Neurodivergence In People Of Colour : Your Therapist Is Telling You Not To Mask And Here’s Why

Being neurodivergent and a person of colour is like being between a rock and a hard place- and the fact that masking is often the answer we have to resort to is nothing short of cruel. 

Like jumping out of a frying pan into the fire. What choice do we really have? 

Most Black and People of Colour don’t find out they’re neurodivergent or on the spectrum until adulthood—often late adulthood.

And that’s not a coincidence.

A child with ADHD will have received, on average, 20,000 more instances of negative feedback from adults before the age of 10 than their neurotypical peers.

As a team of neurodivergent-affirming therapists who have supported over   100 People of Colour  in Calgary in navigating late neurodivergent diagnoses, what we know fromthat work is that the late discovery is almost never the hardest part. 

The hardest part is navigating life after a neurodivergence diagnosis and dealing with the grief of living life the way that you thought that you should’ve until finding out. 

In a world where therapy is expensive and anyone can call themselves a therapist —masking becomes a band-aid solution that still results in burnout, fractured relationships, and a body that starts keeping score.

The very first step is learning how to actually navigate neurodivergence, not just survive it.

Let’s take it together. 

Understanding Masking & Neurodivergence:

Masking is the phenomenon of suppressing or hiding your natural neurodivergent behaviors to fit into the room you’re in.

When life looks like: 

• everyone is in on some joke, and no one wants to tell you or feeling constantly observed, 
• you wondering a lot why you are seen and treated differently by your peers, 
• people being nice to you only if you keep your mouth shut. 
• being perceived as aggressive, unfriendly, and unapproachable while someone white with the same personality gets called quirky and fun—
• being in rooms that are not neurodivergent-friendly, where the lights were instant or restrictive exam spaces or being expected to sit in one place and not be able to move anything like that. 

Masking becomes a coping mechanism. 

You, who used to be direct. Honest. Yourself. And then got corrected for it, repeatedly, until being direct became something you associated with consequences instead of connection may find yourself masking to cope. 

However, as you may already know, masking as  a strategy for dealing with neurodivergence doesn’t resolve anything—it just delays the cost. 

That cost eventually shows up as neurodivergent burnout: a state of complete physical, mental, and emotional depletion where things that were previously manageable stop being manageable.

It shows up in relationships, in work performance, in your body. 

And by the time most of us people of colour reach this point, we would have been masking for so long that we don’t even recognize burnout for what it is. 

We just think we are failing again.

The Difference Between Masking And Unmasking 

Masking and unmasking are not like a light switch, and if you’ve tried to stop masking before and found it felt more uncomfortable than the masking itself, you’re not doing it wrong. 

When you’re masking, you’re monitoring yourself constantly. scanning the room for cues about how you come across to people. 

You might also notice—and this one surprises people—that you come across as stiffer, more artificial when you’re trying to mask. 

When you’re unmasking, you stop performing and start participating. You say what you actually think. You stop overthinking every response before it leaves your mouth. 

Some people will find it refreshing. Others will find it too much, too forward, too direct, too honest.

But it won’t matter forever. As you continue to lean more into unmasking, it becomes your filter that weeds out people who were never going to be like you for you. 

Is this going to be easy? No.

Truth is,  as neurodivergent people of colour, we often have fewer close relationships to begin with, which makes the loss of even one feel disproportionately devastating. 

When your circle is already small, losing someone from it hurts and can make —it can feel like evidence that you were right to stay masked in the first place.

And as you start consistently showing up less masked, you’ll find that like-minded people—people who function similarly, who don’t require all of the acting you have to do to feel like you belong, who find your directness a relief rather than a problem—tend to find their way to you. 

This is especially true in spaces that already have a higher concentration of neurodivergent people. 

Online communities, certain hobby or interest spaces, any environment that already holds people who exist outside the neurotypical social spheres.

How To Navigate Neurodivergence As A Person Of Colour  

Like I said, much of the work you need to do to improve the quality of your life as a neurodivergent Person of Colour is to learn emotional regulation.

To safely and gently unmask and navigate neurodivergence in current times, you need to get more intentional about building a life that works with and for your nervous system. 

And we get into how to do that below: 

✅ Get honest about your sensory environment.

The lights that are too bright, the sounds that cost you more than they seem to cost other people, the physical spaces that make it impossible to think need to be treated as information about what your nervous system can and cannot sustain.

Designing your life around the information that your body gives you significantly lessens the stress that comes from continuous masking. 

This can be helpful at work as well. By telling your employers what your needs might be, you are able to gradually and gently unmask while still maintaining the kind of professional demeanor you want to portray. 

✅ Permit yourself to have needs. 

This one is harder for people of colour specifically, because having needs has historically been received as demanding, difficult, or aggressive. 

You are allowed to have them and to say so.

Also, you need to permit yourself to recover after social interactions. It’s okay to limit the amount of time you stay at a particular event without calling it antisocial or lazy. 

✅Review your current coping strategies:

Which coping strategies are still serving you?  Which ones did you develop due to a situation but no longer apply to you? 

You have learned exactly what you needed to learn to survive. It’s time to seek help that gives you lasting relief.

What The Right Therapeutic Support For Neurodivergent Black People and People of Colour Looks Like

A neurodiversity-affirming therapist who understands the intersection of race, background and neurodivergence and is the best person to work with when dealing with neurodivergence. Period and full stop.

A neurodivergence-friendly therapist won’t collapse everything into one diagnosis. They will work to understand your specific context. 

Buu Dao is our lead neurodivergence-affirming therapist at Ashay Therapy. 

She also has lived experience as a neurodivergent individual herself, and she uses approaches such as EMDR,  Somatic Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Coherence Therapy and attachment-based interventions.

Frequently Asked Questions About Neurodivergence

✅ Do I need a formal diagnosis to start therapy?

No. Many of our clients come to us while they’re still figuring out what’s happening or without a formal diagnosis at all.

Our Downtown Calgary clinic offers a first-level matching form, and based on what it is you need to work on, we personally match you with a therapist who would be the best fit for you in Canada.

Therapists in Canada cannot diagnose unless you’re a psychiatrist or doctor, but we can do screening tools, and with that information, you can take it to your family doctor, who will refer you to a psychiatrist as well if you want to go the medication route.  You also have the option to work through things through counselling/psychotherapy.

✅ What if I tried to unmask before and it didn’t work? 

This becomes information that you haven’t yet found our circle or people who are for you. 

As a POC who is on the neurodivergence spectrum, being yourself is not always the solution for every environment-some places are genuinely not safe for unmasking. 

The work you will do is to learn to tell the difference between an unsafe environment and a conditioned fear response, and build enough safe environments in your life that unmasking has somewhere to lean.

✅ What types of neurodivergence do you work with?

At Ashay Therapy, we work with clients navigating ADHD, autism, AuDHD, CPTSD, anxiety, OCD, depression, and BPD—often in combination, and often after years of misdiagnosis or no diagnosis at all. 

We understand these conditions don’t exist independently of each other or of the broader context of your life.

At Ashay Therapy, we help neurodivergent Black people and People of Colour move beyond coping and begin building lives that honour who they are—not just who they’ve had to become to get by.

You deserve support that considers all of you—not just your neurodivergence, but also your culture, your lived experiences, your relationships, and the environments you’ve had to survive.

 

Our goal isn’t to teach you how to fit into every room. It’s to help you build a life where you don’t have to leave yourself at the door every time you walk into one.

Whether you’ve recently been diagnosed, suspect you may be neurodivergent, or simply recognize yourself in this article, you don’t have to have everything figured out before reaching out.

We’ll meet you where you are.

Get matched up with a therapist