So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
I want to talk today.
About a particular shape of a person that I see very often in my work.
In my own community of practitioners.
And if I'm honest.
In my own mirror on certain mornings.
The helper,
The fixer,
The one who can't stop giving advice.
The friend who everyone calls when they have a problem.
The colleague who organizes everyone else's lives.
The partner who has read the books knows the techniques.
And is very subtly always slightly running the relationship.
The person who,
When a difficult moment arises in any room,
Finds themselves rising to handle it before anyone else can.
So I want to look at this pattern honestly,
Not to shame it,
Not to call it a complex or a syndrome.
The wellness internet has been doing that for years.
And the labels mostly add a layer of self-criticism to people who already have plenty of it.
I want to look at it differently.
As a wound disguised as virtue.
As an old protection that very intelligently kept us safe at some point in our lives and is now quietly costing us a great deal.
If you have ever asked yourself possibly late at night.
Possibly with some bitterness.
Why do I help everyone but myself?
Then this might be for you.
We are going to look at where this pattern comes from,
What it has been protecting.
And what it might look like slowly,
Gently.
To begin to set it down.
Not to stop helping.
Helping is one of the most beautiful things a human can do.
But to stop helping from the place we have been helping from.
Let me describe what it looks like in everyday life.
So we are clear about who we are talking about.
There is a friend who,
When you call them in distress,
Immediately they start solving.
Before you have finished describing what is wrong,
They are already mid-strategy.
They are recommending books,
They are sending you links,
They are telling you what worked for them,
What they read in the article last week,
And maybe what their cousin did in a similar situation.
So you came for company and you got consultancy.
Then there is a family member who organizes everyone else's lives.
The one who is on top of the calendar,
Who remembers everyone's birthdays,
Who handles the difficult relatives,
Who quietly arranges the logistics behind every gathering.
And the family runs because they run it.
And if you ask them whether they enjoy this,
They will tell you someone has to do it.
With a particular small psi that contains the entire condition.
Then there is a partner who has taken on the project of their partner's growth.
They read books,
They suggest practices,
They mention lovingly but persistently the things their partner might want to look at.
And they are in some real way in a couple of two people,
Themselves and the version of their partner who has been improved by their attention to them.
And then there is the professional helper.
The therapist,
The coach,
The body worker,
The social worker,
The energy practitioner,
The teacher.
The person who has built an entire career around being the one who knows what to do.
Who in moments of personal difficulty finds themselves unable to ask for help because they cannot somehow occupy the position of needing it.
Who has spent thousands of hours sitting with other people's pain and very few hours sitting with their own.
So if you have recognized yourself anywhere in the list,
You are not unusual.
And you're not a bad person.
You're someone whose system has organized itself around being needed.
And the organization,
Like most of what we carry,
Was probably installed early for excellent reasons.
And is now running long after the reasons have changed.
So let me say something about where this pattern usually comes from.
Because the origins in my experience are remarkably consistent.
Most of us who became fixers were children in households where we figured out very early that being useful was the safest way to be loved.
Register this.
Being useful was the safest way to be loved.
The love in the family was conditional often in subtle ways,
Sometimes very obvious ways.
And the condition for many of us was usefulness.
Be helpful,
Be good,
Take care of mum,
Watch out for your sibling,
Handle the difficult things so adults don't have to.
The child who got this message had a choice.
They could be useless and risk losing the precarious love they did have or they could be useful and be love for the usefulness and feel a tentative security in being needed.
So almost all of us,
Given that choice,
Choose to be useful.
It's a very intelligent move.
It keeps us connected to the people we needed to be connected to.
And here is what happens almost inevitably then.
The child grows up,
The original conditions change.
The parents are no longer the source of survival.
The household is no longer the only world.
But the system that learned to find safety through usefulness does not know that the conditions have changed.
It continues to operate on the original premise.
It continues to scan in every relationship for what it can give,
What it can fix,
What it can be needed for.
Because giving,
Fixing and being needed is what made love feel possible in the first place.
What this means decades later.
The adult fixer is not,
In their core,
An unusually generous person.
The adult fixer is a child who is trying to earn love by being useful.
The generosity is real,
But the engine driving it is not generosity.
The engine is fear.
Fear of what would happen if they stopped,
Fear of being unnecessary,
Fear of being themselves,
The one who needs.
And I say this without judgment.
The strategy was brilliant when it was installed.
But it's very expensive in adult life.
So,
Before we go further,
I want to name a few other origin paths to this pattern,
Because the conditional love story is the most common,
But is not the only one.
Some fixers grew up in households where someone was struggling.
Parent with addiction,
Parent with depression,
Chronic illness,
And an unstable temperament.
And the child learned that managing the adult state was,
In a real sense,
Their job.
And by the time they were 8,
They were running emotional trials for a household.
So the fixer in them is in part the 8 year old who never got to put the roll down.
Then some Fixers grew up as the eldest,
The responsible one,
In a family with younger siblings and or chaotic dynamics.
