This article explores the broader spectrum of camouflaging behaviours among neurodivergent people with AuDHD, extending beyond masking. It describes overcompensating, over-explaining, role-playing, disappearing, hyper-mirroring, caregiving, channelling intensity into acceptable pursuits, and intellectualising emotions. A comparison table shows how these strategies differ from masking while still leading to exhaustion, identity confusion, and misdiagnosis.

Contents

Introduction

When we talk about neurodivergent camouflaging, especially among people with AuDHD (Autism + ADHD), the conversation usually starts and ends with “masking”. Masking is real, exhausting, and often harmful. But it’s only one piece of a much more complex puzzle.

Camouflaging isn’t just faking eye contact or copying how your colleagues say “let’s circle back.” It’s a whole suite of adaptive strategies, conscious and unconscious, that can look like coping, achievement, people-pleasing, ambition, hyper-responsibility, or even humour. These behaviours don’t always seem like camouflage, but for many ND people, they serve the same purpose: hiding differences to avoid rejection.

Let’s name them.

Masking 101: What It Is (and Isn’t)

Masking is the conscious or unconscious suppression of neurodivergent traits to appear “normal.” It’s often associated with autism, but many people with ADHD or other neurodivergences mask as well.

Common masking behaviours:

• Forcing or faking eye contact
• Suppressing stimming (e.g. fidgeting, hand-flapping)
• Rehearsing conversations ahead of time
• Imitating social scripts or intonations
• Smiling/laughing at the “right” time

Masking is typically most visible in face-to-face social interactions, and it’s often what diagnostic tools or therapists look for. But it doesn’t explain the full range of camouflaging behaviours.

Other Forms of Camouflaging

These forms of camouflaging go beyond typical masking:

• Overcompensation (perfectionism, hyper-responsibility)
• Over-explaining (managing others’ perceptions with disclaimers)
• Role-playing (developing multiple social personas)
• Disappearing (social withdrawal to avoid scrutiny)
• Hyper-mirroring (copying not just behaviour, but identity cues)
• Caregiving (becoming “useful” to remain included)
• Acceptable obsession (funnelling hyperfixations into work or academia)
• Intellectualising (analysing rather than processing emotions)

1. Overcompensating

For many AuDHD people, camouflaging isn’t about shrinking, it’s about overdoing. You become the most prepared, the most competent, the one who triple-checks everything and finishes the project early. You’re praised for being “driven” or “meticulous,” but really you’re in a constant state of self-defence, terrified that one misstep will expose your overwhelm, your chaos, your difficulty regulating attention or emotions.

Key signs:

• Chronic overachievement to offset perceived deficits
• Taking on extra tasks to “prove” you’re capable
• Perfectionism not as pride, but as panic

2. Over-Explaining and Justifying

Instead of masking your behaviour, you pre-emptively explain it away. You give disclaimers, soften your tone, add context. You might narrate your thought process just to be understood or lessen the impact of perceived bluntness.

This is camouflaging through language. You try to manage people’s perceptions not by changing who you are, but by creating a smokescreen of justification.

Example phrases:

• “Sorry if this sounds weird, but…”
• “I might be overthinking this, but I just wanted to clarify…”
• “Just to be clear, the reason I did it that way is because…”

3. Role-Playing

You build personas. You might have a ‘Work Self’, a ‘School Self’, a ‘Social Self’, and even a ‘Doctor’s Appointment Self’, each tailored to the expectations of that setting. These versions of you are scripted, curated, and monitored constantly.

This is more than masking facial expressions, it’s identity compartmentalisation.
You play the part of the Responsible Colleague, the Empathetic Listener, the Fun Friend, sometimes so convincingly that you lose track of what you actually want or feel.

4. Disappearing Acts (Social Vanishing)

When people think of camouflaging, they don’t think of absence. But for many ND folks, withdrawal is strategic. You ghost. You cancel plans. You stay silent in meetings. You minimise your visibility not to rest, but to avoid scrutiny or exposure.

