Mm.

That, [sighs] you know? It's oftentimes then we kick into that mode of like, oh my gosh, they're stressed or they're this, or maybe it's 'cause I didn't send that email when I should've, or maybe this, and we start to internalize, and it keeps us in this gear where we're kind of filling in the gaps, filling in things, and sometimes internalizing and making it about us and our deficits.

And you can see that that is futuristic thinking and also just not meeting, again, situations and people where they are, and that does a lot to our speed, our pace, and our ability, I think, to regulate ourselves and also recover in real time, rather than kind of letting our internal loan just get bigger and bigger and bigger until we pop.

... through development.

And here, and, and too, we have to remember that, you know, in the moment, again, I kind of talked about that part of us that's more protective in nature.

We have these strong associations that if I don't do this, then I'm probably not a good leader.

If I don't do this, then I'm not a good partner, I'm not a good friend, I'm not a good daughter, I'm not...

Like, we have these sometimes very rigid associations of what our mind categorizes as good enough.

Like where did you start? Were you a serial fixer? How'd you realize it? Tell us a little bit about your background.

I definitely, I think, would like to categorize myself as a recovering serial fixer.

Of course, I'm, I'm in the works.

I always have to be mindful of my habits too.

And what I've found, not only through my clinical work, but working with teams and organizations and focusing a lot on overextension and cyclical burnout, is that we do a good job these days of regurgitating kind of the symptoms of burnout, but I really wanted to get to the psychology behind it, the root of it.

And a lot of times it is these roles that we place ourselves in when we are constantly, rather than letting people keep ownership of what is theirs, while we support with empathy and compassion, we just step in and we fix and solve.

And I've found that people with high levels of emotional intelligence and that do have high levels of compassion and empathy and that are in roles that really, that's a necessity, these are the very people that are constantly serial fixing to maintain the graces of everyone, to not be stamped or categorized as something negative, to be premature in taking care of something that may not even come to fruition.

So how can you be a person who is a compassionate friend in relationship with someone without fixing? How do you care without fixing someone's problems?