They became very young,
The small adult of the family.
Helpful,
Organized,
Competent beyond their years.
And the competence was rewarded.
The competence became their identity.
They have not in any way stopped being that small adult,
Even now.
Now,
Some fixers come from religious or cultural backgrounds where service was taught as the highest virtue.
So the teaching was not wrong exactly,
But the version that landed in the child was,
Your worth is measured by what you give him.
Your suffering is less important than the suffering of others.
To attend to yourself is selfish.
These messages took root and the adult is now living a life that in some real way treats their own needs as less important than anyone else's.
Some fixers,
Particularly women,
Were socialized into a broader cultural expectation that this is what women do.
They care.
They give.
They notice what everyone else needs.
They put themselves last as a matter of course.
And the fixer pattern in many women.
Is not even particularly personal.
It is the inherited shape of being a woman in many cultures.
Which makes it harder to see.
Because the culture continues to reward it.
So whichever path caught you here,
The result is similar.
An adult whose nervous system has been trained in some deep way to feel safer giving than receiving.
To feel more comfortable being needed than needing.
To find the position of the helper more inhabitable than the position of the one being helped.
Now I want to spend some time on what the fixer is actually protecting.
Because if you don't understand what it is protecting,
You will keep trying to attack it.
And attacking it will not work.
Underneath the fixer in nearly every case I've ever seen.
It's something quite specific.
There is a small one inside who learned a long time ago.
That being the one who needs is not safe.
That to ask for help is to risk a particular kind of pain,
The pain of being a burden.
The pain of being told you're too much and the pain of being met with annoyance or indifference.
The fixer in the adult is the strategy that the small one developed to never be in that position again.
If I'm always the giver,
I will never have to be the asker.
If I'm always the helper,
I will never have to be helped.
And this strategy works in a sense.
The small one inside has not had to feel that original pain again.
They've been very successful in avoiding it.
The cost is that decades later,
The adult has no real access to receiving end of care.
So the position of being helped is not available to them and they have organized their entire life around never having to occupy it.
And this is the deep cost that almost no one talks about.
The fixer is,
In their own life,
Very lonely in a particular way.
Not isolated,
Surrounded often by people who depend on them,
But unable to be met,
Unable to be held,
Unable to receive the kind of care they have spent their whole life giving to others.
I see this most often in practitioners.
People who hold space for others all week,
With extraordinary skill,
And then go home and have no idea how to let themselves be held.
This pattern shows up across professions.
Doctors can't take a sick day.
Therapists who can't go to therapy.
Carers who deteriorate in their own health for years before anyone notices.
I want to name some specific shapes the fixer takes,
Because the fixer is rarely obvious.
The first one,
And you might have noticed it in yourself or in somebody that you know,
There is the unsolicited advice mask.
You haven't asked for advice.
The fixer gives it anyway.
Because they cannot,
In the presence of someone else's difficulty,
Simply sit with it.
The advice is frankly often very good advice.
That's not the point.
The point is that the giving of it is the fixer's way of not having to feel the discomfort of being in the presence of a difficulty they cannot resolve.
Then there is the rescue mask.
The fixer,
On hearing a friend's situation,
Immediately steps in,
Makes the call,
Pays the bill.
And the rescue is often very useful.
Because it keeps that friend in a position of being rescued and the fixer in the position of being the helper.
So the friendship is now structured around an asymmetry.
Then,
There is the analyzing mask.
The fixer who cannot quite stop interpreting.
They explain the other person's behavior back to them.
They suggest the reasons,
They psychologize,
And often they are insightful.
They are also in this mode slightly above the conversation rather than in it.
The analysis is,
In part,
A way of staying in the position of the one who knows.
Then there is the over functioning mask.
The fixer who takes on more than is theirs to take on.
Who picks up other people's responsibilities.
Who in a group project ends up doing the lion's share of the work and feeling resentful about it but unable to stop.
The over-functioning looks from the outside like competence and reliability,
But from the inside it's often very exhausting.
Then the less common one is the spiritual fixer mask.
Which I want to be careful about.
The person who has done the work knows the language,
Has the frameworks,
They can see other people's patterns.
They are also certainly helping everyone else do their work and they mean very well.
They are often very skilled.
But the helping is sometimes a way of staying in the teacher position rather than ever being the student.
So the spiritual fixer in some real way is using their own healing journey as the latest evidence that they are,
Even in this domain,
The one who knows.
Now I want to be lightly dry for a moment.
Because I think the wellness internet has again made this harder to see.
Everyone loves the helper,
The healer.
We are very fascinated by the wounded healer narrative.
The idea is that our suffering,
When transmuted into service,
Becomes our gift.
And there is something true in this framing,
But it also gives the fixer in us a kind of cover.
We can dress our compulsion to be useful in the language of calling it purpose and avoid having to look at it ever.
And I have frankly done this myself for many years.
I built a career around helping and I described it when asked as my path.
My calling,
My way of giving back and on one level all of this is true.
