The Fixer's Vow — Turn Down the Noise
Episode transcript
You were never broken. You were biological. I'm Sonja Irina Johansen, and for decades, I believed my struggle with food was a character flaw, until I learned the science that said otherwise. This is Turn Down the Noise, the show about why we really reach for food and the gentler way through. Keep your plan. Keep your practitioner. Keep your medication. This is company, and not instead.
I think I'm looking at a room full of professionals, not by job title, by temperament. We walk in anywhere and run the audit in four seconds flat. Not everybody in this room, I would venture to say, but most of us. Who's upset? Who's tired? Who needs a glass of water? And who's two sentences away from ruining dinner?
Some of you know I'm the oldest of four kids and the only girl. And some of you may also know that for my fifth birthday my dad gave me a step stool so I could reach the sink and do the dishes more easily.
I do not think he was trying to develop, you know, the slave in the room, but I do think that there's a lot of irony involved. I think he saw me struggling to do the dishes and was trying to help, but in essence, I think the wrong message got delivered. So, I honestly can't tell you whether I was handed the job that day or whether I took one look at my mom, overworked, overdone, overwrought, and simply knew.
But either way, I knew what to do: fix, anticipate, take care of everyone in sight. And it pays. It gives me purpose. It's a place. It's approval. Some kids collected stickers. I collected gold stars for being the okay-est child in the house. So let's tell the truth about fixing, because it isn't a flaw we stumbled into.
It's a deal, and the deal pays really well, which is exactly why we keep signing it in ink every morning before coffee. So first, fixing gives us somewhere to look that isn't inward. As long as I'm managing your weather, I never have to sit in mine. Does that just hit you like a ton of bricks?
There's an opening in my basement and I'm not applying, okay? Fixing is the most respectable hiding place I've ever found. Nobody ever staged an intervention for being too helpful. Second, it gives us worth. Being needed feels like proof we matter. If I'm the one holding it all together, there's a place for me at the table.
Granted, I'm usually standing at the table refilling glasses, but it's a place. And third, we're not just willing, we're gifted. So many of us are highly sensitive people. We read a room before the room knows it has a mood. Of course, the family handed us the job. We were the most qualified person in the building at five years old, and then we spent decades perfecting the craft.
Some people take up watercolors. We do this. Here's what the deal quietly costs. While all that care flows outward, nobody is home with us, including us. We tend every nervous system in the house except one. Guess whose? Now, this is the part that matters. There is nothing wrong with you. The fixing came from love, and very often it came from a little one, maybe one standing on a step stool, who learned that if everybody was okay, she was safe.
That wasn't a character flaw. That was a five-year-old genius doing security work. It kept you alive. Tonight, we're not going to fight her. We'll get curious, thank her, and see if she's ready to set something down. And this is me too, which is a funny confession because I'm a coach. Advice is literally the job description.
People pay me for it, and I still offer it when it's asked for. But here's what I've found. The minute I stop building someone's path and walk it with them instead, it gets stronger, realer. I ask the questions, they get curious, and suddenly they have skin in the game. It's their healing, and it lasts because they found it.
My best fix never once outperformed my company. So I wanna ask you, are you a fixer?
So a Magic member has someone she loves who calls with the same hard thing over and over, and every time, every cell in her body stands up and reports for duty. "Have you tried...?" "What if you just...?" Then she was offered one word, and I wanna credit this where it belongs because it's Patricia's, and it's brilliant.
"Bummer." That's it. That's the whole technology. "Oh, bummer. That's really hard." So she tried it. Next time the call came, she said, "That must have been so hard." And then she pressed her lips together, which was also one of the rules. She held the line with her own face, and the person on the other end went quiet and then said, "Yeah, it really was. Thank you."
Years of premium, artisanal, handcrafted advice outperformed by one word. Let's take that apart, because here's how I've put together why it worked. Fixing carries three loads that being-with never has to pick up.
The thinking load. When you fix, you're problem-solving a life you don't live in. You're drafting their text at midnight, rehearsing their conversation in your shower, researching symptoms for a body you don't even live in. It's the unpaid night shift, and you're working it with half the information, because they have the other half, the half that matters.
The responsibility load. The minute you hand someone a solution, you own how it turns out, and you can't control how it turns out, so you check in. Did you call the doctor yet? Relief if it works, guilt if it doesn't, and a quiet little resentment if they just don't do it. You're keeping score on a life you don't run. That tab never closes. It hums at two in the morning.
And then there's the friction load. You know this one from the other side. Think of the last time somebody handed you advice you didn't order. Something in you braced, didn't it? Even if they were right, especially if they were right. Researchers gave that a name back in the '60s: reactance. When we feel our freedom being taken, we push back. It's not ingratitude, it's wiring.
