I guess I have trouble telling which level of masking I’m seeing talked about because I interpreted the op as a conscious thing whoops.

I do both levels. Like, I have “I don’t want to explain this thing” which I’m trying to stop on that conscious level, but I also experience the other side where certain circumstances are just like, flashes in my brain that pull out the only response that feels safe, or sometimes the only one that seems non-destructive, but not in a way that I’m capable of processing in the moment, and I don’t know why I do it often. Unraveling that is a lot harder, though, and while it is happening, maybe the less advanced state of that unmasking effort is also why I can’t see it being talked about.