19/04/2023
One of the strangest and most tantalising ideas in psychotherapy is that of the ‘repetition compulsion.’ This tells us that, as a result of certain traumas that have not been properly understood and unpicked, we will be inclined to keep putting ourselves back into, and in effect re-enacting, difficult situations from the past that run counter to our emotional needs in the present.
For example, we may be tempted to keep falling in love with people who make us suffer by being distant or cold, muddled or chaotic. Or we might constantly wind up in jobs where we try to please a tricky boss but are rejected by them and eventually dismissed.
Psychotherapy seems to say that we should learn to see such patterns and try to break them: we should notice ourselves falling for one ungrateful partner after another or being mesmerised by one unjust boss after another - and go off to seek more fulfilling unions and careers.
However, this analysis risks missing an important nuance. We are not simply hunting out an awful situation and then attempting to repeat the whole of its course. We are trying to find a story familiar enough for us to be drawn to it, and then we are attempting to give it a different ending. What leads us to keep repeating a story isn’t that it’s challenging to begin with, but that we’re not managing to alter how it ends.
Our deepest motivation is to go back to a key bit of childhood with all our adult faculties - and to ensure that this time, it can go right. That is what will enable liberation and regrowth.
We want to find someone who is as distant as our mother was but this time, we want to take her kind to therapy, have long dialogues with her, help her to see her wounds and act as her protector and her guide. We want to find the same sort of angry man who our father was but this time, rather than cowering under the sofa, we want a chance to be able to get to the root of their rage, appease it and ensure they treat us well. We are seeking, in adulthood, for a second chance to rectify a traumatic dynamic that our unavoidable childhood weaknesses meant we were never originally able to fix.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to go out with characters like their unfulfilling parents or taking jobs that repeat relationships they had with awkward authority figures in the past. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Indeed, it is psychologically extremely compelling and, we can say, unavoidable.
What we need to make sure is that once we have found our pattern, we can manage to bend it towards goodness, freedom and light.
We can ask ourselves questions to find out the sort of stories we may be trying to finish in more satisfactory ways. What situations do I keep putting myself in that are difficult? What sort of testing characters do I fall in love with? What jobs do I go in for that land me in greater complications than might be strictly necessary?
And then, with the answers in mind, we should ask: what sort of ending would I prefer?
What does it mean to give a story a better ending? It means bringing all the resources of adulthood to bear on the difficulties an emotionally compromised childhood. We’ll be back with a bully but this time we’ll be able to say no. We’ll be back with a teasing horde but this time we’ll be able to show them what they’re doing. We’ll be with a depressed person, but this time we’ll be able to get them the help they need.
The often ignored idea of story completion lends us a more hopeful angle to the popular and possibly dispiriting notion of repetition compulsion. We aren’t merely driven by an urge to suffer, we’re being motivated by something much more creative: a desire to identify something in the here and now that is broken like it used to be - and then to repair it with our adult strengths in the hope of being able to move on and find freedom.
