If you always want to fix people, the urge is often about your own unease as much as their trouble. Someone else's problem lands in you as something to settle, and a solution settles it fastest. The care is real. The rush to solve usually started long before today's problem.
Zuzana's friend mentions it at the nail salon, while the two of them sit side by side with their feet in warm water: since her closest friend moved to Toronto in the summer, the weekends have felt very long.
Before the polish is chosen, Zuzana has a plan. A running club that meets by the Creek on Friday mornings. A book group a colleague swears by. A standing video call with Toronto on Saturdays, the time difference worked out on her fingers.
Her friend studies a rack of little bottles. "Maybe," she says. "I think I just wanted to say it to someone."
"Of course," Zuzana says. While the first coat dries, she mentions the running club again.
Outside, they hug by the car park, and her friend thanks her for the afternoon.
Zuzana doesn't start the car straight away. She sits in the driver's seat with her phone for twenty minutes, and before she pulls out she has sent three links, the book group's next date and a screenshot of a time zone chart, with "No pressure at all" underneath.
The reply comes that evening: a heart, and "you're so sweet".
Zuzana feels a small sting. Under the sting there's something she likes less. Relief. The long weekends are still her friend's. But Zuzana has done something about them, and now she can put it out of her mind.
Why do I always want to fix people?
For many people, it's because someone else's trouble doesn't stay with them. It turns into unease of their own, and fixing the problem is the quickest way to stop it. That's why the ideas can arrive before the other person has finished, and why holding them back is hard, even when all they wanted was to be heard.
Zuzana's friend brought a feeling. Zuzana heard a problem, and her own relief came when the links went.
This isn't a case against helping. Parents, carers and nurses help all day long, and so do friends who stay close to someone through a difficult stretch. That care is good. This article questions something smaller: whose need a particular answer is meeting.
The fixer isn't a medical label, and this article offers no therapy or medical care. Please don't change your medication, treatment or support on the strength of this page. If you're in treatment, keep working with your doctor or therapist, and if you're in recovery, carry on with your programme and with anyone who's been helping you through it. If looking after others has worn you down, or the tiredness won't lift, see a doctor.
Sometimes the person a fixer most wants to help is the one causing harm. If someone is hurting or threatening you, or has taken over your bank account or your phone, put this article aside and look after your own safety. If anyone's life or safety is under threat now, call your local emergency services before anything else. In the UAE, call 800111, a free line that the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children keeps open at any hour of the day or night. In other places, a local domestic abuse or crisis service is the one to find. If someone you care about is talking about harming themselves, help them get to a doctor, and if they're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Find support for yourself as well.
Where does the fixer come from?
For many fixers, it started young. In some homes, when one adult was worried, everyone felt it, and a child worked out that the quickest way to clear the air was to find the answer: the lost keys, the right words, the job done before anyone had to ask. A child who can make a problem go away gets a little calm back, and calm is worth a lot to a child.
Not every fixer grew up that way. Some picked it up later, in a first job that rewarded whoever had the answer, or in a friendship where being useful felt like the surest way to stay close.
However it began, it tends to work the same way. Trouble appears in someone nearby. A knot forms in you. An answer comes, and handing it over loosens the knot. Over the years the whole thing speeds up, until offering a solution feels less like a choice than a reflex.
Seen that way, the fixer is less a trait than a habit with a history, and it's been busy ever since. How to respond instead of react looks at well-worn replies, and an offered solution can easily be one of them.
Looking at where a habit began can hurt. When it does, take a break from reading and talk to someone you trust or a professional, and in a crisis, contact your local emergency services. Come to the quiz Who Did You Become to Survive? whenever its title question starts to pull at you. Or read on.
Why does just listening feel so hard?
For a fixer, listening often leaves the unease where it is. While someone talks through a problem you could solve, the urge to say something keeps building and has no outlet. In my experience, fixers often describe plain listening as doing nothing at all.
To the person talking, it's rarely nothing. A quick answer has a cost of its own: offered too early, it can tell someone, without anyone meaning it to, that their problem looked too big for them. Some people feel helped. Others feel hurried, or a little smaller, and over time they bring you less.
The quality of an idea is one thing. Whose need it meets at that moment is another, and Zuzana's links met hers.
Does the fixer ever turn on you?
Often, yes. The urge that can't let a friend's long weekends be tends to treat your own feelings as problems to solve. An ordinary bad day gets a plan before it's been felt, and a hard week turns into an improvement plan with your name at the top. A care plan made with your doctor or therapist is a different thing, and it stays as agreed.
Unbecome, my book, pictures a reader's ordinary day in its chapter The Fixing Years, and one sentence of it describes the fixer closely: "By nine you will be the person other people bring their tangles to, because you are good with everyone's knots except one."
Stop fixing yourself takes up the fixer's work on its own owner.
What if you offered a choice before an answer?
Save it for ordinary conversations, the grumble by the lifts or a neighbour's tiring week. If someone depends on you for their care, or anyone is at risk, that comes first and the exercise waits. It isn't for anyone you feel unsafe with, either. Anything to do with drink, drugs or self-harm, yours or anyone else's, falls outside it: if anyone's at risk, reach a doctor, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Neither this exercise nor this article is therapy or medical care, and the exercise never means holding back help that's wanted.
- The next time someone mentions something small that's bothering them, at work or anywhere else, offer them a choice first: some ideas, or a chance to get it off their chest. Put it in your own words.
- Go with whatever they pick. If it's ideas, offer as many as help. If it's talking, listen, and before you add anything of your own, say back one thing you heard.
- Later, think back to what the listening was like for you: when you most wanted to jump in, and how long that pull lasted. That's simply information about an old habit.
Holding back an answer can bring old feelings to the surface. When it does, drop the exercise for today and talk to someone you trust or a professional. Help you're asked for is always yours to give.
When does the quiz make sense for a fixer?
Here's how a fixer might tell whether the quiz, Who Did You Become to Survive?, is worth a try.
- The answers line up before the other person has finished. That's the fixer at work.
- You're curious about the self underneath it. The quiz's page addresses it head-on: "Meet the version of you that's been waiting underneath."
- You want to understand the habit and keep caring for people. Looking at the fixer is a separate thing from looking after people, and the care never has to wait for it.
The quiz isn't therapy or medical care, and its result appears only after you enter your first name, email and phone. If a question stings, you can stop partway through and take whatever comes up to someone you trust or a professional. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
A worry, as I see it, deserves a chair before it gets a plan.
Anne, one of my book's readers, on Amazon.com: "This book is so much more than a read."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Over coffee one day, someone may mention a hard week, and a plan for it may start to form before they've got to the end of it. If that happens, the quiz is there. If a question presses on an old bruise, talk to someone you trust or a professional, and in a crisis, contact your local emergency services. Show me who I became