I Have to Fix It — The Lie Trauma Taught You Control Equals Safety
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Photo Description: A calm, blue-toned graphic with ocean waves in motion. Centered text reads “I Have to Fix It: The Lie Trauma Taught You Control Equals Safety,” with the author’s name (Kandace Ledergerber) and credentials below. The imagery conveys movement, depth, and emotional intensity while maintaining a sense of containment.
Helping trauma survivors feel safe without carrying everything alone — right here in Phoenix.
If you’re someone who feels an almost reflexive urge to fix things (you know the one), to smooth tension, solve problems, anticipate needs, or step in before anything falls apart, you may not even realize how much weight you’re carrying.
If this is you, you might…
Notice distress before others do.
Jump into action when something feels off in the room or a relationship.
Feel uneasy when things are unresolved or uncertain.
And somewhere underneath all of that lives a quiet belief: If I don’t make this better, something bad is going to happen.
This post isn’t about telling you to “let go”, stop caring, or even take on less. It’s about understanding why your nervous system learned that control equals safety, and how trauma-informed EMDR therapy in Phoenix can help your body learn that it doesn’t have to stay on high alert to survive.
If you’re newer to EMDR therapy, you may want to start with EMDR Therapy Phoenix: A Trauma Therapist’s Complete Guide to Moving Forward and Hope, which explains how EMDR works and what trauma-informed care looks like in practice.
Fixing Is a Trauma Adaptive Strategy, Not a Control Issue
Please hear me when I say this - we are adaptive creatures, we have to in order to survive and maintain safety. This, in a nutshell, is what a trauma response is, an adaptive strategy we learned along the way of life in order to survive. That being said, people who learned to fix often grew up in environments where things felt unpredictable, emotionally chaotic, or unstable.
Maybe adults around you were overwhelmed, reactive, absent, or struggling in ways that made consistency feel less like a solid foundation and more like a glass house. Maybe problems were ignored until they exploded. Maybe no one stepped in, and so you learned how to do it yourself.
The nervous system learns quickly in those environments (because its focus is survival).
It learns that vigilance keeps me safe.
It learns that constant action reduces danger.
It learns that staying one step ahead feels safer than waiting for the storm.
Control doesn’t come from a desire to dominate. It comes from a need to stabilize. And over time, the body forms a belief: If I can manage this, I’ll be okay.
So you become the fixer.
You anticipate.
You organize.
You step in.
You hold it together.
You are the ultimate caretaker (perhaps from a very young age) in order to maintain stability and safety within your four walls.
Not because you wanted to necessarily, but because your system learned that someone had to.
When Fixing Becomes Exhausting (Hint: It Happens Quicker Than You Might Expect)
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Photo Description: A person lying on their side on a bed with their hand covering part of their face, glasses resting nearby. The image evokes emotional exhaustion, overwhelm, and the weight of carrying too much responsibility.
At first, fixing can feel empowering. You’re capable. Responsible. Reliable. Others may even depend on you. You finally feel like the ball is in your court and you control the outcome.
But over time, the cost becomes clearer.
You feel tense when things are unresolved.
You struggle to rest when something feels unfinished.
You feel responsible for outcomes that aren’t actually yours to carry.
And when something goes wrong (as things inevitably do) or when the reaction to resolve something before it becomes a problem takes your system into burnout, your body and mind can claim this as a personal failure, even when the situation was never in your control.
This isn’t perfectionism or anxiety for no reason or just because that is a part of your personality. It’s a nervous system that learned chaos was dangerous, and order meant relief, even if only temporary.
This is often what it looks like when a nervous system has been living in survival mode for too long, constantly scanning for what might go wrong and believing rest is only allowed once everything is “handled.” If this resonates with you,
From a trauma-informed lens, fixing isn’t the problem. The problem is that your nervous system never got the message that it’s allowed to stop, it’s allowed to exhale and not claim personal responsibility for everything and everyone in the room.
Why Control Feels Safer Than Uncertainty
From a nervous system-based perspective, uncertainty equals threat.
When the body has lived through unpredictable environments, waiting can feel unbearable. Action creates the illusion of safety and control because it restores a sense of agency. This makes sense and allows us to feel like we have ownership in what is happening.
This is why being told to “just let it be” or “stop trying to control things” or “don’t worry” often feels dismissive, unsafe, and even unsettling.
