Repetition compulsion
As a Psychologist who worked mainly with behavioural approaches, I still find some nuggets from Freud’s teachings truly fascinating. The concept of repetition compulsion is one of them. Repetition compulsion refers to the tendency to act out past traumas unconsciously. Essentially, the nervous system puts its past learning on repeat by seeking out situations that will recreate a familiar set of emotions.
This drive to repeat painful or unresolved issues can be seen as a subconscious attempt to seek resolution or gain mastery. Unfortunately, this is rarely the outcome. Certainly not straight away.
Instead, the pattern can drive a person to continue to reenact emotional pain and, as a result, often compound the negative experiences, leaving the person feeling even more trapped and powerless!
This pattern frequently occurs in addictions and dysfunctional relationships. Addictive behaviours can give an illusion of providing a band-aid for challenging emotions that arise as a result of early unmet needs, neglect, abandonment and chaos. Meanwhile, the more conscious part of the mind will be wondering why on earth it is so hard to learn from the very real and negative current consequences of such behaviours.
“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”
Quote by Sigmund Freud
I tend to view these types of compulsions as the mind’s desperate attempt to make you understand and opt for new healing pathways. The unconscious mind, which is largely programmed by our past experiences (particularly early ones), cleverly helps you manifest the circumstances externally that have once hurt you to make you wake up and understand how to heal from it.
This theory offers one way of understanding maladaptive habits and destructive coping styles that can help explain the painful reality of continuing to seek out more pain even in situations when, consciously, you may want nothing more than to end the pain cycle!
Your nervous system is trying to help you, but it might be running dated ‘programs’
Our brain (through processes like pattern recognition, heuristics and implicit memory) simplifies information to conserve energy and allow quick decision making. As such, it will enable us to operate with simplified ‘codes’ for approaching everyday life.
Sadly, the nervous system does not think in moral or long-term well-being terms. It does not inherently distinguish between the kinds of learning that lead to emotional growth and freedom versus those that reinforce long-term distress or fear. It simply favours simplification and efficiency.
As such, it can maintain patterns that were once able to keep us safe or that helped us survive, even if those patterns no longer serve us at all.
An example of this is seen in trauma sufferers who frequently over-prioritise ‘safety’, such as avoidance behaviours and/or hypervigilance in maladaptive ways. Even when such creates more pain and anxiety in the long term.
Thankfully, there is ‘neuroplasticity’, which means that we can retrain our nervous system toward more freeing patterns. Whilst we cannot erase past patterns, we can retrain our minds to rely more heavily on ways of being that serve us well in the present time.
The drawback is that this work can be challenging, often requires a bit of guidance, and last but not least, it requires people to face up and take accountability over their own behaviours and painful life patterns.
Enlisting some help would always be the ideal, but even if you can’t, please make sure you choose to be gentle, kind and compassionate with yourself on this journey. Every little step towards healing is positive, but setbacks are common and expected, too!
How the nervous system got attached to inconsistency in the first place
Our nervous system learns from repetition. If our childhood featured high doses of intermittent reinforcement, you would have learnt to find some odd sense of comfort in the inconsistency and unpredictability that you lived in.
Dopamine may have spiked when you found yourself getting seen, heard or attended to, and you will likely have confused dysregulation for excitement.
Remember, inconsistency is not a behaviour that should make you feel like you have found your cushy emotional home — quite the opposite.
When you treat clients who are securely attached, they have a very different response to unpredictability than do those who have insecure attachments. In the former group, it is seen as a turnoff. In the latter- frequently a turn-on! Even some insecurely attached clients who are perfectly able to express a cognitive dislike to inconsistency in their relationships may find themselves magnetically drawn back into the dance of uncertainty when push comes to shove. This says a lot about the depth and emotional underpinning of such behaviours.
Your nervous system learns patterns — it does not care if those patterns make you feel good or bad. It cares about the fact that they are predictable! Concerningly, if inconsistency is what your brain has come to predict — that can be predictable as well.
‘This is what closeness and intimacy feels like..’ is the learning’ from a childhood marred by emotional unpredictability, chaos and conditional affection.
The legacy of unmet needs and emotional unpredictability in childhood
A child brought up in an environment where needs will only get met intermittently may learn that love is unpredictable and that attention and affection needs to be earned- often by pleasing, performing or being hyper-attuned to other people’s moods and at the ready to shape-shift if a different ‘tactic’ is more likely to get a particular need met.
Staying hypervigilant to other people’s emotional cues is not so much a choice as it is a necessity, as it helps anticipate inconsistency. This will often happen at the expense of attuning to one’s own inner world.
In adulthood, the child who eagerly awaited the parent’s love and affection frequently displays anxiety upon separation from a partner, followed by a rush of relief when they return.
This is why even patterns that you consciously question and deem ‘unhealthy’ can feel tolerable. You might dislike the chaos, but your nervous system registers the feeling as familiar and therefore ‘safe’.
When you are being exposed to intermittent reinforcement on an ongoing basis, the brain gets so used to existing in a state of hungry undernourishment with the odd emotional ‘feed’ coming your way that you eventually will have retrained your entire being to feel satisfied with the bare minimum of attention.
Vagueness, low effort and confusing on/on behaviours can all fly under the radar when you are not expecting anything other than the occasional moment of connection.
Early attachments, inconsistency and patterns
In childhood, we have no choice but to make do with the environment we are born into. If the environment offers on and off parenting, neglect or even abuse, the sad reality is that a child will continue to want to be loved by the parent and will automatically start suppressing their childhood needs.
