When Masking Depression Becomes Obligation: On Rediscovering Our Compassionate Voice
When I feel depressed during a mood episode, I tend to isolate myself. It’s an adaptive reaction to social judgment that I’ve had since childhood. Admittedly, my family was not a very safe nesting space for feeling seen, safe, soothed, or held, and that may be why I found it simpler to withdraw and hide.
Now as an adult with a clear diagnosis, a clarifying career in mental health, and tools including medication and wellness routines, I have more energy to try to tackle the problem of internalized stigma and old programming. I’ve turned it inside out in my mind, and remembered its weight in my body – this reflexive bracing against anticipated judgment or rejection that gradually became ingrained. And while I know that true change requires embodied feelings of safety to last, I also believe mindset strategies can help jumpstart the process of unfolding.
Author Katherine May, who was diagnosed with Aspergers (now categorized on the ASD spectrum), wrote eloquently on the unfairness of public judgment:
“There are days when I can say with great certainty that I am not strong enough to manage. And what if I can’t hang on in there? What then? These people might as well be leaning into my face, shouting, Cope! Cope! Cope! while spraying perfume into the air to make it all seem nice. The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can’t pull that off, then you’d better disappear from view for a while. You’re dragging down the vibe.” - Wintering
She touches on the heart of the compounding problem we face: feeling unwanted. I relate to her description of the pressure to mask pain with a smile and hopeful comment, almost like a distorted form of social grace.
Masking is a defensive behavior often related to living with neurodivergence, and depression is a diagnosis that involves neurological changes, manifesting in either chronic symptoms or acute episodes. When we mask it is often the result of struggling under social pressures to filter or hide emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. We know that to be rejected or deemed undesirable is to feel shame, and efforts to avoid this are often riddled with anxiety. As psychiatrist and interpersonal neurobiologist Curt Thompson explains,
“One of the primal origins of our anxiety response is our neurally correlated, existential terror of abandonment. I am here referring to the state of awareness we have (frequently non-consciously but not always) that we are being intentionally left, in direct response to our state of [perceived] shamefulness.” - The Deepest Place
We are strongly wired for connection, and neurobiology increasingly confirms what our bodies intuitively know: that prolonged social disconnection is detrimental to our health. Why else would the warnings bells of imminent disconnection ring so loudly throughout our whole being?
Just as when we receive a dismissive response or see eyes glaze over as we try to explain our troubles, our bodies sense danger and compensate through releasing stress hormones. We are mobilized to do something — to fight, flee, freeze, or start to fawn. This reveals our body’s oldest wiring, the limbic warning system that monitors our capacity for self-preservation. At any age or development stage, we know the importance of life giving connections and feel the risk of relationship failure as a threat to our fundamental sense of okay-ness.
Looking for ways to feel more okay
When I would try to find a balance between solo rest and social connections while depressed, the latter usually felt marred by the shadow of inauthenticity. Katherine May’s instincts were also mine, that people prefer a smiling face or hopeful comment over a listless sigh, or having to hear me try to describe the sense of heavy ache in my bones.
Despite my best efforts to mask, the embodied signs of depression would always slip through. Ensuing interactions would typically leave me feeling more misunderstood and less okay to just be. But with my own loved ones, I started to wonder about the practice of compassionate imagining, through asking myself what else might be motivating the reactions I would get, whether the tone deaf feedback or the awkward reassurances.
I learned about mentalization-based therapy (MBT), where the key practice in the pursuit of stronger mental health is to increase your capacity to mentalize, aka to make realistic assessments of what yours and others’ motivations might be. While not some form of exact science, mentalization became for me a tool for externalizing false shame and self-blame.
It’s also useful because depression inevitably limits one’s natural capacity to mentalize. This can show up as hypomentalization, where cognitive flexibility becomes limited as mental distress increases, and interpreting the subtleties of difficult social interactions becomes overwhelming.
The opposite is hypermentalization, when we overestimate our certainty on what others are thinking. Thus the side-eye from a waiter who asks you to repeat your order because they couldn’t hear you generates the conviction that “They’re judging me as weak”. Even if they had noted your low energy and were experiencing a vague spark of sympathy, this possibility falls by the wayside. Such instant meaning making is not a personal fault or flaw; rather, it’s an expression of the narrow-minded nature of depression, with all its intrusive, ruminative, self-referential and denigrating thought patterns that can skew even neutral experiences toward the negative.
Mentalization tools to soothe the sting
There exists so much complexity in reconciling our need for people, with gracefully acknowledging the limits of their support. This is all the more true when limits involve threats of rupture.
We experience people misinterpreting our depression-related behaviors constantly. They might equate unmasked symptoms with our personality, or even pass judgments on our character. They might conclude that we’re ungrateful for our life, or think us oddly moody or uncomfortably inconsistent energetically. Detaching as much as possible from these cruel conclusions becomes paramount.
