Happy Halloween! In honor of the holiday, let’s talk about masks.

We all wear (metaphorical) masks every single day. You may wear a mask that covers your entire face, obfuscating your identity, and choose to let it down only when you’re alone, or around one of a very small number of people who have earned your trust. You may wear a less concealing mask and you may take it off frequently, putting it on only in volatile situations. Or – and this is most likely – you may have a large collection of masks, and select the one most relevant to a given occasion.

These masks are not an indication that there is something wrong with you, or even that there is something that needs to be hidden. On the contrary, wearing a mask is a way of setting boundaries, and as long as those boundaries don’t grow into thick, impenetrable walls, this is healthy.

Being maskless – letting your authentic self show – is a vulnerable thing to do and requires a great deal of courage. Seeing you maskless is an earned privilege for those who offer you unconditional positive regard: love and acceptance, whether or not they agree with your actions. When you choose to take off your mask – to be your authentic self – you’re putting your heart on the table and saying “please, this is fragile… take good care of it.” With the wrong person, this can be a dangerous thing to do; with the right person, it breeds the kind of connection that we all yearn for.

To protect ourselves, we wear many different types of masks:

 

Identity Masks

Sometimes people wear masks to hide who they really are. This happens in a variety of circumstances. Someone who is a member of a gender, sexual, or relationship minority (LGBT+) wears a mask around anyone they are not “out” to. Sometimes this mask takes the form of dodging uncomfortable questions; sometimes it means engaging in traditional gender roles just so that no one questions who they are.

But there are a lot of different identity masks. Someone who is trying to live up to someone else’s standards – by being in a career they don’t like, by participating in an activity they don’t enjoy, by acting in a way that’s counter to who they are – is wearing an identity mask. A heterosexual woman who tries to hide her intelligence because she doesn’t want to intimidate men she is dating is wearing an identity mask. A politically liberal person in a politically conservative family (or vice versa) who goes home for the holidays and resorts to “smile-and-nod” whenever someone mentions the upcoming primary elections is wearing an identity mask.

This can be a matter of conflict avoidance, or in some situations of safety and survival, but if you wear this mask too much, it’s bound to catch up with you. You may find yourself bursting at the seams with the desire to let someone in on who you are. I’ve had many clients in their late 40s to early 50s who, instead of having a mid-life crisis and buying a convertible, have a mid-life “awakening” and decide that they need to finally tell the world who they truly are.

 

Emotional Masks

Sometimes people wear masks to hide what they’re feeling. This happens for a lot of reasons. Many people come from cultural or family backgrounds that don’t support or encourage the open expression of emotions. Others go through something difficult and find that people don’t necessarily want to hear about what they’re feeling all the time. Often, people who stop acknowledging their emotions to others also stop being able to recognize their own emotions.

This is a really common mask, and one that most healthy people use from time to time. If you’re going through something difficult like the death of a loved one or the end of a long-term relationship, those emotions need an outlet. But if you let yourself feel the full impact of this every day, you’re going to find that you don’t have the skills necessary to survive in the world. For example, someone who cries every day at work may find himself in a meeting with his boss having a conversation about whether he should take a sabbatical. So it’s very important to be able to zip up what you’re feeling, put on your emotional mask, and get through the parts of your day that aren’t able to support your needs.

However, if you spend too much time behind that emotional mask, things manifest in other ways. You may find that you have a hair-trigger for anger, which is a “defender” emotion that protects you from the vulnerability of softer feelings like sadness, fear, or shame. You may find yourself engaging in numbing activities to perpetuate the mask-wearing, such as substance abuse, overeating, or compulsive shopping.

The other reason this is dangerous is that our feelings contain information. Fear tells us to heighten our awareness. Anger tells us that our rights are being violated. Disgust helps us avoid poison and toxins. Sadness communicates to others that we need empathy, and this leads to connection. When we feel these emotions, we are then empowered to act on them. If we wear an emotional mask so effectively that we don’t feel our feelings anymore, we’re depriving ourselves of valuable information.

 

Situational Masks

Sometimes people wear masks that help them adapt to different situations. This makes sense, because different places and groups of people have different social protocols. Someone who walked into a job interview with their “hanging out with friends” mask on would probably not land the job; someone who went out with friends with their “job interview” mask would likely be perceived as dry and not very much fun.

It’s important to be able to assess a situation and select the appropriate mask in order to survive in interactions with others. The people who are generally thought of as the most authentic or down-to-earth have small, unobtrusive masks that don’t completely hide who they are, but rather tailor the expression of their personality to their current setting… but even those are still masks.

The problem comes when you crave the approval of others so much that you lose any sense of who you really are. When you have so many elaborate masks that you become a chameleon, you can completely lose your sense of self. It’s important to get to know yourself so that your situational masks reflect a nuanced version of who you are, not a complete deference to whatever group of people you’re with. A great way to evaluate whether you’re doing this is to think about the situations when you’re not wearing a mask at all – when you’re raw and vulnerable… just yourself. Who are you with when this happens? What are you engrossed in? How often does this occur?

And then, in other situations, would that version of you – the unmasked version – recognize the version of you in a situational mask?

 

Commonalities

 Although these masks differ in many different ways, there are several things they have in common.

  1. All of the masks serve a function. None of them are inherently pathological or problematic, and there is a time and place for each of them. Emotionally healthy people who live authentic lives still wear masks from time to time in order to protect themselves when necessary and appropriate.
  2. They protect you from ill-intentioned people or from people who might not have good intentions. Trust needs to be earned, and until you get to know someone, it’s healthy to keep people at arm’s length and to let them in a little bit at a time.
  3. Only when overused do they cause problems. All of these masks exist to help you in moderation, but when you wear them too much, you run the risk of losing track of who you are, how you feel, or what you value. When you lose yourself in this way, there are often unintended consequences.

 

I invite you to evaluate the masks you wear, and to think about how much you rely on them and whether they help or harm you.