Really nobody else can fix you but yourself.
I’m Olivia S. Benson, and yes, I do have to use the S, because if not, you will find Mariska Hargitay instead of Olivia S. Benson. And also, you could run into Taylor Swift’s cat. So please make sure when you’re looking for me that you put the S in it.
If it’s not your first time, you know that we’re currently discussing my book, For the Love of My Father: A Spiritual Guide for Women Healing from the Absence of a Father in the Age of Spiritual Evolution.
Some of you may know that on my Facebook page, which is Author Olivia S. Benson, and on my Instagram page, I post quotes from the book on a practically daily basis. I think the only time that we don’t post is on the weekend. But we post directly from the book, and the quotes also say what page in the book it comes from. So if you find a quote interesting, you can always go to a specific page in the book and find the entire discussion around it.
Fixing Us Is Not Their Job
This week, we had one particular one that seems to have struck people, interestingly enough. I’m not sure why, but it seems to have struck a lot of people, or touched a lot of people, I think is a better word. Touched a lot of people. And it says, fixing us is not their job and they just can’t do it.
Now that comes from For the Love of My Father, page 108. And by the way, in case I haven’t said it before, it’s available on Amazon, and it’s from page 108. And as you know, the continuing discussion is in chapter 7, and the title of chapter 7 is Getting Ready to Love Another.
Basically, the entire chapter talks about my experience in terms of the work, the healing work that was necessary for me to be really healed and prepared in the best way possible for a healthy, intimate relationship. And so the things that come out of the chapter address just that. And this particular quote, fixing us is not their job and they just can’t do it, is a very important one, because it has a lot of information in it.
It’s not just that they can’t fix us because it’s our responsibility, or it’s not their responsibility. In my experience, it is that really nobody else can fix you but yourself. And there are a couple of things that are important with that.
First of all, in this book, we’re talking about issues that arose, or things that we experienced or that some people experience, as a result of having an absent father or having a bad relationship with their father. So this is the context in which we’re having this discussion when we say fixing us is not their job and they just can’t do it. So let’s presume, for purposes of a discussion, that whatever your traumas are present in your life, in your mind, in your body, they’re yours.
You Would Still Have to Do the Work
And there’s a point in the book where I say that even if your father was alive, and if he was willing to ask for forgiveness, redemption, or work his way into your life, he would still not be able to heal you. You would still have to do the work that would be required for you to feel better. Your dad, your father, your daddy could come into your life. He could apologize, and that would make you feel better.
But if you have anger, resentment, bitterness, or any of the emotions that usually happen or accumulate as a result of different difficult experiences with your father, you are the only one that can sit down with yourself, work with yourself, work on yourself, and then get yourself to the point where you release those emotions. Don’t get me wrong — if your father was willing to ask for forgiveness and just trying to work on doing different things to make it better because he was absent in your life, it could help you and it could help your healing process. It would move you along. But the bottom line is that you still have to do the work.
Now, specifically with regards to this quote, we’re talking about somebody else other than your dad. Fixing us is not their job. So, as a woman who grew up without their father, or had a difficult relationship with their father, or had no relationship with their father, we are specifically now talking about another person who comes into a relationship with you, and for some reason, whether because you don’t realize it or for whatever other reason, now all of a sudden you are expecting, either consciously or subconsciously, you’re expecting this person to really sort of fix you, to get you right, to make everything right. And this is simply not possible.
The Only Person That Has the Power to Do That Is You
First of all, it’s not their responsibility. If we were trying to give out responsibility, it would certainly be your father’s and secondarily yours — or I would say that in reverse, primarily yours and secondarily your father’s. Because you cannot depend on your father. Even if he was offensive, even if he was a bad dad, even if he was absolutely absent, you certainly could not stake your life or the trajectory of your life or your happiness on whether your father showed up and made things right.
The only person that absolutely has the power to do that is you, regardless of whether he shows up or not. For many people, this father has already passed on, and the fact that he is no longer here doesn’t make it impossible for you to heal yourself, because you have the ability to do that. You have the ability — and when I say you have the ability, I’m not talking about, as I say often, I’m not talking about a magic wand. I’m talking about you getting to understand who you are, getting to understand yourself spiritually, and being able to use forgiveness and other spiritual tools to really be able to heal yourself.
So aside from whether your father is around and able to do anything to help you in your process, what we are talking about in this post is us coming into relationships and either not being aware, or having expectations — not being aware that we have expectations — that somebody else, some male, because that’s what we’re talking about in this particular case, heterosexual relationships, that some male is going to come into your life and fix you and fix everything.
That is not a possibility. And not because people haven’t tried, because obviously people come into your life, and for the most part — I don’t want to generalize, but most human beings are just at the core just really sweet and kind and generous. A lot of us have outer shells that we put on, but there’s a lot of gooey stuff in the middle. And somebody would come into your life and say, wow, what an amazing person you are, and really want to work to fix you. But that, generally speaking, does not work.
It’s Like Reading a Book
I think that most of us would agree with that, that just nobody can come in and do it for you. You first of all have to want to do it, then you have to do the work itself, and then you have to live that life. It’s like reading a book. You can read the book, but then there is the practice.
And the interesting thing about it is that the practice means just that. It’s not just you read the book and you got the information and so on and so on, but there is a repetition of the practice. It has to happen on a repeated basis before you assimilate it, before it becomes yours.
We Are the Center for Ourselves
So the idea that you’re going to expect somebody else to come into your life and fix your life, or fix you, or anything that has to do with your relationship with your father, is just really an impossibility. Because like everything in life, we are the center for ourselves. I like to say often, and I said it — it’s in the book — we have our first person is us. We have a relationship with ourselves, and we have a responsibility to work on ourselves and do things that need to be done to make us better.
If you have expectations that someone is going to come out of the sky and just make you right, that is really unreasonable. It’s really unrealistic. And many times I know for myself, especially when you’re not aware, that maybe I had times where I expected something from a male in a relationship, a man that I was in relationship with, that was really based on a lacking in myself. Because if I was whole and complete and aware and understood the issues that were present in my life, maybe I wouldn’t have expected certain things in certain ways.
We Have to Know That Something Is Off
So I can understand why this particular quote, fixing us is not their job and they just can’t do it, seems to have struck chords with a lot of different people. Because we really have to be aware of it, and also the important thing with that is that the idea of fixing us includes the fact that we have to know that something is off, something is out of balance — and just getting to that awareness in and of itself.
If you’ve had daddy issues, if your father was absent, if you consider yourself fatherless, if you had a bad relationship with your dad, it’s a whole thing to realize that this has had a significant impact in your life, and that it is very likely, unless you heal it, to impact your relationship and what your expectations are in a relationship.
I think I said this a few videos back: if you have negative experiences with your dad and you subconsciously are projecting that onto other guys, how could you ever expect to have a good relationship with someone, with a man? How could you expect to have a good relationship if in the back of your head you’re always thinking, consciously or subconsciously, the way you thought about your father, particularly if it’s unhealed?
So, if you haven’t seen the quote, or you haven’t been to my Facebook page and seen all the quotes from the book that I’ve used, my Facebook page is Author Olivia S. Benson and the quotes are there. The Instagram is under Olivia S. Benson as well, and also I make the post on Twitter on a daily basis. My website is OliviaSBenson.com, and the book is For the Love of My Father, and it’s available on Amazon. Check out the website again, because we have not only other things that I have written, but we have cups and t-shirts and things along those lines.
And I hope that this quote, fixing us is not their job and they just can’t do it, leads you to thinking about what it is that needs to be fixed and how you can work on yourself, your first person.