The Good Girl Mask: How Autism Hides in Women

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Cold. Aloof. Thinks she’s better than everyone.

Or the other one: dramatic, high-maintenance, hard to love.

You’ve probably been called at least one of those. Maybe by a partner. A parent. Someone you thought was a friend. Or maybe they’re just the words that show up in your own head at two in the morning, after yet another fight you can’t seem to stop having.

You don’t mean to be any of those things. You don’t want to be any of those things. And yet somehow it’s been the pattern your whole life. Cold and distant. Or too sensitive and too much. Sometimes both, somehow, at the very same time.

So what’s actually going on underneath all of it?

It was never coldness, and it was never drama. It was autism, wearing a good girl mask nobody ever taught you how to take off.

About this episode

The whole cultural picture of autism was built on a little boy with trains. The research was done on boys. The diagnostic criteria were written for boys. So for decades, autistic girls and women slipped right through, because everyone was looking for the wrong thing.

This episode is the companion to The ADHD Nobody Was Looking For, and it’s about the autism that hides in women. The version that gets read as cold and aloof, then somehow also as dramatic and too sensitive, sometimes in the very same woman. We go through eight traits that show up specifically in how autistic women love, and how almost every one of them gets read backwards by the people closest to them.

And underneath all of it sits the good girl mask: a lifetime of being trained to be agreeable, accommodating, easy. So this isn’t just about wiring. It’s about what happens when that wiring is handed to a girl who was taught her whole life to be good.

What you’ll learn

• Why autism was missed in girls and women for so long, and the two contradictory stereotypes we got handed instead
• The empathy myth and the double empathy problem, and why the misunderstanding was never a one-way street
• How info-dumping and special interests are actually one of the most vulnerable bids for connection there is
• Why parallel play and the need for routine are safety and trust, not distance and control
• What alexithymia is, and why I don’t know what I feel is not the same as I feel nothing
• Why the mask drops at home, and why a partner so often misreads that as being saved their worst
• How sensory needs and directness get tangled up with a lifetime of pressure to be available, easy, and nice

The way you love isn’t deficient. It’s just been spoken in a language some people never bothered to learn. And language is so very learnable.

Resources mentioned

• Get the free workbook, How to Feel Understood in Love
• Get on the waitlist for Wired For Love to get even more support understanding how you want to be loved, and how to be loved and accepted for you (not the masked you)
• Come say hey on Instagram @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If you saw yourself in this episode and you want to start untangling what’s wiring, what’s dynamics, and what’s the tangled combo of both:

• Take the free quiz, Is This My Brain or My Relationship? It takes about five minutes, it’s free, and you get a personalized result plus a starter toolkit in your inbox.
• If you’re in Alberta, you can book a free 15-minute consultation to see what working together one-on-one might look like.

Loved this episode?

Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a rating wherever you listen, and send this one to the woman in your life who has spent her whole life being told she was cold and too much, and never had the words for what was actually going on.

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Episode transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Intro

Cold. Aloof. Thinks she’s better than everyone else. Dramatic. High-maintenance. Hard to love.

You’ve probably been called at least one of those, right? Maybe by a partner. A parent. Someone you thought was a friend. Maybe it’s just the words that show up in your own head at two in the morning, when you’ve had yet another fight with your partner and you’re going over it again and again and again.

You don’t mean to be any of those things. You don’t want to be labelled with any of those things. Yet this has been a pattern your whole life. Cold and distant. Or dramatic and too sensitive. Maybe both.

So what’s actually going on underneath all this? Let’s talk about it, shall we?

Intro

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton, a psychologist who is late-diagnosed AuDHD, and I help ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD adults make sense of love.

Last episode we talked about The ADHD Nobody Was Looking For. About the quiet, internal ADHD that gets missed in girls and women. The version nobody tests for, because it doesn’t look like a wiggly little boy bouncing off the walls.

This is its companion.

Today we’re talking about autism in women, or people assigned female at birth and socialized as women. And specifically, the ways it shows up in your relationships that you didn’t even know were a thing. The ones that get read completely, devastatingly backwards. Plus the ones people think they understand, and somehow still misunderstand.

So let’s clear things up and help you better understand how your autism shapes you as an individual, and as a partner.

The setup: the story that was never about you

So let’s start with the picture in almost everybody’s head. What does autism look like?

Most people would say a boy. Young. Maybe seven or eight. Obsessed with trains and organizing said trains. He rarely, if ever, makes eye contact. Logical to a fault, bad with feelings, doesn’t really need people, would rather talk about the trains than tell you he loves you.

But that’s not you, right?

The entire cultural image of autism was built on autistic boys. The research was done on boys. The diagnostic criteria were written for boys. And so for decades, girls and women who were autistic just… slipped right through. Because we were looking for a boy with trains, and what we had was a girl who was watching everyone in the room so carefully she could tell you exactly what mood her teacher was in before she was three steps into the classroom.

