When Fixing Things Breaks Everything
Why Fixing Feels Like Love, And Why It Pushes People Away
“There’s evidence everywhere in our lives that the way you’re thinking is completely fucked. And here you are again, overreacting for the five thousandth time. If you had any fucking sense, here’s how you’d look at this…”
I’d just stood there and listened to a thirty-minute, rage-filled monologue from my wife about how leaving the toilet seat up proved I had no respect for her as a woman. How could I call myself a father to daughters if I so clearly hated women?
This time it was the toilet seat. But with bipolar hijacking her mind and body, there was always something that justified her total dysregulation.
And objectively, she had left a trail of wreckage behind her. She’d spent us to the edge of bankruptcy more than once. There were infidelities. Rehab. Locked psych wards. Homeless shelters. It was like being one of those guests on Oprah where people watching think, “That could never happen to me.”
No one could fix her and she couldn’t fix herself. She’d seen every professional, tried every program, and swallowed every pill they pushed. Things only got worse.
I saw myself as the last line of defense. If no one else could help her, maybe I could reason her into sanity. Maybe if I just explained it clearly enough, logically enough, forcefully enough, I could change the way she thought.
The irony? I couldn’t even apply logic to myself.
I kept trying the same strategy over and over, even though it never worked. In fact, it made everything worse. I blamed her for the fact that I couldn’t get through to her. It never occurred to me that I was part of the problem.
Blaming her only made her feel more alone, increased my frustration and made me angrier. In the end, I stopped being able to see her as anything other than a crazy person who was wrecking our lives. And that guaranteed that I’d try the same thing the next time she got upset.
Why Men Reach for Tools
When someone we love is in pain, we see a neon sign screaming “Problem to Be Solved!” You see her crying and you feel intense pressure to do something to make it better. Your reaction isn’t random.
When we see someone we love in distress, our own stress response kicks in. It’s a survival strategy that takes over before we realize what’s happening.
We become less tolerant of uncertainty and more focused on control. Action lowers anxiety faster than uncertainty does. Doing something feels better than standing there helpless. Helpless feels pathetic and dangerous.
Men know the best defense is a good offense. So we reach into our Man Toolbox and get to work.
We provide detailed and completely unwanted analysis of the situation to help the other person “think more clearly.”
We correct their thinking because we think logic trumps emotion. Logic is black and white and male, while emotions are messy and female. The holes in their reasoning are obvious to us, so we “helpfully” point them out.
Often the solution seems right there in plain sight. If they’re too upset or irrational to see it, someone has to point it out. And that’s what they came to you for anyway, right?
There’s also a cultural layer most men don’t understand. From a young age, men are trained toward the kind of support that fixes, protects, and handles things. We’re taught to do something concrete to improve a bad situation. Being useful and competent is one of the highest expressions of manhood.
Anyone who is a man, or loves a man, knows we’re not great at dealing with tough feelings, whether they’re ours or someone else’s. When they show up, we don’t have much practice, and it can feel intolerably uncomfortable.
It’s so common, smart people have come up with a term for it: normative male alexithymia. It basically means men aren’t great at identifying and putting words to what we feel. You can forget the term now, if you haven’t already.
It doesn’t mean we’re defective. It means no one showed us how.
So when someone we love is angry, sad, or grieving, we reach for the tools we were given, whether they work or not (they usually don’t).
Logic
Solutions
Perspective
Timeframes
Plans
You can call it helping. But stop for a second and ask yourself: who is this really helping? Fixing often calms you down faster than it helps them. It lowers your anxiety. It gives you back a sense of control. It protects you from feeling helpless. It doesn’t do much for the other person except make them more upset.
The person in pain doesn’t need you to fix yourself by fixing them. They want to feel seen, understood, and safe. No screwdriver is going to do that.
This isn’t about men being cold or heartless. It’s about doing something feeling a hell of a lot safer than standing there not having a clue what to say or do.
