By: Camden Baucke, MS, LLP
What happens when fixing stops being an action and becomes who you are?
When your purpose is driven by problems, and you exist to perfectly propose a solution to them all? Turns out, it’s exhausting. A fixer identity is riddled with problematic perceptions of self and everyday tasks.
Fixer identities often elicit signs or symptoms of anxiety or depression. They might write their whole routine around wrecks that need repair. The two become tied, even if it is parasitic. A fixer is drained of solutions, meanwhile they struggle to exist without problems—play and leisure may seem foreign and off limits for a fixer. Life is fixing, and no matter how tiring it is, a fixer might just consider their self-destructive perception as who they are.
In this article, I will dive into the nature of a fixer identity and offer some solutions for a life beyond fixing.
What is a Fixer Identity?
The word identity comes from the Latin “identitas” which means sameness, identifying what about you stays the same across contexts.
The word fix has evolved over time, but it maintains a similar narrative. In the Middle English period, fix meant something that was “attached or secure“. Over time, it acquired the meaning of “mending” and providing solutions. Altogether, fixing means to mend something back to a secure position.
A fixer identity is someone who, across contexts, tries to constantly mend their way back to security.
Problems and solutions cease to be temporary shifts from homeostasis—they transform into an identity, around which a lifestyle is created.
Unfortunately, a lifestyle planned around fixing often excludes what makes us feel most alive.
When Problems are a Painful Purpose
A fixer identity is someone chronically fighting towards security, which indicates they are fearful of insecurity.
This might make sense to the fixer, as life does present plenty of problems that need solving. You need shelter, food, water, and healthy relationships, all of which demand your active effort or else you face dire consequences.
However, avoiding consequences isn’t the only motivation we can experience, and it often leads to an unfulfilling life. Try telling your partner that you love them just to avoid being alone. It will seem as if you aren’t motivated by who they are. Try explaining how food is just fuel for the body’s machine to restaurant owners in Italy. It will seem you have no care for the cultural, experiential, or familial components of eating. Insecurities don’t have to be met avoidantly. In fact, meeting daily problems with additional positive value, other than just avoiding consequences, is what turns mundane living into a vibrant experience.
Fixers don’t often care for what they receive in return for their solution. They attempt to return themselves to a facade of security, just to find that there are more problems to solve. Life as a fixer can be the ultimate disappointment. Even worse, fixers may not consider themselves as more than a fixing tool, like a lifeless wrench or hammer.
Although a fixer lives by fixing, taking away problems and a fixer might feel worse, because who are they if they aren’t fixing?
Fix problems, feel dehumanized and distressed—have no problems to fix, feel empty and insecure. There’s rarely a pleasant ending for a fixer identity.
How Do You Develop a Fixer Identity?
When fixing problems is a mission all throughout someone’s life, chances are insecurity has played a key role in their youth.
Food insecurity, emotionally or physically volatile childhood homes, interpersonal aggression between parents, and plenty of similar conditions can drive the development of a fixer identity.
A fixer might have had to fix their food scarcity on their own to be fed. They might have fixed situations at home to escape abuse or earn the attention of neglectful parents. Their parents might have parentified them, inadvertently forcing them to mend their arguments as a child mediator. A fixer grows up having to fix, not choosing to, and the potential consequences of failure were probably devastating.
Insecure childhood conditions often force children to fix if they want to be safe, kept around, and survive.
Even decades after they escape the conditional dangers of their childhood homes, fixers might still frame life in the same way, simply because they might not recognize it. Even if they did, fixers might not know any other way to live.
What is Fixing Really?
There are two distinct perceptions of fixing—one is for (1) reality, and the other is for (2) identity.
To be fair, you are always solving problems in reality. Life presents endless opportunities for problem-solving, which everyone on the planet actively attempts every day.
But what actually is a problem? It is something shifted out of homeostasis, most often temporarily, that requires effort to return back to homeostasis. A fixing identity transforms this objective method of problem-solving into something entirely different.
When a fixer is solving a problem, they’re not just fixing, they believe they’re creating security as an expression of identity.
However, when identity is integrated into challenges, you often have the issue of self-esteem (self-evaluation of personal worth). If you fix something well, your worth remains and you are secure. If you fail to fix, then your worth is just as abysmal as your outcomes. If your identity is as worthy as the quality of your solutions, then your worth is conditional, and so is your security.
So a fixer doesn’t just use fixing for real-world solutions, but for a battle for an unstable self-worth.
Fixing is a Framework
Fixing, for a fixer, is much more than a singular action—it is an identity that creates a framework for living.
Making meals becomes a problem—something that fails if it doesn’t taste good or if it’s not made on time.
A partner’s anger becomes a problem—failing to be a good partner if you aren’t managing your partner’s emotions for them.
Not knowing what you want in life becomes a problem, as well as having anxiety, feeling lonely, and so on.
Everything that is not absolutely secure is a problem that needs to be fixed for a fixer to feel safe. Until then, they may seem like a problem if they don’t provide an effective solution.
With a fixer identity, you are who you are because of your solutions, and life appears as constant problems because your self-esteem is ingrained in everything you do.
However, you can take your self-esteem out of problem-solving. You can have fun and play for the enjoyment of it, as well as meet your needs in a meaningful and fulfilling way.
Unbecoming the Fixer
If someone waits for an absence of issues to change their fixer identity, they will find no such opportunity.
Fixer identities may help children and young adults escape and survive awful conditions. However, it’s worth acknowledging that a successful and adaptive identity may have worked for the situations that necessitated it—but not anymore.
Problems will persist, but a fixer identity doesn’t have to.
If you identify as a fixer, I encourage you to explore possible alternative truths—to give them a chance to be as true as what you currently believe.
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