Don’t Just Do Something — Stand There
Last month, I wrote about grief as compost — the slow, living process that transforms loss into insight, growth, and renewed vitality. Grief asks us to pause, to slow down, and to feel fully what life has asked of us — to honour our interior landscape before trying to tidy or fix it. It is not about resolution so much as belonging — to ourselves, to our experiences, and to what is true.
I want to extend that reflection into the relational realm — into what happens when connection ruptures, when we feel a rift with another, and when discomfort arises in response to guilt, confusion, or sorrow. Like grief, relational rupture is fertile. It offers invitations to presence, attunement, and repair. And yet, more often than not, we respond habitually — rushing, fixing, rescuing — attempting to erase pain rather than stay with it.
Just as grief calls us inward, rupture calls for intelligent, careful response. It asks whether we can tolerate discomfort long enough to notice what is happening — both in ourselves and in the other — before we act. Whether confusion, shame, or sorrow can be allowed to exist as part of the relational dialogue, rather than being smoothed over with hurried solutions or moral certainties.
When we cannot, we reach for fixing. And this is where trouble begins.
Most of us were raised inside a culture organised around solutionism. If there’s a problem, solve it. If someone is hurting, offer an answer. If there’s silence, fill it. If sorrow emerges, tidy it away. This seems harmless enough — helpful, even. But solutionism subtly reinforces a deeper belief: there is a problem here, and if there’s a problem, someone is failing.
The nervous system reads problems as threats. The body mobilises — fight, flee, brace, rush. In that state, we lose access to curiosity, empathy, and complexity. Over time, this creates a landscape of vigilance, poor sleep, relational fragility, and the quiet hum of mental ill-health. Fixing becomes less about supporting the person in front of us and more about managing our own discomfort.
In relationships, fixing is not neutral — it carries weight and power. When we step in with answers, instructions, or “shoulds,” we inadvertently position ourselves above the other. Fixing often infantilises. It says: I know better. You need guidance. Your pain is too much, too messy, too inefficient. Complexity collapses into moral binaries — right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy, strong or weak. Our role becomes inflated. We become the one who can save, soothe, steer, or correct.
It can feel righteous. Important. But importance is not intimacy.
As J. Krishnamurti observed, action without understanding relationship inevitably generates conflict. Fixing is precisely this kind of action — movement without attunement. Relationship, by contrast, requires patience. Time. Slowness. Spaciousness. The courage to stay with what is happening before deciding what should happen. In this way, rushing becomes a subtle form of violence — collapsing the space between two people so quickly that neither can breathe.
Rescuing is fixing with urgency. It carries a quiet panic — I must intervene now. Often, this urgency has little to do with the other person’s wellbeing and everything to do with our own intolerance for their distress. The road to hell, as the saying goes, is paved with good intentions. Many relational harms are not driven by cruelty but by care that cannot bear to wait. We drown one another in a sea of good intentions.
Listening is difficult precisely because it is slow. It is inefficient. It doesn’t produce or consume. No one profits from listening. And yet listening is deeply political. It disrupts the speed of culture. It resists moral binaries. It refuses to treat human beings as problems to be managed. Listening is not passive — it is relational care.
Fixing has a close cousin: care-taking. Care-taking looks generous from the outside, but it often centres the self — my anxiety, my image, my need to feel competent, my desire to smooth the edges. Care-giving is different. It arises from attunement. It listens first. It waits. It responds to the other person’s experience rather than to the discomfort their experience evokes in us. Care-taking is a performance. Care-giving is a relationship.
A pattern I see often — personally and professionally — is the urge to pacify others when we are in pain. When our suffering triggers someone else’s discomfort, we shrink. We tidy up our sorrow so they don’t have to feel theirs. It is a subtle erasure — I will collapse my complexity so you don’t have to encounter your limits.
Sophie Strand, in The Body as a Doorway, offers a different possibility: How would it be to say, I’m not feeling better, and I may feel worse — but I’m feeling with every part of me. Can you feel with me? This is not an invitation to be fixed. It is an invitation to be met.
What if presence is more transformative than intervention? What if patience is more connective than solutions? What if grief is not a detour from healing but the doorway into it?
Slowing down in relationship — whether in therapy, partnership, family, or group — allows us to actually encounter one another. It makes room for contradiction, texture, and complexity. It allows being with rather than doing to.
Fixing has its place. When someone is bleeding, we bandage the wound. But most of what hurts in us is not bleeding — it is longing. Longing for contact, for recognition, for space, for someone to stay.
In the end, the question is simple: do we want to be right, or do we want to be in relationship?