The Signs We Miss, the Silence We Carry, and Why Avoiding Trauma Doesn’t Mean We Escape Its Echo

Some posts are delicate threads. This one is a full tapestry—stitched with truths, complications, and emotional debris I’ve only recently started sorting through.

We’re still on verbal masking. Still unpacking how it hides in plain sight. Still discovering how the signs don’t always scream—they whisper. And sometimes they whisper so quietly that unless someone holds up a mirror, you won’t see what you’ve been performing every day.

Let’s start with speech impediments.

They’re rarely talked about as a sign of masking, but they can be. Not always—but often enough to matter. For many neurodivergent folks, especially those with AuDHD, fluency isn’t stable. It’s situational. Emotional. Sensory-bound. That slurring when tired? That tongue-twist under stress? That stumbling over easy words when dysregulated? That’s not poor diction. That’s a brain begging for rest and regulation. And sometimes, it’s the very effort of sustaining a mask that causes those breakdowns.

We learn to override them. To suppress the symptoms. To pretend they don’t exist because they’re inconvenient or embarrassing. I’ve done it. I’ve spent entire social interactions digging for words that won’t surface, panicking when a sentence falls apart halfway through, and then laughing it off like, “Oh, I’m just tired.” But the truth is more complicated. Verbal masking isn’t just keeping words coming—it’s hiding what’s happening when they don’t.

And that leads me straight to ABA.

Applied Behavior Analysis is the name. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a therapy model widely used on autistic children—especially those diagnosed early. On paper, it’s structured reinforcement to “shape” desired behaviors and extinguish unwanted ones. In reality, it often translates to emotional suppression dressed as clinical progress. The child cries during a lesson? Ignore it. The child melts down during language drills? Delay comfort until compliance. The child doesn’t speak on cue? Practice until they can—with no room for autonomy.

Let me be blunt: the more I’ve learned about ABA, the more sickened I’ve become.

I never went through ABA. I masked well enough that my autism slid under the radar until adulthood. And I’ve been told I should be grateful. But that’s a jagged kind of gratitude, because it comes with holes. With missed insight. With years of misunderstanding myself. While ABA survivors often carry trauma from forced compliance, those of us who avoided it can carry trauma from non-recognition. We’re left believing our differences are flaws. That we’re broken. That we need to try harder to be “normal.”

I’ve read stories that haunt me. One woman shared how she was trained to smile on command—to display happiness like a puppet—regardless of her emotional state. Another described being forced to practice verbal scripts while her tears were ignored, her pain dismissed, and her autonomy erased. A man recounted years of praise for not stimming, not flapping, not “acting autistic”—he later needed years of therapy to unlearn the belief that his authentic self was unacceptable.

These aren’t horror stories from a fringe experiment. They’re everyday accounts from people who went through “standard treatment.” And when I contrast that to my own journey, I feel complicated relief. Yes, I avoided those tactics. But I also avoided understanding. I wasn’t taught what my dysregulation looked like. I wasn’t supported through speech shutdowns or verbal overload. I had to discover those patterns myself—often through painful trial and error.

And discovery is still happening.

For example, the difference between neurotypical mimicry and AuDHD mimicking is subtle—but important. We don’t copy others just to fit in. We mimic because it’s how we learn to exist. It’s how we build social language, pattern recognition, emotional vocabulary. If someone laughs at a joke in a certain rhythm, we echo it. If someone uses phrases that make them accepted, we absorb them. But over time, this creates a blurred line between authentic communication and survival performance.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve asked myself, “Do I actually talk like this, or did I build this voice from borrowed fragments?” And when I’m struggling—when my internal state is chaotic—I revert to those fragments. I speak in rehearsed tones. I mimic confidence. I over-communicate to cover the fact that I don’t know how to express what I actually feel.

This has made adapting incredibly difficult. Instead of accepting my differences, I spent years trying to disprove them. I’d spot a trait—slurred speech, communication fatigue, silence under stress—and think, “That’s a glitch. I need to fix that.” I’d mask harder. Talk more. Pretend. Perform. And when someone pointed out a behavior—like my gesticulation or speech dropouts—I’d immediately get defensive. Not because I was offended, but because their observation shattered my illusion of normalcy.

It’s an illusion that’s exhausting to maintain. It isolates you. Not because people push you away, but because you stop knowing what’s you. You start to wonder if the version of yourself who shows up to dinner, to appointments, to conversations—is just a walking echo.

And it doesn’t help when support is practically non-existent.

In Canada, if you’re an adult with late-diagnosed autism—especially AuDHD—you’re on your own. There’s no central resource hub. No guided adaptation. No therapy models tailored to our lived reality. You’re expected to navigate the fallout of decades of masking while holding a diagnosis that half the professionals haven’t been trained on. It’s surreal. You have to teach your therapist what your diagnosis means. You have to explain verbal masking to your doctor. You have to beg for accommodations that don’t yet have policy backing.

So yeah—this is messy. All of it. Gratitude tangled in grief. Discovery layered over silence. Masking hiding damage that wasn’t inflicted directly, but left bruises anyway. And every time I write about it, I feel the tension of exposing something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to conceal.

But I also feel hope. Because this is how we change things. Not with sanitized blurbs, but with raw, lived truth. If you’re reading this and wondering whether your speech shutdowns, your mimicking, your exhaustion after conversation mean more than you thought—listen to that voice. Let yourself ask questions. Let yourself unmask at your own pace.

And know this: You don’t have to prove your difference to deserve understanding.

You don’t have to mimic health to be cared for.

You don’t have to speak perfectly to be heard.