Concealing who you truly are is a survival strategy that works in unsafe environments, but it’s likely to leave you overworked, overtired and overwhelmed. Time to come out of your shell

As a runner-up in the 2018 series of popular UK TV show The Great British Bake Off, Kim-Joy exudes confidence and happiness. Her latest book, Bake Me a Cat, overflows with cute, feline-shaped bakes and her Instagram feed is a cornucopia of colour, wit and verve. In short, she shines.

Yet, last year, she posted a picture of the antidepressant pill she takes daily and laid bare the struggle behind the smiles. She wrote: ‘I had a traumatic and chaotic childhood with close family having very severe mental illness, so I’ve always felt like I need to be the adult and that means I need to appear “strong…”’

The concept of masking who you are or how you really feel has gained prominence in recent years, driven in part by the autism community’s efforts to raise awareness of the pressure that many of its members feel to behave in neurotypical ways. A recent study, however, showed that non-autistic people also mask if they feel they’ll be stigmatised for being themselves.

Cost of camouflaging The trouble is that feeling forced to mask the effects of family dysfunction creates additional psychological trauma that can’t be openly addressed. As a result, it gets stuffed away. You feel unable to reveal to others what’s happening behind the scenes and can’t emotionally react at home in an authentic way. This can leave you feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, depressed and with the sense that no one knows who you really are.