So girls didn’t get the obsessed-with-trains stereotype. We got a whole different one. Two of them, actually. And they contradict each other.

On one side: cold. Aloof. Stuck up. Thinks she’s better than everyone. The girl who didn’t understand the social code and so she got labelled as an outcast.

And on the other side, and often within the very same girl: too much. Too sensitive. Too intense. Why does everything bother you? Why do you take everything so personally? Why are you crying again?

Cold and too sensitive. The multifaceted autistic woman. Who feels so misunderstood. Even when she tries to explain herself.

On the outside, it can look like she’s closed off. Avoidant. Emotionally detached. But underneath that? She was flooded with so many feelings it felt overwhelming, so she just shut down. And she didn’t know what was happening or how to explain it.

That’s what this episode is about. I’m going to help you understand yourself better, and help you translate that understanding so your partner can also understand you better. Now, let’s get into it.

The education: how autism actually shows up in women, in love

I’m going to split this into two halves. First, the traits that get misread. Then the ones people think they understand, and still misjudge.

And like always, these are traits. Not symptoms. This is wiring, not malfunction. Some of them cost you. Some of them are really wonderfully unique things about how you love. All of them are real. And almost all of them have been shaped by how a woman in particular experiences autism.

Because in addition to your unique wiring, you have a lifetime of being told to be agreeable, accommodating, easy, good. It’s the good girl mask that has protected you for so long. Kept you safe. Kept you from being rejected entirely. Sure, there have been moments of rejection, but as long as you were good enough, as long as you followed the rules, you weren’t rejected completely.

Part one: the traits that get misread

The empathy myth, and the double empathy problem.

Here’s one of the biggest misunderstandings about you: the idea that you and other autistic people don’t have empathy. I need to be really clear here, because this one has done so much harm, and it has done specific harm to women. That idea is wrong. Not a little outdated. Wrong. And it has been wrong for a long time.

Here’s what I see in my practice, over and over. I see autistic women who feel things at a volume most people will never experience. Who love so deeply and so loyally they’ll quietly reorganize their entire life around one person’s comfort. Who notice the subtle shift in a partner’s voice before anyone else in the room. Who lie awake at night replaying a two-second look on someone’s face, sick with worry that they hurt them.

That is not an empathy deficit. That is the opposite of a deficit. That is a Hoover Dam sized amount of empathy with no innate ability to turn that deeply feeling sensitivity down.

There’s actually a clinical name for this. It’s called the double empathy problem. For a long time, when an autistic person and a non-autistic person misunderstood each other, we blamed the autistic person. We said she lacks social skills. She can’t read the room. She’s the problem. But the research suggests something completely different. The misunderstanding goes both ways. Autistic people read each other just fine. Non-autistic people read each other just fine. It’s across the two neurotypes that the signal gets scrambled. Like two people speaking slightly different dialects, each one assuming the other is just not good at communicating.

Now couple this with the simple fact that women often find themselves in the position of managing everyone else’s feelings. It’s your job to do the translating. It’s your job to read the room, smooth out the wrinkles, decode what your partner really meant. You are the glue. And you are the problem. And it’s your job to fix it. But it wasn’t a you problem. It was a translation gap. A two-way gap. And you’ve been doing the work of both directions, alone, for years. No wonder you’re exhausted.

Info-dumping, which is one of the purest love languages there is.

When an autistic woman tells you everything, and I mean everything, about the thing she’s obsessed with, that is not her failing to notice you’ve checked out. That is her handing you her heart.

Sharing a special interest is intimacy. It’s saying, this is the thing that lights me up, and I want you in here with me. It’s a bid for connection. One of the most vulnerable ones a person can make.

And here’s the gendered knife in it. A lot of women learned, young, to fold themselves smaller. To not be too much. So when you do let it out, when you do let yourself light up about your thing and experience that autistic joy, and the person you love goes, yeah, sure, anyway, or simply picks up their phone and noticeably tunes you out, you don’t just feel unheard. You feel confirmed. See. You’re too much. I knew it. And you tuck it back in.

A bit of personal reflection here. This has happened to me. Numerous times throughout my 40 years. I’ve become so attuned to that subtle shift in body posture, or that tone that suggests, woah, you’re a lot. I know this hurt. This feeling of sharing something that means so very much to you and being met with disinterest at best.

If you love an autistic woman, one of the most supportive things you can do is take her hand and walk into that room you’re being invited into, because she doesn’t share that space with just anyone. She’s learned she can only share it with a handful of people she trusts. Don’t hold that trust lightly.

Parallel play. Being alone, together.