So flip it. When we're the fixer, that bracing is the wall we lean on all day. Yes, but. We push harder. They defend harder. We both hang up tired, and next week, same phone call. And here's the sneaky part. Sometimes they go quiet, and we think, "Nailed it." They didn't take the advice. They closed up shop.
Because underneath even the most loving advice, here's what people so often hear: "I don't like where you are. Your feeling is uncomfortable for me. I want you somewhere else. And lucky for you, I'm excellent, so I know exactly where you should be." We don't mean it that way. Advice is how most of us were taught to love. And let's be honest about the perk. Being the one with the answer feels wise, important, useful. There's the worth deal again, showing up mid-conversation in a little consultant's blazer.
Advice is not the villain. Asked-for advice, offered after someone feels heard, lands like a gift. What we're setting down is the reflex, the fix that rushes in before anyone's been heard. And the research on the other way is beautiful. Every name and every study is waiting in your deep dive, credited properly. Tonight, you just get the findings.
Researchers studying what happens in us when we're with someone who's suffering found there are two very different ways to do it. The first is empathic distress, taking their pain on as our own. And doesn't that one come naturally to us? We feel it, we absorb it, and we never once question whether there's another option. People trained to do more of that felt worse.
I just wanna say there's a bunch of people in here that are taking care of somebody right now, and I'm gonna talk about that in a little bit. But when you know that something that you have, an awareness that you have, could help them, you wanna do it. You wanna help them feel better, right? That's how we work. That's human nature. But that piece around empathic distress actually creates the pain that is inside of us — it's taking on their pain.
The second way is compassion. Warmth beside the pain without becoming it, and that one actually refilled people. Patricia uses the phrase sitting in the audience and watching the show. I like the expression of sitting in the stands and cheering on the game. Not being responsible for the end of the game, not being responsible for the outcome, but cheering on and loving the people that are there. That's compassion.
Warmth runs on a different fuel tank. That compassion creates warmth, and that tank refills itself. It's not burnout. It's warmth. That compassion creates the space that helps accompany people. People waiting for a mild shock — this is another study that they did — had far less alarm in their brains while holding the hand of someone they loved. Our brains are built expecting company. So when you're simply present, two nervous systems split the bill, and you pocket some of that settling too.
So it's not natural for some of us who have this high sensitivity, the empathy piece, to automatically go to this compassion and just walking with instead of trying to solve the problem. Decades of research on motivation say people change when the choice feels like their own. So here's the fixer's irony, and it's almost rude. All that effort — the midnight drafting, the pushing, the follow-up calls — gets outperformed by sitting still next to someone. Fixing buys less change and less closeness than company does. We've been overpaying for years.
So let me name what we've been circling. Fixing and accompanying start in the exact same place: caring. The care was never the problem. The care is the gift. But fixing turns caring into correcting. Let me move you somewhere else. Accompanying lets caring stay caring. I'm right here, wherever you are. You're not caring less, not one drop. You just get to retire the corrections department.
Okay, so I want to talk about why this is a Quiet Hour topic. I want you to think about your evening. If you have been spending a bit of time managing other people's weather, by the time the house goes quiet, everyone else is okay, and you're standing there, the last unattended nervous system in the building.
Most of us fixers cannot receive care to save our lives. Someone offers and we swat it away like a bee. "Oh, no, no, no, I'm fine. I'm fine." Ask for it? Oh, never. Apparently we don't have the paperwork for that. Why are we so uncomfortable with someone else's help? Especially when we're so eager to offer it ourselves. If being the helper is where my worth lives, then receiving help feels like being out of a job. Feels like I'm somehow not good enough. The little one on the step stool learned the giving side by heart. Nobody ever taught her the receiving side. So care coming toward us lands as unfamiliar, almost suspicious. So nobody fills us back up, and we don't let them.
So think about what you're doing when you don't ask for help. What are you creating there? Alarmed aloneness, right? I've been holding everyone, and no one is holding me. And guess what helps in all of this? Guess what does accompany us? Fast, every time. No asking required. No thank-you note. No conversation. No pushback. Food. It's always there. It's our solution.
So the fixing isn't next to the food pattern. Very often, it's paying for it.
A Magic member caring for someone through a hard stretch heard this on a recent call: "You have an awful lot of compassion for others. Can you put some in the bucket for you?" So many of you are caregivers right now. The physical care — the meals, the medications, the sitting up at night — is real, loving work, and it stays. What we're setting down is the vow that says I also have to fix how they feel. Do the care. Walk beside the feelings. Both and, not instead. The fascinating part is that's the better answer, to walk beside them instead of trying to fix them. We've seen it over and over and over again in The Magic.
Thanks for walking with me today. Everything I make lives at transformwithsonja.com. Until next time, with love and light, Sonja.