Camouflage through disappearance looks like:

• Avoiding environments where your dysregulation might show
• Leaving group chats unread to avoid saying the “wrong thing”
• Not asking questions to avoid looking “stupid”

5. Hyper-Mirroring

This goes beyond basic social mimicry. You adopt the mannerisms, interests, or values of those around you, often unconsciously, just to fit. You change your accent slightly. You pretend to like the pub, even if it’s a sensory hell. You laugh when everyone else does, even if you didn’t get the joke.

Over time, it becomes hard to know: what’s me, and what’s strategy?

6. Caregiving and Emotional Labour

Many AuDHD people become the carers, the mediators, the fixers. You get rewarded for your empathy and support, but few see that these roles protect you too. By being helpful or nurturing, you become needed. Being needed often means being tolerated or forgiven.

Camouflaging through service can mean:

• Overextending yourself to stay included
• Becoming the emotional translator in difficult situations
• Being “the therapist friend” as a survival strategy

7. Funnelling Intensity into Acceptable Obsessions

You have special interests or hyperfixations, but instead of stimming openly or diving into your niche passion, you funnel your energy into something legible to others. A PhD. A high-status career. A socially acceptable hobby.

It looks like ambition. It looks like expertise. It hides the reality: this is how you cope. This is how you regulate. This is the one part of life that feels coherent.

8. Intellectualisation

You retreat into abstraction. Rather than feeling emotions in real time (because they’re too much, too fast), you analyse them. You treat interpersonal situations like puzzles. You explain away distress with frameworks. You hide behind theories, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, not as arrogance, but as armour.

Comparison of Masking vs Other Camouflaging Strategies

Category	Masking	Other Camouflaging Strategies
Goal	Blend in during social interactions	Avoid rejection, prove worth, stay safe, or maintain control
Visibility	Highly visible (especially to trained observers)	Often invisible or misinterpreted as ambition, helpfulness, or personality traits
Typical Contexts	Face-to-face conversations, social settings	Work, school, family dynamics, emotional regulation, identity management
Common Behaviours	Eye contact, voice modulation, body posture, smile mirroring	Overworking, people-pleasing, ghosting, over-analysing, identity shifting
Perception by Others	“Quiet,” “polite,” “socially competent”	“Driven,” “caring,” “high-achiever,” “independent,” “reserved”
Emotional Toll	Eye contact, voice modulation, body posture, and smile mirroring	Same, but often delayed or misattributed due to external praise or internalised pressure
Awareness Level	Often semi-conscious or learned from childhood	May be deeply internalised and misrecognised as core personality or “just how I cope”
Gendered Expectations	More documented in AFAB individuals (esp. masking)	Many other camouflaging forms also map to socialised gender roles (e.g. caregiving, overachievement, peacemaking)
Risk of Misdiagnosis	High, due to “not seeming autistic/ADHD enough”	Extremely high, these behaviours can actively mask the need for support or lead to misdiagnosis (e.g., anxiety)

Why It Matters

These lesser-known forms of camouflaging are:

• Less visible
• More rewarded
• Harder to unpick

And that makes them more insidious. You can burn out without ever having masked traditionally. You can overcompensate for years and be praised for it. You can intellectualise yourself into emotional isolation.

Understanding this broader spectrum of camouflage is crucial, not just for clinicians or employers, but for ourselves. We need language to make sense of why we’re exhausted. Why we succeed and still feel like frauds? Why rest doesn’t always come after unmasking, because we were never just masking. We were performing, translating, disappearing, over-delivering, and calling it survival.

Closing Thought

Masking is a known trap. But camouflaging is the terrain. And until we map it fully, we can’t build lives that honour who we are beneath all the coping. Personally, masking for any amount of time wipes me out… I can take days to recover, and all these nuances of desperatly trying to “fit in”, it’s just too hard.