But on another level,
It was the most elegant possible justification for never having to be the one who needed help.
And the healer label gave the fixer in me somewhere to live that nobody could question.
And it took me a long time to see this.
And I'm not entirely past it now.
I say this because if you are in a helping profession,
This pattern is almost by definition alive in you in some degree.
So naming it is not judgment.
It is the beginning of having any real freedom in the work.
So what does it look like then to work with this pattern?
Because the goal is not,
As I said,
To stop helping.
The goal is to stop helping from the place we have been helping from.
First thing.
Begin to recognize the fixer when it shows up.
Notice a small inner activation in your body and your nervous system when someone presents a problem to you in your vicinity.
The slight lean forward.
The mind beginning to organize.
The tongue forming the advice.
To notice it,
And to pause,
And to remember,
There is a part of me that has to fix.
The part is here right now.
I do not have to act on it.
And then do the opposite of what the fixer wants briefly,
Which is going to be tough.
Sit with the person's difficulty without offering anything.
Just listen.
Let the discomfort of not fixing be present in you without acting on it.
And this can be surprisingly difficult to do.
The not acting can feel almost intolerable,
Which is information.
The intolerable feeling is the wound the fixer has been protecting.
So you have,
In not acting,
Made contact with the thing the entire strategy has been keeping you from feeling.
Now the third moves slowly over time.
Is to begin to receive.
To actually let other people help you,
To say yes when help is offered,
And to ask for help slowly when you need it.
To let a friend pay for your coffee,
To let a colleague handle the difficult thing while you stay quiet,
And to let your partner occasionally be the one with the answer.
And again,
This is actual work.
Not learning to give less,
But learning to receive.
So,
You might notice,
Over months and over years of this work,
Something begins to happen.
The compulsion to fix begins to soften.
You can still help.
You can still be useful.
But the helping is no longer the engine of your worth.
It is one of the many things that you do and it is often offered when it is genuinely the right offering and it is withheld when it is not.
And perhaps most importantly,
You can finally be on the receiving side without feeling like the floor is dropping out.
You can be helped,
You can be held and you can be loved for who you are rather than for what you provide.
Let me offer you something simple.
Let's meet the part of you that has been the helper for a long time.
Settle?
Wherever you are.
Sitting is fine.
Lying down is fine.
Eyes open is fine.
Eyes closed is fine.
Just receiving my birds is also fine.
Just let yourself be supported now.
Let your body be supported now.
Bring your attention now.
To the part of you that fixes.
The helper.
The one who is always on duty.
And the one even now listening to this.
Is thinking how will I apply this to someone they know.
Watching.
.
.
Observing.
.
.
The one inside me who has to fix.
The one inside me.
Who has been the helper.
For a very long time.
And now,
If you can,
Place a hand on your chest.
And just feel the weight of your hand on your chest.
Let's offer them a sentence.
Not advice,
Not instruction,
Just an acknowledgement.
Thank you.
I see how long you have been working.
I see what you have done for me.
I see how tired you are.
Thank you.
I see how long you've been working.
I see what you have done for me.
And I see how tired you are.
Now simply notice what you notice.
You don't have to be the one who fixes everything.
You don't have to earn your place.
You don't have to keep working to deserve being here.
You are allowed to put it down even briefly.
I will be here while you rest.
You don't have to be the one who fixes everything.
You don't have to earn your place.
You don't have to keep working to deserve being here.
You are allowed to put it down.
I will be here while you rest.
And just notice what arises.
There may be grief.
There may be a relief.
There may be a small wave of feeling.
There may be resistance.
The fixer in you may immediately rise to protest.
Whatever comes,
Let it be there.
You are not asking the part to stop forever.
You are just letting them know that for these few minutes they can put the work down.
Now very slowly,
As you bring your awareness back.
Let me describe what changes over time when this work begins to land,
Not because I want to sell you on it,
Just so you know what to look for.
The compulsion eases,
Softens.
Not all at once,
But very slowly,
Gradually.
You begin to notice the fixer rising and sometimes you are able to not act on it.
You sit with a friend's pain without solving.
You let a meeting unfold without rescuing.
You let a colleague struggle without stepping in contact.
The not acting is uncomfortable,
But the discomfort over time gets easier.
Then you might see Your capacity for being met increases.
You let people in more.
You let people help you.
And you find slowly.
That being on the receiving side does in fact matter.
Does not in fact annihilate you.
The small one inside of you who had been so afraid of needing begins to register that the world has not collapsed every time they have asked for something.
The fear of being a burden eases.
The ability to be loved rather than only to be useful begins to open up.
If anything in the last few minutes.
Have helped you recognize the fixer in yourself.
That recognition is the work landing.
You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to change anything.
Just let this be present in your awareness and notice over time.
Noticing over time is what creates the small gap in which different choices become possible.
Be gentle with the helper in you.
Be gentle with yourself.
Thank yourself for giving yourself this time.
And until next time.
Namaste.