While I’ve found that trying to ground through mentalization practice is mostly only effective during milder depressive episodes, I frequently return to four specific conclusions:
It could be their instinct
When people interact with others, their nervous system is unconsciously drawn to calm, soothing energy that supports their own autonomic, rest and digest state. If they encounter what they perceive as agitation, too much intensity, or signals they are not easy to interpret (even non verbal cues or micro-expressions), their nervous systems signal to them to be cautious or even keep a distance. This is instinctual, even for us.
It could be their emotional bandwidth
Sometimes others are weathering their own storms, and erecting walls to preserve their energy includes leaving you out. It’s true that everyone is fighting battles others don’t know about. Some people are also naturally more conscientious and empathetic. On the Big Five Personality Test, a foundational tool used to assess personality, they would be the ones scoring high in Conscientiousness. There is a correlation between conscientiousness and empathy when it comes to the organic impulse to attend and attune to others.
It could reveal their emotional intelligence
Being “too much” for someone else is not a condemnation of your character or personhood, but rather a data point about the other person’s relatively limited window of emotional tolerance. They’re out of their depth compared to you, and it shows. And if we were to be a fly on the wall of their life, we might see that this reflects how they navigate the world and most of their relationships, not just with you.
It could be their attention span
We are all subsumed by how entirely too fast-paced modern life has become. People feel compelled to make decisions as quickly and accurately as possible, including how they evaluate how safe or important others are. They’re effectively relying on snap judgments more than reflective, flexible thinking. This is unfortunately how stereotypes are perpetuated.
Considering the complex, detailed nature of how depression impacts one’s inner and outer life, it is unsurprising that stigma and stereotypes around it still peresist.
Using compassionate imagining with ourselves
In the pursuit of applying compassionate perspective taking to ourselves, we sometimes need to be reminded of our profound emotional depth. We are ones who mine the depths of human experience through encountering shadows, polarities of emotion, and the complexities they hold. The capacity to untangle from existential despair and seek renewal comes with its own sort of alchemic potential, one which makes us uniquely equipped to live more congruent, even truthful lives.
As psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross observed, “The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” She went on to create the widespread framework for five stages of grief, one of which she recognized as depression.
Dan Siegel, the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, refers to depressive episodes as signals of need for greater connection with self and others. They are a period requiring support, co-regulation, rest, and preferably fewer demands on our taxed nervous systems. Attuning to our needs and limitations, while challenging (especially with the illness’s pull toward self neglect and despair) may prove to deepen our self knowledge, intentionality, and even our ability to live authentically.
Whether there exist underlying developmental wounds, a wounded sense of self, or chronic overextension of energy, we’re invited to ask ourselves, What do I owe myself? What is truly meaningful to me? How do I choose to live, knowing the fragility of life? Even during an episode, if we can find a solid (albeit sub-baseline) sort of emotional grounding for such work, we can grow more rooted in our inborn trait architecture, self-attunement, and introspective gifting.
Shifting how we relate with others
With acquaintances, I try to actively redirect my thoughts to the common factors surrounding rude or callous reactions, even naming them out loud to myself. The hope is to reduce feelings of rejection or internalization of dismissive and unfair judgments. We don’t have to start empathizing with these individuals, but we can make mental note of the very real social contexts, like the four I described earlier, that are beyond our control.
People’s reactions say more about them and their combination of developmental, attentional, and stress-related limitations, and perhaps serve only to remind us of what we already know: that we are actively battling depression. That is all.
In relationships that are of real importance to me, I try a little more to meet them halfway. This means consistently projecting signals of safety to their nervous system through fostering mutual investment that includes vulnerable self-disclosure. And during an actual episode, I resist depressive urges to give up on connections out of temporary beliefs and low self-worth. Instead, I do my best to align my communication with my deeper relationship values.
I might send a text that I’m not feeling well and might not answer their messages as quickly, or even ask them for specific, doable forms of support. In doing so I’m trying to manage their expectations and keep channels of communication open rather than silently withdrawing.
Another channel is to educate loved ones on depression and its features. Whether by describing your personal experiences or sharing educational content, we give them the opportunity to overcome their own internalized stigmas. And it can also boost your sense of agency over how you are shaping your support network. A few educational tools I recommend:
This Huberman Lab podcast episode on depression research
Articles by The Depression Project
To Depression, With Love, a memoir by psychologist Marsha Jacobson who lives with chronic depression and anxiety
It’s our journey, but we deserve help along the way
I’m learning myself how to feel more empowered during painfully vulnerable experiences of depression, and mindful mental strategies are just one tool in my toolbox. Their mileage may vary.
But mentalizing and compassionate imagining do align with the larger goal of shaping the narrative of our own lives and inner world experiences. Other people and their evaluations of us do not have the final say, even when depression’s grip has loosened and we are regaining our strength, and especially when we are actively managing an episode.
