Notes On… Repetition Compulsion

A client once told me that he couldn’t understand why he kept falling for men who made him feel small. Men who didn’t call back, who kept him on the edge of uncertainty. “It’s like I know it’s bad for me,” he said, “but… I go back”

There it was. Familiarity mistaken for safety. The hallmark of repetition compulsion.

Repetition compulsion is the unconscious pull to relive an old emotional injury, usually one first experienced in childhood. Freud named it. Trauma therapists see it daily. We reenact the same patterns not because we want pain, but because we are loyal to the idea that this time, if we love hard enough, we’ll finally be chosen.

The client grew up with a father who was kind but absent, physically in the room, but emotionally offshore. “I always had to earn his attention,” he told me. So now, as an adult, he’s drawn to the emotionally unavailable. Not because he enjoys being dismissed, but because some part of him still hopes that, this time, the silence will break into love.

Repetition compulsion isn’t a flaw. It’s a strategy. A brilliant, misguided attempt at mastery. But insight alone doesn’t undo the pattern. We can know the story and still cast the same characters.

Healing begins not with judgment, but with gentle interruption. Noticing the quickening in your chest and asking, Is this attraction or is this a memory?

And then choosing differently. Not the dazzling spark, but the steady flame. The person who returns your text. The one who makes you feel secure, not special-for-now. It may feel boring at first, but only because your nervous system is detoxing from chaos mistaken for connection.

The pattern breaks when you stop chasing the old ending and begin writing a new one.

That’s the work. Not just finding someone new.
But becoming someone new.