For a lot of autistic women, the deepest closeness isn’t the candlelit dinner and the eye contact and the big emotional conversation. It’s being in the same room, doing two completely separate things. You reading, them on their phone. You cooking, them working on a project close by. Quiet. Side by side.

That is not avoidance. That is not, we never spend real time together. That is, I feel safe enough with you to stop performing. And you have no idea how big that is until you understand how much of her day was performance. Which we’re getting to.

Monotropism. The single, powerful beam.

A lot of autistic minds run on something called monotropism. Attention that pours, fully, completely, all the way in, on one thing at a time. One very bright beam fixated in one spot.

When that beam is on you? It is extraordinary. You are studied, remembered, adored, known in a way most people dream to be seen. But when it locks onto something else, a project, a deadline, the kids, a problem she’s trying to solve, a partner can feel like they’ve vanished. Like they got switched off.

It’s not that she stopped caring. It’s that her attention is a spotlight, not a floodlight. And here’s the tricky part. The world wants her attention to be a floodlight. Track everyone. Tend to everyone. Notice everyone’s needs all at once. And she tried. So very hard. But it just didn’t come naturally to her. So little by little it exhausted her, trying to focus her attention in so many areas at once.

Alexithymia. When you can’t find the word for what you feel.

This one I need you to really invest in listening to, because it gets so badly misread, especially in women.

A lot of autistic people experience something called alexithymia. This is when an autistic person has difficulty identifying and naming their own emotions. The feeling is there. Often it’s enormous. But the bridge between feeling it and saying I feel hurt, or I feel scared, is missing. Or it’s running on a delay.

So your partner asks, what’s wrong, what are you feeling, and the honest answer is, I don’t know. And that comes across as stonewalling. Withholding. Avoiding. Like you don’t care enough to share.

But here’s what I want you to remember: I don’t know what I feel is not the same as I feel nothing. It’s a wiring difference in the path between your heart and your words.

And for women, there’s an extra layer of cruelty here. You were told your whole life that you were too emotional. That you felt too much. And meanwhile, the actual experience inside you was often a wall of feeling so big and so fast it overwhelmed you into shutdown and you couldn’t even name it. Both of those things were true at once, and people constantly misread both of them.

Masking. And the collapse that looks like withdrawal.

If you take one thing from this whole episode, hear this. Autistic women mask. And the research suggests they mask more than autistic men. We camouflage. We fit in. We shapeshift into whatever you need us to be. And we are so good at it that it’s a huge part of why we got missed for diagnosis in the first place.

Think about what girls are trained to do from the time they can talk. Be sweet. Be easy. Don’t make a fuss. Read what people need and give it to them. Smile. Make everyone comfortable. Be good. Now hand that training to a brain that already studies people obsessively, that already scripts and rehearses, that already wants desperately to get it right.

What you get is a woman who built an entire second self. Who manages her eye contact like a part-time job. Who rehearses conversations in the shower. Who has a smile for every situation and a voice for every audience. Who suppresses the stims, decodes the subtext in real time, performs normal, easy, fine, all day long. And it is exhausting.

Then she comes home. To the one person on earth she feels safest with. And the mask finally, finally drops. And sometimes what’s underneath is a shutdown. She goes quiet. She goes still. She needs the lights off and the noise to stop and the whole world to just… pause.

And her partner sees that and thinks, you’re fine with everyone else. You light up for your friends, for your coworkers, for strangers at the store. And then you come home and shut down with me. You save your worst for me. When the truth is simply not that.

You don’t drop the mask at home because you care less about your partner than everyone else. You drop it at home because home is the one place safe enough to finally stop holding it all together.

The solution isn’t to keep the mask on. The solution is to figure out a routine, a ritual, a way of reconnecting when you get home, after you’ve had a moment, or thirty moments, to regulate, rest, and take care of your needs when you’ve been focused on everyone else’s all day long. And you’re not connecting with your partner as masked you, or an utterly depleted you, but as an authentic you who allows herself to take care of her needs after a long day, so genuine connection with your partner is even possible in the first place.

You unmask with your partner not because you care less about them. But because you trust them more than anyone to just be you. That’s not rejecting them. That’s inviting them to be around for the real you.

Part two: the ones people think they understand

These are the traits that actually made it into the stereotype. So people expect them. They just still get them wrong.

Sensory needs. And why not tonight was never about your partner.

Sensory sensitivity is real, it runs deep, and it shows up powerfully in intimacy. Certain textures. Certain kinds of touch. A tag on a shirt. The sound of chewing. A light that’s too bright. These are not preferences. This is a nervous system getting genuinely, physically overwhelmed.

So when an autistic woman flinches from a certain touch, or can’t be held a particular way, or needs the TV off before she can connect, that is not her rejecting the person.

