Transcript

One of the strangest and most tantalizing 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, repeating difficult situations from the past that run counter to our emotional needs in the present.

So 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 tried to please a tricky boss, but then were rejected by them and eventually dismissed. But there's a nuance here, we are not generally simply hunting out an awful situation, and then attempting to repeat the whole of it. What we're doing is trying to find a story familiar enough for us to be drawn to it. And then what we're attempting to do is to give it a different ending.