Addition through Subtraction

Shared anonymously by a member of the OasisForAutism community

From The Heart is a space for unfiltered, real stories from autistic caregivers. To protect privacy, all contributors remain anonymous. The experiences here belong to specific people. The truth in them belongs to all of us.

I hadn’t seen George in close to ten years when we finally sat down to catch up. I went through it all. My wife walking out. Felicia’s mother putting more and more distance between herself and her daughter. The particular brand of fury that comes not from being hurt yourself but from watching someone you love get left behind by people who were supposed to stay.

George listened to all of it. He didn’t rush me, didn’t offer the standard-issue consolations, didn’t tell me everything happens for a reason (for which I remain profoundly grateful). When I finally ran out of things to say, he looked at me and offered four words that rearranged something in my chest.

“Jim. Addition by subtraction.”

I sat with that for a second. Then I started laughing. Not the relieved kind. The recognition kind. The kind that happens when a frame you’ve been missing your whole life drops into place and suddenly the picture makes sense.

What I had been cataloguing as loss, George had just reframed as gain. The people who left weren’t additions to Felicia’s life that I was now missing. They were subtractions that had been masquerading as additions all along. Their departure didn’t diminish our world. It clarified it.

Here’s what I need to say before I go further, though, because this concept is sharp enough to cut you if you pick it up carelessly:

Addition by subtraction is not a reason to feel nothing. It is not a permission slip to skip the grief. And it is absolutely not a license to reframe every difficult relationship out of your life the moment things get hard. That’s not addition by subtraction. That’s just subtraction.

What the Research Actually Says

It turns out George had stumbled into something psychologists have been documenting for years. A 2007 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology by researchers Lewandowski and Bizzoco examined what actually happens to people after the dissolution of relationships that were, in clinical terms, low in “self-expansion,” meaning connections that had stopped contributing to their growth, identity, or sense of possibility. The study confirmed that ending a relationship low in self-expansion was associated with personal growth, and that this growth was mediated by people experiencing more rediscovery of the self, less loss of self, and more positive emotions following the dissolution. In plain language: when you remove a relationship that has been shrinking you, you tend to find more of yourself on the other side of the loss than you expected.

There’s also work from the University of Virginia exploring why we so rarely think this way to begin with. Research suggests that people systematically overlook subtractive solutions to problems, instinctively reaching for addition instead. When reminded that subtraction is an option, people are significantly more likely to explore it, suggesting the problem isn’t that we can’t think this way, but that we don’t think to think this way. We’re wired to believe that more is more. More support, more relationships, more connections, more hands on deck. The idea that removing something could produce gain runs directly against our instincts.

But autistic caregivers know something about impossible math. We know that not all support is actually supportive. That some people in the room make the room smaller. That a family member who shows up with opinions and judgment and zero capacity for the reality in front of them isn’t filling a gap in your support network. They’re creating one.

Before You Start Cutting

This is the part where I need you to slow down. Because addition by subtraction is a real phenomenon backed by real research, and it is also one of the most abusable pieces of wisdom available to someone who is exhausted and depleted and looking for anything that will simplify their life. Exhausted people make permanent decisions based on temporary overwhelm. I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it. So before you decide that someone in your life is dead tissue worth cutting away, ask yourself these questions honestly. Not quickly. Honestly.

Is this relationship actually draining me, or is everything draining me right now?

There’s a meaningful difference between a relationship that consistently costs more than it gives and the fact that you are currently running on fumes and everything feels like too much. Chronic caregiver exhaustion flattens your ability to distinguish between a genuinely toxic presence and a good person who caught you on your worst month. If you can’t remember the last time you weren’t depleted, you may not be in a position to accurately assess any relationship right now. Get some rest first, if any exists. Then look again.

What has this person’s presence actually cost me, specifically?

Not how they make you feel in the abstract. Specifically. Has their involvement led to worse outcomes for your loved one? Have their opinions overridden your informed caregiving decisions? Have they consistently undermined your credibility, your boundaries, or your ability to function? Feelings are real data, but they’re not the only data. If you can’t name specific, recurring patterns of harm, what you may have is a relationship that needs a hard conversation, not a permanent subtraction.

Am I removing this person, or am I removing the discomfort they represent?

Some people in our lives make us uncomfortable because they are genuinely harmful. Others make us uncomfortable because they remind us of things we haven’t dealt with yet, or because they care enough to say difficult things, or because their presence exposes a grief we haven’t finished sitting with. Cutting off the second kind of person doesn’t produce addition. It produces a quieter avoidance. Be honest with yourself about which category you’re working with.

What does my autistic loved one actually experience in this person’s presence?

This is the one that most caregivers either skip or weight too heavily in one direction. Your loved one’s experience matters enormously. If a person’s presence consistently produces behavioral escalation, distress, or regression, that is important information. But your loved one’s reaction to a person isn’t always the whole story either. Some disruption isn’t harmful. Some discomfort is growth. You know your loved one well enough to tell the difference. Trust that knowledge, and factor it in.

Is this a subtraction I can live with permanently?

Some subtractions are reversible. Others aren’t. A spouse who leaves is a different kind of subtraction than a friendship you chose to end. A family member who abandons your loved one is a different weight than a service provider you discharged. Before you make a permanent move, be honest about whether what you need is distance or removal. Distance is often enough, and it leaves the door open. Removal closes it. Sometimes closing it is exactly right. But it should be a deliberate choice, not a crisis response.

None of this is easy. And none of it will feel clean. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. Big changes in the relational landscape of a caregiver’s life are, as a practical matter, occupational territory. The people who stay tend to be the ones capable of staying. The ones who go tend to reveal, by leaving, that they weren’t able to provide what you needed anyway. That doesn’t make their departure painless. It just makes it informative.

What Addition Actually Looks Like

After George reframed those years for me, I started seeing what the subtractions had actually created. Space. Clarity. A household where Felicia’s needs weren’t filtered through someone else’s discomfort with them. A version of our life that was genuinely ours, without the static of people who were never quite able to accept the life we were actually living.

I won’t tell you it felt like winning. It didn’t. It felt like loss for a long time before it felt like anything else. But the research, and more importantly the lived experience of caregivers who have navigated this kind of pruning, consistently points toward the same thing: removing what isn’t working creates room for what does. Not automatically. Not painlessly. But it creates room.

You can’t fill that room with nothing, though. Addition by subtraction only works if the subtraction is actually followed by something. A more honest relationship with your own needs. A support structure that actually fits your reality. Connections, even small ones, with people who don’t require you to translate your life before they’ll engage with it.

George gave me four words and ten years of loss suddenly looked different. That’s the power of a well-timed reframe from someone who actually knows you.

Not everyone gets a George. But the question he was really asking is one you can ask yourself: what in your life has been wearing the label of “addition” while quietly functioning as subtraction all along?

Start there. Then do the math slowly.

If this one sat heavy with you, it was supposed to. These aren’t easy questions. But they’re yours to ask, and you’re exactly the right person to answer them. Submissions to From The Heart are always anonymous. This space exists because the truth is worth telling.