YOU CAN'T BE FIXED!

And that's not a problem...

Exploring why the pursuit of being “fixed” often becomes an escape from the full spectrum of human emotion.

Man attempts to fix himself

There’s a phrase I hear constantly in my practice: “I just want to be fixed.”

I understand the appeal. When you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, grief, or any form of emotional pain, the idea of being “fixed” sounds like relief. It sounds like peace. It sounds like finally, finally, you’ll stop feeling this way.

But here’s what I’ve learned after years of sitting with people in their most vulnerable moments: the pursuit of being “fixed” is often less about healing and more about escaping the discomfort of being human.

The Fantasy of Being “Fixed”

When we imagine ourselves as “fixed,” what are we really picturing? Usually, it’s some version of ourselves that feels calm, unbothered, consistently happy or at least consistently neutral. We imagine a self that doesn’t get anxious before big presentations, doesn’t feel the sting of rejection, doesn’t lie awake worrying about loved ones. We imagine a self that doesn’t feel so much.

And there’s the problem. Because being fully alive means feeling the full range of human emotions. Joy and grief. Excitement and anxiety. Love and fear. These aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. They’re how we know we’re engaged with life, connected to others, invested in outcomes that matter to us.

“Fixed” as Emotional Avoidance

The desire to be “fixed” becomes problematic when it’s really a sophisticated form of avoidance. Instead of learning to be with difficult emotions, to understand them, to tolerate them, to let them move through us, we treat them as evidence that something is fundamentally broken.

This mindset keeps us perpetually searching for the solution that will finally make us stop feeling: the right medication, the right therapist, the right self-help book, the right mindfulness practice. And when we still feel anxious or sad afterward, we conclude that we’re not fixed yet, that we need to try harder, do more, find the real answer. But what if the feelings themselves aren’t the problem? What if the problem is our relationship with those feelings?

The Cost of Emotional Immunity

I sometimes ask clients: “If I could wave a magic wand and make it so you never felt anxious again, but it also meant you’d never feel excited or passionate about anything, would you take that deal?”

Most people, after thinking about it, say no. Because we intuitively understand that our capacity for pain and our capacity for joy are linked. The parent who can’t bear to feel the anxiety of their child taking risks is also limiting their child’s growth. The person who numbs their grief also numbs their ability to feel deep connection. The walls we build to keep out hurt also keep out intimacy, meaning, and aliveness.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Real healing isn’t about eliminating difficult emotions. It’s about expanding our capacity to be with them. It’s about learning that you can feel anxious and take action anyway. That you can feel grief and still find moments of beauty. That you can be afraid and courageous at the same time. It’s about understanding that emotions are temporary visitors, not permanent residents. They arise, peak, and pass, if we let them. When we try to fix ourselves out of feeling them, we paradoxically trap them in place.

Healing looks like:

• Feeling your feelings without making them mean something is wrong with you

• Developing tools to regulate your nervous system without demanding it never be activated

• Building resilience through experience, not through avoidance

• Accepting that being human means being vulnerable

A Different Goal

So if the goal isn’t to be “fixed,” what is it?

Maybe it’s to become whole, which includes broken parts. Maybe it’s to develop flexibility rather than immunity. Maybe it’s to build a life rich with meaning, which necessarily includes pain alongside joy.

Maybe it’s to stop treating your emotional life as a problem to be solved and start treating it as information to be understood.

You can’t be fixed because you’re not broken. You’re a human being having a human experience, and that experience includes the full range of emotions, beautiful and terrible, wanted and unwanted, comfortable and challenging.

The question isn’t then how to stop feeling.

The question is: what becomes possible when you stop trying to?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​