Farewell to fixing

If this week would have a theme, it would be ‘fixing’. This may well be very personal - the story I am about to share certainly is - but I’ve heard it come up in various talks as well, so perhaps it’s part of something bigger. And perhaps my personal story is of some comfort to you.  

[ Side note: I’m writing these articles in English, so my friends and fellow coaches abroad can read along. My coaching sessions are either in Dutch or English, whichever you prefer. ]

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One of the people who spoke about fixing, is author/activist Glennon Doyle. She had been receiving a lot of emails and messages from parents in her community, mostly mothers, who felt they were failing badly. Not only were they failing at home-schooling their children, they were also failing at keeping loss, grief and pain away from them.

Somehow, we have come to believe, Glennon said, that this is our job: we have to protect our children, our family, our friends from pain. And if they still suffer, we have failed. But what if this was the wrong job description? She had addressed this topic before, in an interview with Krista Tippett. I’ll use an extensive quote, because I deeply agree with her on this:

‘It took me till my kids were ten to figure out that that parenting memo was complete B.S. and that when we don’t let our kids fail, and we don’t let our kids feel, they don’t learn how to become human.

‘One of my greatest challenges in my personal life and in my parenting is just to look at my kids and say: “I’m not going to protect you from this. I’m going to let you fail here. I’m going to let you feel that, yes, life is that hard. It is that hard to be human, and I’m not going to grab that from you.”

‘We [Glennon and her partner] are trying to raise kids who don’t have to be fire avoiders, who don’t have to constantly avoid the fires of their lives, of their relationships and of the world, because they have learnt over and over again that they can walk through the fires, because they are fireproof.

‘That’s what we learn when we keep showing up for hard things, and we keep making it through: that we don’t have to skip the hard things anymore because we somehow always survive and end up stronger.’

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My personal story about fixing is this. When I was very little, I was put into hospital. Hip dysplasia. To push the left hip bone in its socket, both my hips were covered in plaster. I was lying on my back with my legs held in braces, sand bags on the side to keep them in place. I could not move and not be held. I wasn’t told what was happening. I must have felt very afraid, but I didn’t let that show. It was a long time ago, parents did not stay in hospitals overnight with their children. The hospitalisation took about three weeks. I was ten months old at the time. 

For decades I had no recollection of those three weeks, nor of the anxiety I felt. But when I experienced a very similar feeling of being trapped and stuck last year, the memory came back. At this moment, I am working with a haptotherapist to reconnect with my body and integrate all the coping skills I developed at the time. They were useful then, but not so much now.

This week, during a session (over the phone) with the therapist, she asked me to tune into my body. What was coming up today? I became aware of pain in my jaw, my shoulders and tried to ease it. She stopped me and said: ‘you are trying to fix it. Why don’t you let it be?’

So I did. And it hurt. Not the pain itself, but the anxiety that arose when I let it be. I was convinced that if I was in pain, it meant I was broken. It meant something was wrong with me. And so my parents would leave. They would go and look for a happier, healthier, more cheerful girl who was better than I was. This wasn’t my grown-up self speaking, but the little one in her hospital bed. 

My conviction was based on the frightened look on my parent’s faces as they sat next to my bed at the time. I had remembered this last year too. And my parents have told me since that indeed they were very worried, they couldn’t explain what had gone wrong, how I ended up with my hip that needed fixing.

Perhaps my parents got that wrong memo too. I read it from their faces and adopted the idea: pain needs to be fixed. I was convinced I wasn’t allowed to feel pain. What’s more: I began to start fixing my parent’s pain. If I was cheerful, they were more relaxed and happier. They didn’t leave, they looked after me. 

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The strategies of toughening up and fixing other people’s pain were very useful at the time. They have been very useful later. But oftentimes they are not helpful at all.

This week one of my dearest friends, who had been very communicative in the first three weeks of the quarantine, became very curt in his messages, stopped checking in and seemed rather overwhelmed by work, the crisis and family duties.

First, my natural instinct to help and soothe came up. I genuinely wanted to be there for him. But then, as the silence progressed, the anxious child joined the conversation: I need to fix this. What have I done wrong? How will I manage when he is not there for me?

It took me a while to figure out what was happening and calm down. I was able to explain to my friend how I spun out of orbit, and he was able to listen. In fact, he listened without trying to fix anything. Which probably means better memos are being distributed at the moment.

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The memo I would like to give, is this one: at this time, we experience a lot of pain, grief, loss and uncertainty. If we learn to sit with that, to just let it be, without rushing to a quick-fix, we will be able to be so much more supportive. Each of us has their own pain to process. We are not helping anyone by fixing it for them, because they won’t develop the skills and the tools to help themselves next time. All we can do is support each other by saying: I believe you can do this. I’ll be right here, by your side to remind you that you can.

And if you feel that this is too hard, then don’t hide it, be honest about your struggle and keep some distance. Liz Gilbert addressed this beautifully in the TED-interview I mentioned in earlier post. We are taught,’ she said, ‘that empathy is a good thing, but in a case that is as dramatic as this pandemic, you want to be replacing empathy with compassion.’

‘Compassion means: I see your suffering and I want to help you. Underneath compassion lies the courage to sit with and witness somebody else’s pain without inhabiting it yourself. Whereas empathy means: you are suffering and now I am suffering, because you are. And then there’s nobody who can serve. Empathy makes you into another patient who needs assistance. You cannot help somebody when you’re in pain yourself. So, stay out of that field of somebody else’s pain, and see if you can find the inner resolve and courage to help.’

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In the spirit of Easter, I’ll leave you with another quote by Ms. Doyle.

‘I have committed to dealing with life on its own terms and my own feelings on its own terms and not rushing myself and distracting myself — and sometimes that means I go down hard. And then there’s something that happens after that which is really beautiful, 100 percent of the time.

‘We say all the time with our kids, everything is a pattern. It’s, first the pain; then, the waiting; then, the rising — over and over and over again. Pain, waiting, rising. And when we skip the pain, we just never get to this rising.’