Your system isn’t trying to control outcomes - It’s trying to prevent harm that feels like a threat to survival and safety.
Until safety is felt in the body, control remains one of the most reliable tools the nervous system has.
A Nervous-System Lens on the Fixer Role
When trauma is present, the nervous system stays oriented toward threat prevention. The fixer role often shows up as:
• Hyper-responsibility for others’ emotions or outcomes
• Difficulty tolerating uncertainty or waiting
• A sense of urgency around problem-solving
• Guilt or anxiety when resting
• Feeling on edge when things are out of order
These responses don’t mean you’re controlling or rigid. They reflect a system that learned that staying active reduced risk and increased the potential for safety in the environment.
This is why rest can feel SO uncomfortable and almost make the fixer want to crawl out of their skin. Stillness removes the sense of control the nervous system once relied on.
That’s why healing and moving forward aren’t about forcing relaxation. It’s about teaching the body that safety doesn’t require constant management.
How EMDR Therapy Helps the Body Release the Need to Fix
EMDR therapy works with the nervous system rather than against it and takes that knee-jerk reaction to fix as a strategy that it has needed to feel safe.
Instead of challenging the belief “I have to fix this” cognitively, EMDR helps identify and reprocess the experiences that taught the body that control was necessary for survival.
In trauma-informed EMDR therapy, fixing is never framed as resistance. It’s understood as a protective strategy that once worked.
Through bilateral stimulation and a carefully paced process, EMDR allows the nervous system to complete responses that were interrupted by chaos, fear, or responsibility placed too early on a child.
As these memories resolve, many clients notice shifts like:
• Less urgency around problem-solving
• Greater bandwidth for uncertainty
• Less guilt when resting
• A growing sense that outcomes don’t equal worth and value
For many fixers, the urge to step in isn’t about control — it’s about a nervous system that never learned it was safe to pause, something I explore more deeply in why stillness can feel more threatening than action after trauma.
This Post Is Part of a Larger Series
This post is part of my Unlearning the Lies Trauma Taught You series, which explores the survival roles and beliefs that form in unsafe or emotionally limited environments.
You may want to start with The Lies Trauma Taught You: How Survival Roles Shape the Way We Show Up in the World, or continue with I Have to Keep Everyone Happy — The Lie Trauma Taught You Love Is Earned, which looks at how people-pleasing develops as a trauma response, or read I’m Too Much — The Lie Trauma Taught You to Shrink to Stay Loved, which explores how emotional self-silencing develops as protection.
Each post is designed to help you understand these patterns without shame — and to gently create space for something new (which you deserve).
EMDR Therapy in Phoenix for Trauma Survivors Who Learned to Fix
Working with an EMDR therapist in Phoenix who understands fixing as a survival response matters.
In trauma-informed EMDR therapy, the goal is not to take away competence, responsibility, or the survival mechanisms that kept safety alive. It’s to help your nervous system realize that it no longer has to carry everything alone.
Sessions begin with regulation and safety. There is no pressure to revisit memories before your system is ready. EMDR should never be self-guided and is always facilitated by a trained, licensed professional.
If the idea of beginning to trust that safety doesn’t depend on constant effort feels exciting (and yes, maybe a still a little anxiety-provoking), EMDR Therapy in Phoenix may be a supportive next step.
About the Author
Photo Description: Kandace Ledergerber, a trauma therapist in Phoenix, smiling while seated among sunflowers. The image conveys warmth, grounded presence, and emotional safety.
Kandace Ledergerber, LPC/LMHC, is a certified EMDR therapist offering EMDR therapy in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona, as well as virtual EMDR therapy for clients in Florida. She works with adults healing from trauma, attachment wounds, anxiety, and long-standing survival patterns such as fixing, caretaking, overthinking, and emotional self-suppression.
Kandace specializes in trauma-informed EMDR therapy and EMDR Intensives, helping clients move out of survival mode and into greater nervous system safety, self-trust, and balance.
TL;DR
The urge to fix isn’t a flaw; it’s a trauma-adaptive strategy shaped by environments where stability wasn’t guaranteed.
Control once helped you feel safe.
Safety doesn’t have to depend on constant effort.
EMDR therapy in Phoenix helps the nervous system release old survival patterns so rest, uncertainty, and trust no longer feel dangerous.
