If I were to distill the essence of what I’ve found therapeutic, that in turn I offer to others, it’s that we must stop fixing ourselves and work instead on accepting ourselves. Most of us, however, come to therapy because our efforts to “fix” ourselves and our lives have not been working, and we feel a sense of urgency that we need to get our shit together soon. This urgency is useful to get us to work on ourselves, but then the last thing we want to hear is “Stop trying to fix yourself!”
What our “fixer” parts want is to resolve our problems while avoiding taking major risks, making significant and scary changes, or looking at the deeper roots of my distress. This is entirely understandable! If you can heal yourself without that work, why wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, there may come a point where the fixers are valiantly taking on a doomed task.
Imagine that there’s a heavy rainstorm, and you see a dam is starting to fall over. Our fixer parts see the superficial problem—the dam is falling over! They sense the urgency of the situation—if it fails, there’ll be a flood! And they go for the obvious answer—I’ll just prop it up!
To an extent, this works. So long as you never move or change, your fixer could hold the dam in place. But this effort is costly, and grows more so over time, especially when no one is working on the question of why the dam is falling over. And why would they, when the fixer’s got it handled?
To “fix” means to hold something in place. When we fix, we create superficial solutions to our problems, but we do not look at the roots of those issues. If we simply keep pushing our anger, our hopelessness, our exhaustion back up behind the dam, continuing to overwhelm it while we prop it up, does that serve us?
When my clients begin to work with fixer parts, they tend to imagine jugglers, plate-spinners, acrobats—people performing incredible, amazing, superhuman feats that are astonishing and completely unsustainable. Yet they’ll keep going until they die, no matter how exhausted they are, because what’s more terrifying is the not knowing what will happen if they stop. What if all the plates and balls fall to the ground? What if the dam falls over?
These fixer parts tend to live in a world of isolation, with no one else to help—no Self, no family, no friends, no community. If they’re aware of the existence of other people, our fixers may feel these other people are neglectful, unaware, hostile, or waiting for us to fail. What worsens this is that when we engage with other people from our fixer parts, they may feel themselves condescended to, pushed away, or disconnected—like we can’t handle them as anything but another problem to solve.
Our fixers are truly trying to help, and coming from a place of love, and isolation, and doing the best they can. But they may well be trying to hold together an edifice that is no longer serving anyone. What they do not know how to do is transform, which means not only letting go of fixing but embracing radical change.
“Radical” relates to the root of a thing. It is beneath our superficial story and mental efforts to hold together. Turning toward the roots requires what I call “acceptance practice” for lack of a better term at this time. In psychotherapy practice, it means going into the deeper levels of the consciousness, which lay within our bodies.
Our fixers experience our emotions, sensations, and behaviors as problems to solve or things to manage, but until we’ve learned how to accept our full experience and witness ourselves as we are, our fixers tend not to really understand these other parts. They have theories about the “problems” but we can tell it’s incomplete because the problems continue. All that “knowing” is intellectual and disconnected from the actual part of you that is responding and acting in those moments.
The dam metaphor, while strange, continues to be useful, because in the world of a fixer, we’re either in danger of being flooded by our emotions in a catastrophic, damaging way or we’re keeping our feelings at a firm distance with steel walls. The dam is an effort to control overwhelming emotion, but it’s also creating the overwhelm—stopping the natural movement and flow of emotion until it’s built up so much force that it’s overpowering.
Acceptance practice would be to let go of the dam and learn how to stay present even with the flow of emotions. With gratitude for our fixer parts for their incredible labor, we invite them to sit with us so that we can turn toward the emotional roots of our distress and listen to what they have to teach us.
This also means sitting with our multiplicity, able to recognize and allow all the conflicting thoughts and feelings that are a normal part of being a person. Instead of forcing ourselves into a coherent narrative and walling off what is contradictory, we can learn to accept every part of us as having a valid perspective to be witnessed.
With that witnessing and acceptance, the flow of intense feeling begins to diminish and become workable, and all those problems and conflicts begin to dissolve into what we might call a solution. As in chemistry, a solution is the result of various substances merging together; so too do the solutions of our distress come from allowing our conflicting thoughts and feelings to thaw, flow, and come together into a new perspective.
All of this is as simple and challenging as sensing into our bodies, where emotions live, and witnessing them from a place of calm and compassion. Then staying with them, listening and asking for more understanding, and letting clarity come to us.