This is a habit that leaves long trails, and you can often see the pattern still going strong in adulthood, where children of emotionally neglectful or inconsistently loving parents often have children who try extra hard to get approval, validation and a drop of feeling out of the parent. Alternatively, the legacy is one of cutting oneself off from such needs, denying them (often even to oneself) and becoming hyperindependent and essentially acting as though they are ‘without needs’ in future relationships.
Both these patterns spell problems for fully functional adult relationships where the balance is often of the matter.
Familiarity is not synonymous with healthy
If you are someone who frequently finds yourself in relationships or ‘situationships’ that lack consistency, presence and stability, you are going to be barking up the wrong tree by trying to villify those that are offering this poor treatment.
This is not to say that they are without blame, but a firm reminder to you that the main accountability for the pattern you are finding yourself in is something you have to pick up yourself. Failing to do so means you allow your instinct and hypervigilance to run the show. Something that will circle you back around to yet another inconsistent situation, as though you are operating with a broken compass.
These patterns take a tremendous toll emotionally. Some of the common emotional costs are:
Anxiety
Emotional instability and a sense of outsourcing the power and control over your mood, mental health and peace of mind
Self-worth tied entirely to other people’s approval and validation
Repetition of painful cycles under the illusion of ‘love’ ‘’chemistry’, and passion.
Ghosting, breadcrumbing, and hot and cold behaviours can all be tolerated so long as the felt baseline requirements for a good relationship remain unaddressed. It is important ot remind yourself that having a partner who wishes to be present is not a luxury or something that is worthy of the odd celebration- it should be a requirement for continuing to pursue a relationship with the person.
Healing your nervous system requires working with the body, not just the mind
On the bright side, deciding to heal means that you can stop all efforts of decoding, excusing and attempting to convince other people to love and approve of you. On the less fun side, healing means a bit of work and effort. Sometimes it also means putting yourself through some of the painful feelings that were suppressed once upon a time and paved the way for your current predicament.
Your nervous system needs to accept that chasing highs and the excitement that can come from an emotional win, following on from existing on the emotional breadline, are not part of healthy learning but rather what your relationship trauma is made of.
Healing your relationship with consistency is somatic work, not just cognitive. This means you will not be able to think your way out of this situation. You will have to go against some tricky feelings and act in ways that will feel counterintuitive for you.
How can I not stop thinking about her? said one of my clients who used to be stuck in a dynamic that featured everything from love-bombing to outright blocking. All under the guise of ‘love’.
This is logical reasoning applied to situations that logic can never explain. Much like you cannot think your way out of an addiction, your mind needs to recognise that it does not hold all the answers. The body does. And if you can quiet the mind (or at least not engage with it) and give way for your body to pursue some healing, this can change.
Activation is not love — it is an old trauma response…
Many people get confused about the role of the body in emotion regulation. To simplify your understanding, it means that you start considering what is going on inside of you on a deeper physiological level when you experience your feelings. And you learn to stay present, make room and respond more healthily to challenging feelings. This helps regulate the nervous system and teaches us how to trust ourselves and calm ourselves down when we feel feelings that have previously been known to draw us into unhealthy behaviour patterns.
Hypervigilance is part of our anxiety response. Meanwhile, love usually features safety and security.
Hypervigilance forms part of all anxiety responses. It is our ‘threat detection mode’ that is stuck in overdrive. If you are a health-anxious client, hypervigilance will keep you focused on bodily sensations and lead to catastrophic misinterpretations of such. A victim of a robbery may be frantically scanning their environment for threats. Relationship traumas often result in threat monitoring going strong on a more interpersonal level. Subtly changes in tone, degrees of engagement and a partner’s shift in mood become focal points if the threat-detection mode is in an ‘on’ position.
Do you ‘light up’ and become hypervigilant and seek answers when someone is vague, inconsistent, flaky or rejecting? If so, start noticing the subtle pull that makes you crave their answers and feedback. Recognise that your feelings are part of a learnt response, but that this is a truly unhealthy pull that you need to respond to differently now. Label the feeling for yourself and try to make room for it rather than ‘fixing’ it. If you find it helpful, you can narrate your experience to yourself.
E.g., ‘I am getting hooked/activated ‘, this feels like a craving to take action, but it is not healthy to do so. Let me instead stay with these feelings and give them some room’
Searching for answers through loops of rumination, catastrophizing, and strategising is not part of how love feels. Love (without professing to be some sort of master of what things are for other people) is more associated with a grounded, calm and secure feeling. Not a feeling of masterplanning for what the next move can get you attention, or figuring out how to be chosen and prioritised.
What you are seeking from others is what you need to give yourself
Peace is not something that you need other people to provide for you — it is what you provide for yourself when you recognise that you don’t need an absence of triggers, consistency from other people or answers from those that have not been able to provide safety signals up until this date.
What you need is to trust yourself to stop tolerating this from other people!
You will need to be consistent with yourself in identifying the triggers that hook you in and your ability to resist acting on them. Allow yourself to stay with those challenging feelings with a guarantee that you have your own back.
Breathing, grounding work and self-compassion are all important parts of healing. Your nervous system needs to learn that feelings of safety, security and love are positive experiences that will result in trust in ourselves and our inner world. On the reverse, we need to teach ourselves to reject feelings of activation and excitement that come on the back of other people’s unpredictability, as these are often confused with the chemistry and intensity seen, particularly in the early stages of relationships.
Think about a rescue dog that needs to learn that your proximity, physical contact, and regular attention equate to safety. The human brain is not that different.
Be regular and consistent in your efforts with yourself, choose to disallow inconsistency from others, and last but not least, take whatever time it takes you to process and stay present with the feelings that come up when you embark on your journey towards healthier relating.