattened Affect in Camouflaging Autistic People

I've been married for over two years now.  That means there has been plenty of time for arguments and getting upset with each other.  While of course we do try not to argue, I can be rather rigid about some things, and my experience of our life together is rather different than my spouse's on some important facets.  For instance, touch can hurt me rather than comfort me.

A lot of the learning we've done over the last few years has included how to recognize when the other person is upset, and what to do once that's recognized.  With me, the first one is an extra complicated challenge.  I thought it might be useful to present this information, because some of it may be applicable to you or your loved ones.

With most people, their faces display the whole range of their emotions, or at least what emotions they want to be displaying.  This emotional expression is called "affect" in psychology.  One of the ways you can start to recognize an autistic person is by their affect.  If their emotional expressions seem flat all the time, that's a thing to note.  Neurotypical people can also display blunted or flat affect, but it's usually because they're depressed or completely worn out.

The word choice amuses me because another definition of "affect"  in the general lexicon means "to put on a pretense of."  So, "she affected wealth and high position, but in truth was working retail."  And also, "affected" as an adjective can mean "feigned" or "assumed artificially."  In short, depending on how you think about the word, everyone's putting on pretenses of what they show on their faces.

This is particularly relevant when you recall that people don't merely convey their mental states on their faces, but instead use them as another hidden form of communication and to modify the behaviors of others.

A Matter of Degrees

So, with that in mind!  If I'm slightly annoyed by something, my face may display it briefly before I decide it's really not worth my time.  If I am more moderately or heavily annoyed, my face may show it and I may try to address the situation.  Easy examples of both situations would be stuff that triggers my sound sensitivity.

Somebody dropping a heavy box of clothes from 60+ feet away might count as slightly annoying.  The sound that produces would be low in pitch, and while it might be loud, the distance helps make that tolerable.  I would hear this sound, but would try not to let it interrupt what I was doing.

However, someone's child screaming within 20 feet of me is more on the moderate to heavily annoying range.  My face might display the pain of having that high-pitched, grating, unending shriek shredding into my brain.  And if the child doesn't cease quickly, I might put in earplugs or try to leave the situation.

Emotional pain, such as that caused by arguments, can be much more painful.  This is where it gets tricky.  After a certain point, between "I'm upset" and "I am melting down, stand clear," my face stops displaying emotions.  This is not because I'm trying to be confusing, and definitely does not mean I'm doing fine.  It means I've lost regulation of those muscles and am instead focusing very hard on managing myself and the pain I'm feeling.

Affect, you see, takes effort for me.  If I'm using all my energy to manage a conversation and my own hurt feelings, I have none left for communicating in a way that's unnatural to me.  I go stone-faced.  This is easy to mistake for "calm."  It is very much not calm.  In a direct argument, treating it like that can be disastrous.

After I'm pushed beyond "stone-faced," my face starts expressing emotions again... but only because I'm likely in tears or screaming.  Ideally things never get to this point, but it does happen sometimes.

Not All Bad

This tendency to stone-face while moderately emotionally upset has its upsides.  It made it so that I wasn't constantly scowling during school.  Formalized education was not a pleasant experience, and more often than not, I was miserable.  Also angry.  But mostly miserable.  If I'd actually looked how depressed and angry I was, much fuss would have been made over me.  And since all I really wanted was to be left alone, this helped me survive.  

Although I'm less miserable as an adult, the tendency to stone-face does still come in handy.  In cases of being amongst strangers, I may be made miserable by any number of things, including my depression, screaming children, or people I'll never see again being cruel or rude to me on accident.  Since I'd still generally prefer not to cause a fuss, this can be helpful.  

It's probably not the best possible adaptation to the situation, but it beats being unable to go out in public.  Some of my misery-inducing problems, like my depression, don't go away if asked nicely.  There are just times you need to go grocery shopping, and they can't wait until you've stopped feeling like you're everything wrong with the world.

What's Camouflaging?

Camouflaging, in this context, is when autistic people deny their natural mentalities and behaviors in favor of appearing to be neurotypical.  This is what the worst kinds of Applied Behavioral Analysis teach.  On the surface, this might seem like a good thing: after all, neurotypical behavior is what's expected from everyone.  Camouflaging, then, is trying to fit in.  

The thing is, there's a price for denying who you are and stifling yourself.  It's paid in emotional pain, which expresses itself as depression, anxiety, and other kinds of mental illness.  All the responsibility is placed on the autistic person to "act normal" but neurotypical people do not then, in kind, try to accept and work with our differences when they are expressed.  The result is an unjust society, and a markedly higher suicide rate in autistic adults.