Stoplight Thoughts: The Math of Leaving

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.

There’s a particular kind of moment that autistic caregivers collect but rarely discuss. It might happen at a highway on-ramp, or in a gas station parking lot two miles from home, or at a traffic light where you’ve been sitting for thirty seconds that have somehow stretched into something that feels like a decision. You’re looking at the road ahead. You’re not in crisis, exactly. You’re just… calculating.

How far would I get?

I’m going to say the thing out loud that nobody wants to admit. Ready? Here it is.

If you’ve been doing this long enough, you’ve had that thought. Maybe it flashed through your mind and was gone before you could even feel ashamed of it. Maybe it came back. Maybe it came back more than once, wearing slightly different clothes each time.

And now here’s the lie we tell to make ourselves feel better: “Oh, I could never imagine life without them.”

Bullshit.

You accepted the hard truth about autism a long time ago. You looked that reality directly in the face and kept showing up anyway. So you can accept this truth too: chronic, compounding, relentless stress produces thoughts that are not representative of who you are. It produces thoughts you are not proud of. And one of the most common ones, the one that gets whispered in support groups and never in polite company, is the thought of leaving.

Not leaving forever. Not abandonment in any meaningful sense. But leaving. Getting in the car and just… not coming back. At least for a while. At least long enough to remember what silence feels like when it isn’t the suspicious kind.

When a Passing Thought Starts Making Plans

Here’s where it gets important to be honest, because there’s a difference between a thought that flickers and a thought that starts doing math.

Stage one is the flicker. I wonder what it would be like to just go. It passes. You feel vaguely guilty. You move on. Almost every long-term caregiver I’ve encountered knows exactly what this feels like, even if they’d never say so in front of other people.

Stage two is the return visit. The thought comes back. Maybe during another impossible week. Maybe during a crisis that feels identical to the one three months ago, because it basically is. The thought isn’t shameful anymore. It’s almost… familiar. There you are again.

Stage three is where the geography gets specific. You stop wondering if and start wondering where. You stop wondering how long and start wondering how far your credit card would take you before you had to make a decision. You have, without quite meaning to, begun doing logistics.

This is not a character flaw. Research on caregiver burnout from the University of Wisconsin’s Waisman Center has documented that long-term caregivers of autistic individuals show cortisol patterns consistent with chronic traumatic stress, the kind that distorts decision-making, erodes impulse control, and produces intrusive thoughts the mind uses to process what it cannot otherwise resolve. Your brain isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what a brain does when it has been under sustained, unrelenting pressure for years without adequate relief. It starts drafting exit routes.

But knowing that doesn’t make it less dangerous when the math starts getting specific.

The $200 Strategy (And What It Actually Is)

The person who shared this story with me had a method. Before leaving the house on difficult days, they would deliberately leave behind every card with a significant limit and take only a small amount of cash. Under $200. Sometimes much less.

The logic was stark and completely clear-eyed: you can’t get far enough to outrun your own heart on $200. You’d get maybe one tank of gas, maybe a motel night somewhere that would feel lonelier than home ever could. You’d sit there and the crying would find you, and you’d turn around. The thought couldn’t execute itself, because the logistics had been deliberately made impossible.

What that person had stumbled onto, completely instinctively, has an actual name in behavioral science: a precommitment strategy. The concept, sometimes called a Ulysses contract after the mythological story of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast so he couldn’t swim toward the sirens, involves removing your own capacity to act on an impulse before that impulse arrives at full strength. You make the decision when you’re clear-headed, precisely so that the decision is already made when you’re not.

It worked. Not because the thought went away. Because the thought couldn’t find traction.

That’s not a cure. It’s a circuit breaker. And circuit breakers are worth a great deal more than inspiration.

Building Your Own Circuit Breakers

What follows isn’t therapy. It isn’t a promise that these thoughts will stop. It’s a set of practical friction points, grounded in actual research, for the gap between having a thought and acting on one. Some will fit your life. Some won’t. Take what’s useful.

