Why Do We Repeat Our Past Trauma In Relationships?
What is Trauma Repetition or Repetition Compulsion?
Repetition Compulsion: “In psychoanalytic theory, an unconscious need to reenact early traumas in the attempt to overcome or master them. Such traumas are repeated in a new situation symbolic of the repressed prototype. Repetition compulsion acts as a resistance to therapeutic change since the goal of therapy is not to repeat but to remember the trauma and to see its relation to present behavior. Also called compulsion to repeat.”
From the APA
Trauma Mastery or Re-enactment
“A definitive understanding of reenactments and the function they serve remains elusive. Herman has written that there is something uncanny about reenactments. While they often appear to be consciously chosen, they have a quality of involuntariness. In addition, although it has been theorized that reenacting a past trauma is a way an individual attempts to master it, lifelong reenactments and reexposure to trauma rarely result in resolution and mastery. Understanding and addressing the fact that traumatized people typically lead traumatizing lives remains a great challenge.”
From A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments.
Resolving Old Problems In The Present
We repeat the same patterns over and over again expecting new results (seeking a solution or mastery of our traumas)
We are most comfortable and/or familiar with people/experiences/feelings/thoughts we grew up with and were taught (becomes normalized for us)
We get stuck in old deeply embedded patterns and dynamics and find it difficult to get out of these patterns
We become fixated with our trauma identity (how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we navigate the world) and find it hard to shift our identity in other ways (e.g. more realistic or positive appraisals, accepting good things, feeling at ease and calm)
We learned to regulate or soothe/calm ourselves down through chaos/conflict/pressure and find peace/calm/ease/relaxation/slowing down boring/uncomfortable/new/different/strange/weird
We haven’t resolved our losses and grief around losing loss of safety, trust, control, power, intimacy, esteem, worth, time, etc. and are living with a deep sense of sadness, guilt, anger, frustration, etc.
We’re still in survival mode. We are in crisis. We don’t feel safe with others, we don’t feel safe inside of ourselves, we may not have enough money, we may have to work long hours, we may have to go to school, we may not have a mutual support system we trust and love, we may be around family or people we don’t particularly like, we may not have a safe living space, etc.
And more
Research on Trauma Repetition
The compulsion to repeat the trauma. Re-enactment, revictimization, and masochism
“People who have been exposed to highly stressful stimuli develop long-term potentiation of memory tracts that are reactivated at times of subsequent arousal. This activation explains how current stress is experienced as a return of the trauma; it causes a return to earlier behavior patterns. Ordinarily, people will choose the most pleasant of two alternatives. High arousal causes people to engage in familiar behavior, regardless of the rewards.”
“Hyperarousal interferes with the ability to make rational assessments and prevents resolution and integration of the trauma. Disturbances in the catecholamine, serotonin, and endogenous opioid systems have been implicated in this persistence of all-or-none responses. “
From: The compulsion to repeat the trauma. Re-enactment, revictimization, and masochism
A conceptualization of the repetition compulsion
“The concept of the repetition compulsion remains an enigma. Its etiology is not fully understood and the purpose it serves continues to be a mystery. Although it is often theorized that the compulsion to repeat may function to facilitate mastery of a past trauma, mastery is rarely achieved. “
The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioral reenactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to earlier life experiences. This "repetition compulsion" has received surprisingly little systematic exploration during the 70 years since its discovery, though it is regularly described in the clinical literature.Freud thought that the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.
Children seem more vulnerable than adults to compulsive behavioral repetition and loss of conscious memory of the trauma.70,136. However, responses to projective tests show that adults, too, are liable to experience a large range of stimuli vaguely reminiscent of the trauma as a return of the trauma itself, and to react accordingly.39,42
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud proposed that the compulsion to repeat was a function of repression: because the memory is repressed the patient “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience, instead of ... remembering it as something belonging to the past”
From: Freud S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: Standard Edition. London, UK: Hogarth Press; 1920;18:7–64.
How Can I Interrupt The Trauma Repetition Cycle?
Understand your own trauma and it’s impacts on you
Understand your triggers
Understand your own patterns/dynamics
Get to know your thoughts and beliefs (especially the negative, powerful ones)
Challenge your negative thoughts and beliefs with more complete, realistic stories and beliefs
Ask people you love and trust how they perceive you
Share your stories about what happened to you and its impacts on you with people who will validate you and believe you
Learn to befriend your body (emotions, sensations) to develop more safety and trust within yourself
Learn to slow down and practice mindfulness of the present moment
Learn to practice self compassion
Surround yourself with people who care for you, listen to you, respect your boundaries, and want to know you (and vice versa)
Get to the foundation/root cause of your unresolved wounds/trauma
Take good care of yourself (nutrition, sleep, water, exercise, movement)
Minimize stress as much as possible
Practice relaxation skills such as deep breathing, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, guided meditations, etc.
Seek professional help
Celebrate all growth and victories
Gordon Neufeld’s List of Personality Patterns
When you don't get the attention that you needed you become consumed with attracting attention.
If you didn't get the approval you needed you'll be consumed with winning approval and have a winning personality.
If you were not valued you'll be craving to measure up to people's expectations so they can value you.
If you weren’t made to feel special you might become very demanding.
If you weren't esteemed for just who you were you'll want to impress people.
If your importance as an individual wasn't valued you might end up in the helping professions, be helping people all the time. That'll give you a sense of importance.
If you weren't liked for who you were, you'll be very, very nice. You will be liked by being nice, and suppress some of your authentic features.
If you weren't loved you might become very charming.
If you weren't recognized for who you were you might be concerned with seeking status. You might become a very successful person and empty inside because this movement to get validated from the outside actually hurts you
The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller
“Most people do the opposite. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.”
“The presence of a person who is completely aware of them and takes them seriously. When people didn’t get that experience as kids yet they’re ignoring their own repressed life history, they will seek a substitute gratification through their own kids.”
“A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her and supports her.”
“The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator's efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price.”
Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
“It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.
Why people do this to themselves? Because we pull towards that feeling of "home" makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parents who in some way hurt them. In the beginning, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar - but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.”
“This is more than an intellectual process. Repetition compulsion is a formidable beast. For Charlotte, stability and its attendant joy isn’t to be trusted; it makes her feel queasy, anxious. When you’re a child and your father is loving and playful, then disappears for a while, and later comes back and acts as if nothing happened—and does this repeatedly—you learn that joy is fickle. When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does. Every single time. Better to expect nothing too stable.”
James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders
“If one understands repression as the process in which overwhelming experiences are forgotten, distanced, and dissociated, Freud posited that these experiences are likely to recur in the mind and to be reexperienced. He theorized that this "compulsion to repeat" served a need to rework and achieve mastery over the experience and that it perhaps had an underlying biologic basis as well. The most perceptive tenet of Freud’s theory is that previously dissociated events are actually reexperienced as current reality rather than remembered as occurring in the past. Although Freud was discussing the trauma produced by intense intrapsychic conflict, clinical experience has shown that actual traumatic events that have been dissociated are often repeated and reexperienced.”
Dennis Hof, The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money
“It’s called the repetition compulsion. You keep repeating your own history, thinking that next time you’re finally going to get it right”