If you were the fixer in your family growing up, you likely developed these 9 habits as an adult
Every dysfunctional family has a “fixer.” This is the individual who carries the responsibility for keeping everything going.
They might take that role upon themselves, or it may be forced upon them. Either way, they’re the one who steps in and handles all crises, conflicts, and family upheavals.
If this role sounds familiar to you, then you were undoubtedly your family’s “fixer.” Furthermore, if this role began when you were young, it’s likely you developed the following habits once you reached adulthood.
9 habits you take into adulthood when you grow up being the family fixer:
1. Forever being the peacemaker.
Whenever a stressful situation erupts in your vicinity, you feel responsible for keeping the peace.
You’ll step in to negotiate difficulties between colleagues, soothe emotions between friends, and you might have even stepped in to help complete strangers whose tempers flared towards each other.
What’s more, you may still be the go-to person when it comes to keeping the peace in family matters.
If your siblings are having problems with your parents, or your parents are having difficulties with each other, they may turn to you to sort things out instead of addressing the issues themselves. You feel obligated to do so because that’s always been your role.
2. Rock-solid emotional containment (which isn’t always a conscious choice).
We all know the adage about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else.
This is a bit like that: when you’ve been the family fixer since childhood, you learned how to compartmentalize and contain your own emotions quickly and efficiently, since you were also responsible for managing everyone else’s.
As a result, whenever you find yourself in a situation where tensions are rising, you immediately lock down your own emotions. You’re essentially the emotional calm in the eye of the hurricane.
This can happen intentionally, e.g., through concentration techniques, or it may be a subconscious switch response.
Either way, it can have both positive and negative aspects, since the emotions aren’t necessarily being processed, but rather contained in the moment.
You may be able to negotiate emotional upheaval with airtight self-control, but if those emotions aren’t eventually dealt with, accessing your emotions more broadly may become difficult because your body has learned to bury them in order to remain functional.
3. Being quick to abandon situations (and relationships) that cause more chaos than calm.
A person who has had to fix all of their family’s problems from childhood onwards is usually a person who grew up surrounded by upheaval.
If you were raised in an environment like this, you likely spent a lot of time bracing yourself for whatever fresh hell you’d have to mediate next, and in adulthood, this can often manifest in one of two ways.
The first is that once you reached adulthood, you may have made your home a fortress of peace and solace, and you now won’t tolerate anything that threatens that peace, including relationships.
I was the fixer in my family, and after I was finally able to leave after 18 years of hell, I decided that I would never live willingly with that kind of tension again.
As such, as soon as a relationship started to steal my serenity or become more trouble than it was worth, I excised it from my life.
Stressful jobs, demanding relationships, one-sided friendships, and shared living arrangements have all been abandoned for the sake of preserving my peace.
4. Or doggedly remaining in terrible relationships in an attempt to fix them.
Alternatively, rather than being someone who abandons ship at the first sign of a storm, you may put your “fixer” toolbox to use in your personal relationships.
Even though the person you’re dating may be waving an entire stadium’s worth of red flags, your natural predisposition to fixing things may make you determined to make it work.
It’s possible that you might have had some luck now and then. For example, you may have helped a damaged partner to heal and become the best version of themselves, but this is usually the exception rather than the rule.
The rest of the time, your efforts likely result in you getting mistreated and depleted because you’ve refused to walk away from a situation you felt obligated to work through.
5. Only socializing in small doses, on your own terms.
When your friends invite you to a get-together, your response is invariably “maybe” — which means that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll show up.
You socialize with other people entirely on your own terms, and if you do attend a social function to make an appearance, you reserve the right to bail whenever you feel the need to do so.
When you were growing up, you were essentially a captive who had no choice about your living situation, nor the chaos that erupted around you continually. As a result, you became the fixer to create some measure of peace in your life.
The result is that once you reached adulthood, you began to strictly control who had access to you and for how long.
Essentially, you were powerless about those interactions in your early life, so you keep an iron grip on them now.
6. Always trying to fix potential problems before they arise.
You may be hypervigilant about anything that could cause upset, and are always trying to look ahead to smooth out potential problems before they start. This habit likely also makes you excellent at event planning.
Quite simply, you can anticipate anything that could possibly go wrong and create contingency plans to fall back on, including conflict prevention. One of the ways you likely do this is to become an informal pre-emptive mediator.
For example, let’s say you’re having friends over for a movie night. Lisa hates western action films, but Shawn loves them. As such, you may choose a comedic western that appeals to both of them, thereby circumventing potential discord.
7. Being unwilling to relinquish control over your own affairs to anyone.
Over the course of your life thus far, you’ve been eternally responsible for fixing other people’s mess-ups.
And while this has likely granted you an extraordinary number of skills across a wide variety of subjects, it has also likely given you very high standards as far as getting things done goes.
Now, you find that people don’t ever do things as well as you can (or perhaps you think you can); so you find it very difficult to hand over any kind of control to others in regard to your house, your affairs, etc.
For example, you may not feel comfortable leaving your pets with a sitter when you go on holiday because you can’t trust them to care for them as diligently as you do. As a result, you may choose vacation destinations that allow pets, or stay home instead.
If you do leave them — or your kids, if you have them — in the care of others, you leave extensive lists of how they should be cared for, as well as emergency numbers, allergies, and preferences.
Additionally, you may call or text dozens of times a day to check in, or consider cutting your trip short because you just don’t think anyone else could be up to the task.
8. Having White Knight Syndrome.
If a friend of yours is struggling with something, your natural, immediate response is probably to leap in and save them from it.
For example, if they suddenly lose their job, you’ll drop whatever you’re doing to scour employment opportunities online so you can send them listings that would work for them. And while you’re at it, you’ll take it upon yourself to update their CV.
The same thing happens if someone close to you reaches out because they’re being mistreated. You’ll rush to their aid and will fight tooth and nail to protect them.
But at least half the time, you’ll also get immensely frustrated when they reach out to you, you offer help, and they refuse to accept it. Because a lot of the time, they don’t really want a fixer; they just want someone to lend an ear.
9. Not letting anyone in to help you.
You’re the fixer. That has become an inherent part of your personality over the years, so even though you’re happy to stop whatever you’re doing when someone else needs help, you’re loath to accept help in turn — even if you really need it.
For example, if your partner is sick, you make them soup and tea and attend to their every need, but you can’t justify asking them for anything when you get ill. In fact, you may insist upon getting these things yourself, and get snappish if they take it upon themselves to do these things spontaneously.
I understand this feeling well. My partner and I have been together for years, and I’m only now starting to get more comfortable with allowing him to help me.
Final thoughts…
It’s very difficult to unlearn behaviors that you developed during your formative years. Essentially, those behaviors were like the building blocks used to create the foundation of your house: they’re an integral part of who you are.
By recognizing your “fixer” inclinations, however, you can curb those habits when they appear — such as the knee-jerk response to step in and fix everything for everyone.
You may not be able to replace those formative blocks, but you can certainly overlay and repaint them.
