Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness

Many of us dimly sense that, despite ourselves, unfortunately and mysteriously, we keep ending up in some very similar dark places: perhaps another relationship with someone who doesn’t seem to love us properly, or another breakdown of trust at work, or another panic about reputation or sex. Or else the repeated patterns involve a return to a background mood: yet again we feel highly anxious. Yet again we feel convinced that everyone hates us or that something terrible is about to happen.

Psychotherapists have given all this a name. In so far as we keep steering ourselves back to some familiar negative circumstances or emotions, we may be in the grip of what is known as a ‘repetition compulsion.’ We aren’t here again by coincidence, we are – in an unconscious part of our minds – steering ourselves to a place of pain with hidden intent.

This is a hugely perplexing notion to have to take on board. It’s bad enough to keep winding up in particular trouble, it’s even worse to have to think that we’re being driven towards it by an ineluctable internal force. We naturally want to repeat pleasure; but why seek to repeat frustration, sabotage and alarm?

Psychotherapists have a suggestion. We can never let go of any negative experience, they tell us, until it has been fully understood. An issue will remain active for us – even if it is decades old – so long as it has not been acknowledged and its emotional resonance identified and allowed to dissipate.

The experiences that we are driven to repeat are – these therapists go on to say – precisely those that we have not been able to square up to. We repeat what we have sidestepped and left unacknowledged. A part of our minds is committed to forcing us back to a zone of original difficulty not in order that we suffer aimlessly, but so that we may eventually find freedom through understanding. 

Therefore, in this account, we aren’t seeking simply to be unhappy. An emotional conscience is pushing us towards the location of our buried truths in the name of eventual release. Our sad and anxious rehearsals are like ghosts that keep manifesting themselves until a foundational injustice is uncovered and worked through.

Psychotherapy points out that the patterns we are most likely to be repeating are ones that date back to childhood, because this is the period when we are both least able to understand what is going on in ourselves and most at the mercy of the adults around us. 

We may – in our search for release from our repetitions – need to be very brave in remembering what might have gone on many years before. Matters were perhaps not as simple as we might have assumed. If we keep nowadays finding ourselves in a panic that someone will try to humiliate us or if we seek love from distracted and incapable people or spoil our professional chances, we may need to wonder: how might our negative patterns be following in the tracks of earlier pains? 

What our impulse to repeat is in essence inviting us to do is to pause and mourn. Just as we have to do when someone we love dies, we need to stop evading our suffering and give ourselves time to absorb it from a range of angles, at multiple points of day and night, and in relation to different moods.

We may have to mourn that our father’s sexuality was far too complicated, or that our mother couldn’t deal with our vulnerability. Or that a sibling was favoured. Or that we have made a mess of our adult love lives because we have grown up without an ability to trust or assert ourselves. 

The reward for doing this painful work is that eventually our minds can be expected to relent. Once we have kept an appointment with our primal griefs, we can gradually hope to drift away from them and the patterns to which they have given rise. The part of us that isn’t able to rest until the truth has been exhumed will let us plough new, less frightened tracks once it is sufficiently convinced that we have – finally – mourned and understood.