Name the Thought Out Loud (Cognitive Defusion)

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy research consistently shows that trying to suppress an intrusive thought makes it louder and more persistent. The clinical term for this is the “rebound effect,” documented extensively since Daniel Wegner’s foundational white-bear suppression studies. The counter-intuitive alternative is defusion: naming the thought instead of fighting it. “I’m having the thought that I want to leave.” Not: “I want to leave.” The distance that creates is small but measurable, and it interrupts the thought’s ability to masquerade as a decision. A thought you’ve named is one you’re watching. A thought you’re suppressing is one that’s watching you.

Reduce What You Can Act On (Precommitment)

The $200 method is one version of this. Build your own version that matches your specific logistics. If you know certain days are harder, deliberately limit your capacity to act before those days arrive. Leave the car keys somewhere inconvenient. Tell someone you trust: “I’m having a hard week, I need you to check on me Tuesday.” You’re not removing agency. You’re adding enough friction that the impulse has to survive contact with your actual values before it can become action. For most people in most moments, it won’t.

The 24-Hour Moratorium

Behavioral research on impulsive decision-making, including work published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and replicated across populations under stress, consistently shows that a mandatory pause between impulse and action dramatically reduces follow-through on decisions people later regret. The specific interval matters less than the commitment to it. Tell yourself: I will not act on this thought for 24 hours. Not because it’s wrong to have the thought, but because 24 hours from now, the thought may look different. In caregiver stress research, the most dangerous window for impulsive decisions is the immediate aftermath of an acute crisis. The 24-hour rule creates just enough distance to let the acute peak pass.

Write the Return Trip First

This sounds counterintuitive, but stay with it. When the leaving thought arrives with enough specificity to have logistics, don’t just imagine the departure. Imagine coming back. Imagine the specific moment of walking back through that door. What does that look like? What do you feel? Most people find that when they actually do this honestly, the thought deflates considerably. It was never really about leaving. It was about needing relief that nobody has offered and a rest that never comes. The leaving fantasy is your mind’s way of screaming that it needs resources it isn’t getting. That’s important information. It deserves to be heard rather than fled from.

Create a Physical “I’m Still Here” Anchor

Several families I’ve spoken with describe a version of this: a small physical object, a photograph, a piece of their loved one’s art, a specific piece of jewelry, that functions as a deliberate interrupt. Not a guilt object. Not something designed to make you feel terrible for having the thought. Something that reconnects you, briefly, to why you’re still standing in this kitchen at 11 PM instead of somewhere else. The research basis here is grounding technique used in trauma-informed care: a sensory anchor that interrupts dissociative states, which is functionally what escape ideation often is. Your nervous system has temporarily left the building. The anchor helps it come back.

A word if the math has gone further than leaving.

This piece is about escape ideation, the fantasy of getting in the car and not coming back. That is real, it is documented, and it is not shameful. But if your thoughts have moved past leaving to harming yourself or someone else, that is a different and urgent situation that deserves immediate professional support, not a blog post. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) has caregiver-specific resources. The ARCH National Respite Network (archrespite.org) can connect you with emergency respite in your state. You don’t have to be past the point of coping to ask for help. You can ask for help precisely because you’re not there yet.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: the thought of leaving isn’t the problem. The thought of leaving is the symptom. The problem is that you have been running a 40-hour day inside a 24-hour clock, with no real rest, no guaranteed backup, and a system that has repeatedly told you to figure it out yourself. Of course your mind drafted an exit route. It was trying to survive.

You didn’t take it. You’re still here. That matters.

And the next time that thought shows up at a traffic light, you now have a few more tools than just sitting there hoping it passes before the light turns green.

If this landed somewhere tender, it was meant to. You’re not alone in having had this thought, and you’re not broken for it. Submissions to From The Heart are always anonymous. If you have a story to share, this space exists for exactly that.