Why Fixing Feels Like Love
If competence and usefulness feel like manhood, helplessness feels like failure. It challenges our identity as protectors and providers.
We tell ourselves that if we can solve it, we’re not powerless. If we’re not powerless, we can still be useful. And if we’re useful, we still matter. We’re not just talking about anxiety anymore. We’re talking about our sense of self-worth.
But it goes deeper than that. When someone you love is hurting and you do nothing, it can feel like you’re abandoning them. Doing something feels like fighting for them. And that’s what a loyal protector does.
Hard emotions are brutal because they can’t be solved. They can’t be argued into submission. You can’t negotiate them away for someone else. You can’t reason someone out of experiencing them.
When you’ve tried everything you know how to do and none of it works, it feels like you failed them. Fixing feels like love because you’re confusing action and effort with devotion.
Sometimes fixing isn’t about easing their pain. It’s about escaping yours.
What Fixing Actually Sounds Like
It rarely sounds cruel, although it certainly can. It sounds reasonable to you. It sounds like offering something practical they can do right now. It sounds like a guy who’s just trying to help. At least, that’s what you tell yourself it sounds like.
Read through this list:
“At least they aren’t suffering anymore.”
“They wouldn’t want you to live like this.”
“Staying angry won’t bring him back.”
“You have to move forward.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Just focus on what you can control.”
“Look on the bright side.”
“You’re overthinking it.”
“You’re taking it too personally.”
“Don’t let it ruin your day.”
“Calm down.”
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“You’re being irrational.”
“Crying about it for another half an hour won’t solve anything.”
“You need to be strong.”
“Other people have it worse.”
“You’ll laugh about this someday.”
“Other people have figured this out before. You can too.”
“Can we not do this right now?”
“They’ve always acted like this. How can you still get upset when they do it again?”
“You’re hard to be around when you’re like this.”
“Why don’t you just [insert unwanted advice here].”
“If you won’t go talk to them, I will.”
“So let me get this straight. You tried the same thing that didn’t work the first time. And you’re upset it didn’t work again? What did you think was going to happen?”
Be honest. How many of these have you said? How many have been said to you?
Drop the number in the comments.
While you’re at it, drop another number in the comments. What percentage of the time did it make the other person more upset?
Now read that list again. Not as the person who said it. Read it as the person who heard it.
The way you’re thinking and feeling about this is wrong.
I want this to be over with so we can get back to normal.
You’re being unreasonable or irrational.
You’re a failure for not being able to sort this out yourself.
I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.
Fix it so I don’t have to deal with you.
Make this less uncomfortable for me.
Is it any wonder they get more upset?
It doesn’t matter that you’re not trying to judge or dismiss them. It doesn’t matter that you’re trying to restore order to something that feels chaotic.
When someone is upset, they don’t need order. They need to know you’re actually trying to understand them.
When you jump straight into fix-it mode, it doesn’t land as support. It lands as correction. And correction feels like rejection. Rejection always hurts.
It doesn’t matter if you mean well. Good intentions don’t erase the impact of what you’re saying and doing. They just make it harder for you to see the damage while it’s happening.
When Fixing Breaks the Relationship
At first, it just feels situational. You’re trying to help. They’re not responding the way you expected, so you double down on the only thing you know how to do. They shut down, you agree to disagree, and you both move on with your lives.
Then it happens again. And again. And again. Before long, something starts to change. They stop feeling safe and supported and start feeling managed and corrected. They begin to feel like a problem you’re trying to solve instead of a person you’re trying to understand.
So they stop talking. Not because they’re done feeling, but because they’re done explaining themselves to someone who doesn’t seem willing to hear them. They decide it’s easier to keep it to themselves than to keep defending themselves.
Meanwhile, you’re left feeling unappreciated and confused. You start to feel rejected, like nothing you do is good enough. You’re doing everything you can to help, and somehow you’ve become the bad guy. What the hell happened?
