The impulse behind fixing is beautiful. You see someone struggling, and something inside you reaches for the solution. That is part of why you chose this work in the first place.
In a session, though, that same instinct can quietly pull you out of listening and into solving. And the moment you start solving, you stop being curious about the specific person in front of you.
This is the most common mistake I see practitioners make. Not a lack of skill. Not a lack of care. The opposite of those things, actually. It’s the helping instinct, running ahead of the listening discipline.
What Fixing Actually Is
Fixing is what happens when you stop asking questions and start giving answers. When you jump in with “here’s what I think you should do” or “I’ve seen this before, here’s what worked,” before you have learned who is actually in front of you.
At its core, fixing is an attempt to control the direction of the session. Curiosity lets it unfold.
When you move into fixing, you teach the client to look to you instead of themselves. Over time, that weakens the exact thing this work is meant to strengthen. Your client is their own best resource. They are the one living inside their experience, with their own history and the quiet logic that has been running underneath their behavior. Your job is not to hand them your solutions. It is to help them access their own.
The Riskier Version: Categorizing and Diagnosing
There is a particularly risky version of fixing that shows up as labeling. A client describes anxiety, and you mentally file them under anxiety. Or worse, especially if you are not a therapist, you begin naming what they have. The label arrives before the context does. Once the label is there, you stop exploring.
The danger isn’t that the label is wrong. Sometimes it’s accurate. The danger is that the label closes the door on what the client was about to tell you next. The client’s own words carry meaning their subconscious has built around the experience. A clinical label, however accurate, replaces those words with yours.
What You Miss When You Fix
A client comes in describing a pattern of shutting down in conflict with her partner. She starts to describe what happens in her body when the argument escalates, and you can see she is touching something real. Her voice slows. Her eyes drop. But you already recognize the pattern, so you say, “It sounds like you go into a freeze response. That is your nervous system protecting you.”
The language might be accurate. But you assumed the reason was protection without ever asking. She might experience the shutdown as shame, or as disappearing, or as defeat. You skipped the context and jumped to the interpretation.
And she was about to tell you something she had never said out loud. Now she is nodding along with your explanation instead. You named what was happening before she had the chance to say it in her own words. Once you name it, most clients will follow you, even if it is not fully true for them.
Maybe she was going to say, “I feel like I go somewhere else and I don’t know how to get back.” Or “It’s like I become a little girl again.” Those sentences are not the same as “freeze response.” They are not a category, they are hers. They carry the exact meaning her subconscious has built around what happens in those moments. “Freeze response” is a label that sounds right. Her own words are the material that would have made the rest of the session actually land.
Two Questions That Catch You in the Moment
If you want to catch yourself when you slip into fixing, two quick questions can help.
Did I just answer instead of ask?
Did I just name something they had not said yet?
Either one can pull you out of fixing and back into curiosity.
Pauses, “I Don’t Know,” and the Rhythm of Real Work
Emotional experience has its own rhythm. It includes pauses, confusion, moments of searching, and moments where the client says, “I don’t know.” Those moments are transitions, not dead ends. The client is feeling something before they can name it, or knowing something without language for it yet.
I was working with a client who came in for help with emotional eating. I asked what happened right before the urge hit, and she paused for a long time. My instinct was to rephrase the question, offer an example, give her something to work with. Instead, I waited. After about fifteen seconds, which felt much longer, she said quietly, “I think I eat so I do not have to feel how alone I am.”
That sentence changed the entire session. If I had filled that pause with another question or a helpful reframe, she might never have gotten there.
This is why rushed sessions can feel active but shallow. A lot happens, but little settles. When time is allowed, especially past the point of mild discomfort, the client often arrives at what they need on their own.
What to Do Instead of Fixing
The alternative is curiosity. Staying in the question long enough to find the context. Asking empowering questions that help the client discover what they already know.
The most useful questions in this work share a few qualities.
They are open, not leading. “What is that like for you?” rather than “Is that the anxiety I hear?”
They point to experience, not explanation. “What does your body do when you think about that?” rather than “Why do you think you do that?”
They invite the client to stay, not escape. “What would it feel like to stay with that for a moment longer?” rather than “Let’s move to something easier.”
They trust the client’s own language. If a client says, “I feel like I am drowning,” you ask about the drowning. You do not translate it into “anxiety” or “overwhelm.”
When questions land well, the client often goes quiet. They are searching inward. The pause you hear is not a gap. It is the work happening. Your job is to stay with it.
The Takeaway
Change does not come from finding the solution. It comes from giving the client enough space to understand themselves.
This is one of the foundational shifts I write about in Advanced Hypnosis by Alexandra Janelli, available now on Amazon. The book covers what most certification programs leave open: how to use hypnosis once the basics are in place. Get it here.
