The Day I Stopped Trying to 'Fix' My Clients

Fixing doesn't usually look like fixing. It looks like helpfulness. It looks like caring whether your session produced a result. It looks like wanting good things for someone. On paper, these are all the qualities you'd want in a practitioner. The problem is that underneath them, there's often a quiet urgency - a need for something to happen - that the client feels.

And when the client feels it, something subtle shifts in them. They start performing for the practitioner, even unconsciously. They reach for insights. They produce imagery. They manufacture the shifts they sense are wanted. The session looks good from the outside but has a faintly hollow quality that both parties pretend not to notice.

I had to notice this in myself first. That was the hardest part.

I don't think I got into this work because I wanted to fix people exactly. I think I got into it because I wanted them to feel less alone, and because I knew what it was like to carry something heavy and unseen. Those are good reasons. But somewhere they'd gotten tangled up with an older pattern of mine - the pattern of being the helpful one, the capable one, the one who made other people feel better.

Which is, as it happens, one of the patterns I wrote about recently. I was holding my own protective strategy while trying to dissolve my clients'. That's not an unusual position for a therapist. It just needed to be seen for what it was.

When I slowly let go of the fixing impulse, a few things happened. Sessions got quieter. I stopped asking so many questions. I stopped trying to steer clients toward 'useful' territory. I started trusting that whatever came up was the right thing to come up, even when it looked like nothing.

The paradox is that sessions got more useful, not less. Clients landed deeper. Insights arrived that I couldn't have engineered. The work became less mine and more theirs - which is what it was always supposed to be. I think this is the single biggest thing I've learned, and I'm still learning it.

You don't need to perform for a regression session. You don't need to produce dramatic imagery or clear insights to make the hour 'worth it'. You don't need to arrive with your story already figured out. The less you try, the more room there is for something honest to show up.

If a practitioner you're working with subtly makes you feel like you're not producing enough - trust that feeling. It's not your job to fix yourself for them. Good regression work holds the space and trusts that what needs to arrive will arrive. These sessions are a complementary wellness practice, not medical or psychological treatment. A free consultation is the best way to see whether the way I hold sessions feels right for you.