But here’s the gendered trap. Women carry this enormous cultural pressure to be sexually available, accommodating, up for it. So instead of saying, this texture is too much for my system right now, a lifetime of training says, just push through. Mask it. Don’t make him feel bad. And she overrides her own nervous system, again, to keep the peace. And resentment grows in a place neither of them can see. Until it becomes too loud to ignore, and she pushes her partner away, and not tonight, I can’t handle this texture right now, gets heard as I don’t want you.

Routine and predictability. Which is safety, not control.

The need for routine gets labeled as being rigid. Controlling. Inflexible. Why can’t you just go with the flow?

Here’s what’s actually underneath it. Predictability is how an autistic nervous system banks enough energy to be present for anything else. Including you. Every unplanned change costs energy. A surprise reroute. A last-minute let’s just wing it. These are not small for an autistic brain. And now picture the woman who is also running the household, the calendar, the kids’ everything, the mental load nobody else can see. Her routines aren’t her trying to control you. They’re the scaffolding holding up a person who is calm and available enough to love you at all.

When you understand that, you’re so rigid turns into, oh. This is how you keep yourself regulated enough to love me.

Directness. Or its opposite. And how the mask hides it.

A lot of autistic people communicate directly and literally. They say what they mean, and they miss the hints. Not because they don’t care, but because their brain processes the words that were actually said, not the ones implied underneath.

But here’s the twist for masking women, because this is where it flips. A lot of you were trained so hard out of directness that you swung the other way. You learned to hint, to soften, to never say the blunt thing, because blunt got you called rude, cold, not very ladylike. So you scripted yourself into a person who’s endlessly accommodating and indirect, and somewhere along the way you lost the thread of what you actually want. You got so good at reading everyone else that what do you want for dinner is a genuinely hard question. I don’t know. What do you want?

That’s not you being difficult. That’s a lifetime of erasing your own needs dressed up as easygoing.

So whether your directness shows up as blunt honesty or as a learned, exhausting niceness, the solution is the same. The directness was never the problem and the niceness was never the truth. The you underneath deserves to be heard. Give her permission to be heard. I know it’s hard. And it’s also possible.

So look at the entirety of what we just talked about. Hyper-empathy, read as coldness. Info-dumping, read as being oblivious. Parallel play, read as distance and disconnection. Monotropism, read as neglect. Alexithymia, read as withholding. The mask dropping, read as punishment. Sensory needs, read as rejection. Routine, read as control. And under all of it, a lifetime of training to be small, agreeable, and easy. All your traits. Misread. Misunderstood. But that stops now.

The tool: build a two-way love map

So here’s what we actually do about it. And it comes straight out of that double empathy idea. Because if the gap goes both ways, the fix has to go both ways too.

And I need to make myself very clear here, because this matters more for you than almost anyone. This is not a tool where the woman does all the work, all the translating, all the adapting. That’s the old model. The one you’ve already been living for thirty, forty years. You’ve been the translator in probably every relationship you’ve ever had. The one bending. The one decoding. We’re done with that. This one has two sections. For both you and your partner. The idea is that you’re building a two-way love map.

And you can get it at JennaDalton.com/lovemap. That’s JennaDalton.com slash l-o-v-e-m-a-p.

This won’t fix everything, but it’s a starting point. This is the work I do with my clients every single week to help partners gain a better understanding of each other, especially in mixed neurotype relationships.

I’m building an even bigger resource that covers so much more ground to help you better understand yourself and share that understanding with your partner. You can get on the waitlist for that at JennaDalton.com/wired. That’s JennaDalton.com slash w-i-r-e-d.

But for now, start with this love map. It’s free and could create some positive shifts in your relationship tonight. Seriously. One of the most powerful tools in a psychologist’s toolbelt is to help their clients name something that once felt invisible and hard to grasp.

Gain a deeper understanding of yourself. Gain a deeper understanding of your partner. Share that with each other, and suddenly those arguments you keep having change in shape, because you know how to communicate differently. You understand what’s going on underneath. And you know how to show up in a way that allows your partner to feel seen. And how to ask your partner to do the same.

The close

Is it just me, or do we need to take a deep breath and shake the feels out, because this episode went deep. Not going to lie, I got choked up a few times writing it because it brought back so many memories.

I may not have your unique experience. But I know what it’s like to be an autistic woman in this world. I know what it’s like to spend your life being told you were cold and too much. Distant and dramatic. Not enough and exhausting. Feeling hard to love.

And yet we deserve love. Authentic love that doesn’t require us to mask or fit in or hold the space for everyone else but ourselves.

Our brains work differently. Different doesn’t mean disordered. Different doesn’t mean wrong. The way you love isn’t deficient. It’s just been spoken in a language some people have never bothered to learn. And language is so very learnable.

I’m Jenna Dalton. Your brain isn’t broken. It’s beautiful. I’ll talk to you soon.

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The Neurodivergent Love Lab is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service.