Why Do We Feel the Need to Fix People?

How quickly we forget we are all connected

There is no denying that we, in what is considered the “developed” world, are a culture of overconsumption, materialism and convenience, with an acute affinity for “othering” and a hyper-focus on fixing people.

When people don’t line up with the binary that we hold for ourselves, we start to “other” them or we attempt to “fix” them because we see them as defective. Arguably, at times, this want to fix comes from a compassionate place. But the crux of the matter is, as author Laura McKowen puts it, “we pretend to know what other people should do.”

Here’s my thing, as an oddity in the society I grew up in, I often fell into the category of needing to be fixed across several scopes. Mainly, I was, and am, a deep feeling individual with a penchant for the whimsical and programmed with a default setting of depression. Thankfully, my perceived societal flaws could be tucked away or, in my teenage years, become buried by drugs and alcohol. It should go without saying, but these less than societally endearing qualities are a privilege as they can be relatively hidden to fit in. To survive those formative years, as it were. And it wasn’t until recently that I was able to shine my own light into that darkness to uncover what I had buried. But that is a topic for another day.

Read the full article on Elephant Journal.