One Healer's Profound Meditation On the Need to Fix Others

Welcome to How to Live, a newsletter for people asking big questions about the psychology of the self.

Every week I simplify complex psychological concepts that answer universal questions about the human experience.

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.

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THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATION!

If you love wisdom, then get Wiser.

Growing up, I felt ill-equipped for life. I didn’t know the rules or understand how anything worked. I couldn’t anticipate what was going to happen next. When you have an anxiety or panic disorder, you fear the unknown, which means the future. The not-knowing is debilitating. I was often trapped inside an invisible terror. I knew that if something happened to my mother, I wouldn’t be able to function since she knew the rules, and I didn’t.

My mother was gullible. She believed everything we told her, like “We don’t get report cards” or, “No, you didn’t say you’d give us $10; you said $40.” I worried that strangers would take advantage of her because I thought she wasn’t paying enough attention when crossing the street. She startled easily; she dropped things; she was too trustworthy.

To ensure nothing terrible happened to my mother, I had to keep her alive. To make sure I could get my needs met, I had to meet hers.

I needed my mother like she was one of my organs, and because of it, the stakes felt too high. I could not let anything bad happen to her. As long as I made sure no one harmed her, I could stay alive.

This dynamic followed me into adulthood, leading me to make terrible romantic choices and occasionally even some ill-advised friend choices. I don’t even realize I’m doing it, but because of my early and formative fear that separation meant death, I have been drawn to people who overly depend on me for emotional support, creating a one-sided relationship.

This left me doing the heavy lifting while they sat and watched—a terrible dynamic for any relationship.

The point is that a week ago, I listened to my old friend Abdi Assadi’s excellent eponymous podcast, The Abdi Assadi Podcast, and was blown away by the episode “The Need to Fix Others.”

It explained things to me in ways that enriched my understanding and did not go soft on how people who fix also harm those who let them.

So today, I wanted to let you experience this episode while I excerpt the most revelatory bits.

The entire transcript can be found HERE.

CLICK the icon below to listen to the full episode, which is entirely wonderful.

'“What I'd like to talk to you about today is the need to fix people, which is deeper than caretaking.

Some of us, because of our early childhood wounding, get this deep desire, this unconscious and unhealthy desire, to fix people out of their pain, out of their suffering, out of whatever we deem something that is not comfortable for us to tolerate in somebody else.

Caretaking is such confusing business; it looks so different on the outside to what is actually going on inside of us. Fixing is a next level, or beyond caretaking.

So just to differentiate between these words, fixing is a next level in an unhealthy way of caretaking, and healing is what we do when we do it internally.

Caretaking and fixing is when we project it outside and try to do it externally.

Of course, with caretaking and fixing, nothing really happens for us on the inside. All we do is to delay the inevitable; we need to go back inside and heal ourselves.

We have to understand the need to fix comes from a place where we actually project our helplessness on an unconscious level onto another person and then try to care for them—and then the word care isn't really correct. Again, it's really fixing, but we try to care for them, that's how it seems—as a distal way of doing for another what we cannot do for our own self.

So we see somebody in pain. We feel helpless, and then we project that energy onto the other person. It freaks us out, makes us anxious, and then we want to fix them: get them to see a healer, get them to read a book. Get them to change their diet. Get them to do things differently, but it's not really coming from a place of health in our own psyche; it’s coming from a place of fear and anxiety because we can't tolerate to see another in that state. This action has many consequences.

Certainly, you yourself will know at some point something is off. The issue is that many times we don't know what's off for many, many years. For many of us it might be decades.

Why?

Because we get kudos externally.

But internally, we know what's up.

We know because we leave exhausted, we leave angry, we leave tired from these meetings. But we’re not necessarily connected. One of the things that's important is for us to know that some people, because of their wounding, and most of the times without their own even conscious awareness can trick us— and trick is a maybe a harsh word—but on an unconscious level actually it’s pretty accurate.

They can trick us into thinking that we need to heal them. That it’s our responsibility to help them along the way.

But the issue is that they don't really want help. What they want is the attention to unconsciously keep repeating the pattern that they're doing and they don't want to change.

So a good rule of thumb is to learn to distinguish the people that might be reaching out to you who really want to change and the people that are just wanting attention and they don't change and again, it's a pretty obvious thing if we sit with it.

Many times, especially if we have the caretaking wounding, we can have the same conversation 30 times, and nothing changes. We get frustrated, but we don't really realize that something is up.

We have to learn to tolerate our own anxiety and our own pain.

But truly we have to be our own saviors. We have to do our own work to get to the next level. People are responsible for their own healing.

