In coaching a woman who compulsively fixes everything — herself, others, injustices — Joe reveals that every fixing behavior is actually an avoidance of being present. When he invites her to simply be with him without an agenda, she discovers intense anxiety, then sadness, then eventually a profound aliveness.
“Everything you’re doing is trying to avoid just actually being with me. You go into your head to stop being with me. You go to fix me. You try to fix yourself.”
The fixing pattern operates on multiple levels simultaneously: intellectualizing (taking notes instead of being present), caretaking (solving others’ problems), and self-improvement (trying to prove she’s healed). All roads lead away from the present moment and away from genuine contact with another person.
When she finally arrives in the present moment, she names it herself: “I’m avoiding the silence. I’m avoiding the peace.” The thing she’s been running from is the very thing she wants — aliveness, connection, pleasure. The fixing creates a surface-level engagement that feels productive but never reaches the depth where actual change happens.
“How can you fix anything if you’re not here like this with me? You’re trying to fix something without being able to be with it.”
Related Concepts
- Fixing mindset perpetuates stuckness
- Stop fixing others to help them change
- Accomplishment is undoing, not doing
- Asking ‘how do I stop’ keeps you in the doing loop
- The feeling that everything I touch fails drives compulsive fixing
- Judgment protects from a vastness that triggers anxiety