This is where resentment takes root. You resent them for rejecting your effort. They resent you for rejecting their experience. Neither of you set out to hurt the other, and yet you both end up hurt.
Over time, vulnerability starts to feel unsafe. You’re both worried about getting burned again, and neither of you wants to go first. Instead of talking about what actually matters, you talk about tasks and logistics. The relationship still functions, but something vital is gone. What used to feel alive now feels like a model of efficiency and emptiness.
All because fixing felt like love, and doing nothing felt like failure.
That’s exactly what happened to Cindy and me. Her mental health made everything more volatile, but her experience was as real to her as mine was to me.
We stopped being able to talk. Any strong emotion turned into a fight. Every issue exploded into conflict. I was trying to win and she was trying to survive. We both felt misunderstood and attacked.
The two young people who once couldn’t get enough of each other became enemies living under the same roof.
This Was Never About Logic
Hard emotions don’t need to be corrected. They need someone who is willing to try to understand without shutting them down.
Pain will never calm down because you argue with it. It doesn’t magically disappear because you expertly explain why it doesn’t make sense. Pointing out the holes in someone’s experience won’t make them hurt less.
What makes it easier is realizing that you’re not responsible for making it easier in the first place. And all it takes is you having the strength to sit on your hands and listen.
Fixing is about taking control of the situation. Support is about letting go of control so you can love them how they need to be loved in the moment.
The first is about you trying to make yourself feel better and the second is about loving them. They aren’t even close to the same thing.
What To Do Instead
If you want to try something different, it’s not complicated. It sure as hell isn’t easy. In fact, it can be unbelievably hard, especially when they’re upset with you.
Don’t correct their emotions. Don’t offer a solution unless they ask for one. Stay in the conversation longer than you want to, and as long as they need you to.
When you feel the urge to explain, defend, or fix, just stop.
You need a pattern interrupt. It’s something you say to yourself that keeps you from reacting on autopilot. It creates a little space between what just happened and what you’re about to do.
The one I use is simple:
Being effective is better than being right.
Being effective means actually getting the outcome you want. In moments like this, the outcome isn’t winning the argument. It isn’t solving the specific problem. It’s strengthening the relationship.
If I focus on being right, I’ll do all the things we’ve just talked about: correct, argue, explain, fix. And it will almost always make it worse.
The second thing you can do is simple. Say, “That sounds really hard.”
And then shut the fuck up.
It will feel like you’re doing nothing. You’re not. Sticking around when you can’t control the outcome takes more strength than winning the argument ever did.
This isn’t about men being broken, cold, or mean-spirited. It’s about us using the only playbook we were handed. We were taught that fixing things is strength, and sometimes it is.
It’s just not the right strength here.
The real courage is standing in the pocket when you can’t fix it. It’s choosing connection over being right. It’s choosing to listen and understand instead of trying to solve.
It’s the most important relationship skill that we were never taught.
If you’ve made it this far, you don’t get to pretend you don’t know.
If this hit home, I’m running a live workshop on February 28, where we’ll go deeper and actually practice what this looks like in real conversations — especially when emotions are high and your instinct is to fix the problem.
We’ll walk through real scenarios, and learn a simple model that will help you show up better in every emotionally charged situation you face.
If you want to stop repeating this pattern, the details are below:
When Good Intentions Turn Into Fights
February 28 from 1-2:30 PM EST.
I have people in my life who are fucking brilliant at sorting things, fixing things, taking chaos to order and so badly need to read this Jason. Myself too sometimes. Its a hard learning when soneone is in the pit that they need us to sit in the pit with them first, even though we think we see the rope ladder. Thank you.
"When someone is upset, they don’t need order. They need to know you’re actually trying to understand them"....
Full stop.
Teach men this ONE fact... change the world.
Helping them learn to recognize and deal with their own emotions... ... 🫨