So remember, part of those of us who have this childhood wounding is we feel an obligation to help others, an obligation to heal others. We cannot do that. People can do that only for themselves. So as we have talked about in the past, you're not obligated. Sometimes you just have to let people go.

Or if you choose to stay in a relationship, take responsibility for the ways that you might get annoyed, exhausted and use it as a part of your own teaching not to get over-involved with stuff that's not yours.

Be very conscious that this kind of unhealthy caretaking does have dire consequences, because we can enable another’s helplessness under the guise of care and love, which then it makes them unconsciously angry, just as it does us.

Nisargadatta Maharaj had that wonderful line “In order to help others, first be out of a need yourself.” Again, does this mean that we don't give a helping hand to someone's hurting? Yes. But if we're having the same conversation for the 30th time, we have to sit back and examine what's going on.

What are we losing? What are we not seeing?

So there will always be a tint of dishonesty within our own selves when we are starving emotionally internally while we're serving up a feast for another person. And the other person is suffering the same fate in reverse because they're starving because they can't nourish themselves. Right? They're not engaging honestly.

We try to save others as a way of healing them so they can get better, so they can feed us, but since we were never fed, and since we haven't even learned how to tolerate that nourishment, it becomes a vicious circle.

Now there are some guidelines that we can follow when we feel the itch to fix another. And like always, we have to check ourselves, check how we're feeling and examine the situation.

This means we have to take a moment whenever a situation comes up. If you are someone who is a professional fixer, check yourself when you get that phone call, when you get that email, when you get that running into the person, feel your body. Feel how you're feeling.

We always know when we're being hustled. So ask yourself, Is this situation my fault? Literally, is this something that I’ve caused? if we have caused pain to somebody else, that's a different issue. We need to sit down and take an inventory of how we have hurt another.

So again, somebody brings something to your door, a hot coal for you to put out. Did you set that fire? Is this the first time that this person has brought this to your door? Or is it a situation that keeps happening over and over again? Remember that you don't have the power, nor the ability, to fix somebody else's fire.

Only they can do it.

Check yourself and see how if any of these situations or issues are reflecting something back to you. Part of the issue of being a fixer is that we have all kinds of suggestions for people. So a nice guideline would be to ask permission and inquire what, if anything, the other person needs before you offer them advice.

And those of us who are running around, putting out other people's fires, one after another, is dealing with a four-alarm fire in their own backyard, their own home, their own yard, or own apartment, and has learned to tolerate the heat.

So we go outside and put out fires when instead we need to be home and paying attention to the fire that's burning in our own hearts. As always, the practice is check your body.

Being in a body is how we examine, are informed, or know what to do next. And in order to do that, we need to learn to tolerate our own anxiety. So now, as you have been listening to all this, hopefully you've been feeling your body, but if not, let's drop in.

THE START OF THE MEDITATION…

So I want you to feel as you think about a situation where this might be happening for you. Or a situation where you feel you were hoodwinked into fixing, or a situation where you stepped into fixing. Think about it but let the emotion come up.

So you're Joe Blow. Some of us have a couple of those Joe Blows, some of us are healthier than others, but think of a Joe Blow where you are not quite sure if it's healthy, or you already know it's not healthy, the way you keep talking to them about the same thing, but you do it anyway.

Feel your body. Where do you feel this energy? So feel your head, feel your face. Relax everything. Drop your breathing down. Feel your neck and shoulders feel your arms. Feel your chest. Feel your throat. Keep going down

Feel your chest, feel your throat, keep going down. Feel your abdomen, feel your hips, feel your thighs, feel your calves, feel your shin bones, feel your feet and remember, we are very head heavy. So feeling our feet, kinesthetically being aware of our feet really helps build our energy up so we can actually feel what's going on in our chest. Feel what's going on in our emotional heart.

Some as you're feeling your body, feel how this feels. Do you feel agitated? Do you feel angry? Do you feel like, God I don't want to do this anymore? Do you feel like, no that's actually okay, I can do this. Check yourself.

Examine a situation within your body and remember, trying to fix another is actually detrimental to both you and them. Caretaking is not free. It has negative consequences for both parties involved because it's not honest and dishonest relationships always lead to pain all around.

So tend to yourself; tend to your heart. Do trust that when we're centered in the midst of our own chaos, truly, it’s such a gift to other people. When we tend to ourselves, tend to our heart, out of that place we can truly help others, just by our presence.

I send you love always and always.

Till next time.“

HOW WONDERFUL IS THIS?? I urge you to listen in full. A transcript will never do a human voice, with its singular intonation, pausing, and tone, justice.

It was a life-enriching experience for me.

Abdi also has a great book for healers that anyone can benefit from (I did!)

I’d love to hear your thoughts about all this in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda