“Why Trying to Fix People Is Destroying You: The Cost of Being the Healer in Toxic Relationships”

How trauma bonding, overfunctioning, and emotional labor disguise themselves as love

Introduction

Have you ever stayed in a relationship long after it stopped being healthy—because you saw their potential?

Because you believed your love could be the medicine?

This isn’t just love. It’s trauma reenactment.

You may be trying to heal someone who reminds you of the person who once broke you.

And in the process, you’re breaking yourself.

What Happens When You’re Always the “Healer”?

Being the emotional caretaker might feel natural, but it comes at a devastating cost.

Dr. Nicole LePera, author of How to Do the Work (2021), notes that many of us unconsciously replicate family dynamics in our romantic lives. We become addicted to chaos because it feels familiar. We think love means fixing, tolerating, or enduring.

This “emotional overfunctioning” shows up as:

• Apologizing first—every time

• Suppressing your own needs to keep peace

• Feeling responsible for their moods

• Giving second, third, and tenth chances

It’s not empathy.

It’s self-abandonment.

Why You Can’t Save Them (And Why That’s Okay)

Psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner, in The Dance of Intimacy (1989), explains that change happens in relationships when we shift our part of the pattern, not when we try to force others to evolve.

Here’s the truth:

If someone benefits from not changing, they won’t.

And if your presence makes it easy for them to avoid growth, love becomes enablement.

This is especially true in trauma bonds—where emotional highs and lows create addictive patterns of relief and despair (Carnes, 1991).

How This Dynamic Damages You

Staying in a role that constantly asks you to carry the emotional weight of the relationship can lead to:

• Emotional exhaustion

• Anxiety masked as hyper-independence

• Low self-worth (“Why can’t I be loved the way I love?”)

• Psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, fatigue, gut issues)

Dr. Gabor Maté’s research (When the Body Says No, 2003) links chronic people-pleasing to suppressed anger and stress-related illness.

When you constantly minimize your pain, your body will start speaking for you.

Letting Go: From Fantasy to Freedom

You’re not letting go of them.

You’re letting go of the fantasy version of who you thought they’d become—if you just loved them harder.

Letting go isn’t failure. It’s recovery.

From the illusion that love means pain.

From the belief that healing others is your job.

How to Start Healing from the Fixer Role

1.

Acknowledge the Wound

Ask yourself: Where did I first learn that love requires proving or earning?

This often goes back to childhood dynamics with emotionally unavailable, critical, or enmeshed caregivers.

2.

Detach from the Outcome

Their growth is not your responsibility.

Your job is to model healing, not force it.

3.

Learn Regulated Love

At first, peace might feel boring. Stability might feel suspicious.

That’s not intuition—it’s an unhealed nervous system.

Therapy, EMDR, IFS, or trauma-informed coaching can help rewire this.

4.

Reconnect with Self

You’ve spent so long managing their emotions—do you even know what you want anymore?

Start small: solo activities, hobbies, journaling, silence.

Final Words

It’s not your job to carry someone through the healing they keep refusing.

It’s not noble to keep hurting yourself to avoid hurting them.

And it’s not weakness to say: I’m done trying to fix what isn’t mine to fix.

You deserve relationships where you don’t have to become less in order to be loved more.

References

• LePera, N. (2021). How to Do the Work. Harper Wave.

• Lerner, H. (1989). The Dance of Intimacy. Harper & Row.

• Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No. Vintage Canada.

• Carnes, P. (1991). Don’t Call It Love: Recovery From Sexual Addiction. Bantam.