The allure of the familiar
Repetition compulsion and the difficulty of intimacy
Content note: (mostly abstract) talk of parental abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, and addiction.
What is repetition compulsion, and do we have to call it that?
My fave trauma writer, Pete Walker, talks eloquently about repetition compulsion—the tendency of traumatized folks to gravitate toward people and situations that subconsciously remind them of how they were treated in the past. This concept provides some explanation for why we all have that friend (or are that friend) who keeps getting into relationships with abusive partners that start out “seeming fine,” or take job after job for narcissistic bosses who always keep them doubting their abilities.
My love for Pete Walker aside, I’m not that big a fan of the term, because “compulsion” implies a lack of agency—a thing that trauma survivors generally spend a lot of energy attempting to restore to themselves. Historically and currently, people in our culture don’t tend to have a lot of sympathy for people who “just can’t help themselves.” While I’d love to change that about the world, it’s only going to happen slowly, and there are people to help before that.
The term “compulsion” also evokes, for me, a sense of someone who sees something they know is bad, but they go for it anyway. It seems victim-blamey in a way I don’t find helpful.
I don’t judge addictive behaviors; I’ve struggled with them myself, and I know how powerful the draw of something you know you shouldn’t do can be. My beef is more with the idea that traumatized people are attracted to people they know will hurt them, which to me is what the phrase “repetition compulsion” implies. On the contrary, I believe that often, traumatized people are attracted to people who fascinate them, enliven them and make them feel special. The trouble is not with those things, which are absolutely okay to want from a partner. The trouble is with how often those things are a front for control and abuse.
The draw is the comfort of the known
The phrase I like more for this tendency is “the allure of the familiar.” Not least because the word “familiar” comes from “family,” and the thing the traumatized person is compelled to repeat, the familiar thing we’re drawn to, is most likely a pattern learned in early life, at home.
Because the trouble with being drawn to abusive people or situations is, in fact, similar to the trouble of being drawn to drink, or do drugs, or gamble. It’s not the bad stuff we’re after! These things all have attractive qualities, things that have made us feel good. The urge we have toward these destructive patterns is not an urge to destruction. It’s an urge to pleasure, and an urge to receiving care.
In a way, the draw toward abusive partners after an abusive childhood is even more understandable than other addictive behaviors. For the most part, people’s caregivers aren’t out-and-out monsters. Children can usually remember good times with their parents, or at least times when they received what comfort and care their parents could occasionally provide. All humans are born needing care and comfort from an adult. Even if a caregiver can only provide the barest scraps, those very scraps form the child’s idea of what care and comfort look like.
For those whose parents were just plain awful or not present, there’s another problem: the child grows up not even knowing what care and comfort feels like. It’s hard, next to impossible, to know how to seek out something you desperately need without ever having had it modeled. Even people who didn’t receive that modeling from their caregivers, though, probably saw what was supposed to be a happy family on TV, or at a friend’s house. As they grow up, such children might get a sense of what that looks like, but still have no sense of what it’s supposed to feel like. The sight of a mother calmly comforting a tantruming toddler, or a father helping a kid with homework, might even be deeply distressing in its unfamiliarity.
The familiar, to a traumatized person, is what their body has learned is available, and what they’ve come to believe they deserve. The idea that things could be different, or better, is barely an idea. The lesson imprinted in the body is: that kind of care is not for you.
So naturally, when an opportunity for an intimate relationship presents itself, that body will tend to reach for something that feels familiar, even if it’s terrible. Because it is still, in its way, that body reaching for care.
You don’t actually want to date your parents. Well sort of.
Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but the Oedipus/Electra complex thing is not entirely without merit. When kids grow up, they really do tend to attach to romantic partners who, for better or worse, remind them of their parents. With securely attached people, it’s more direct: their partner will often even physically resemble the parent they were closest to. But more to the point: they’re (usually unconsciously) searching for the good qualities their parent showed, and more specifically, they want someone who makes them feel the way that parent made them feel.
You can see where this is going.
The allure of the familiar—this idea of repetition compulsion—is not by its nature pathological. Rather, it is an integral part of how our attachment systems work. How our caregivers treated us is what we learned about what care looks like, how home feels, what love is. The attraction we feel to familiar behaviors and treatment—whether it’s loving supportiveness, undermining abandonment, or alternating care and violence—is not a mistake our bodies are making. It’s a sign of the system working as intended.
So where does the healing come in? It’s a long long road, a lot of the time, to teaching our bodies what actual care, genuine love, nurturing support really looks and feels like. Sometimes, when we begin to encounter it, it may even feel aversive or terrifying. Vulnerability, some of us learned, was an invitation to violence or abandonment.
The good news is that our bodies can learn differently, even as adults. Often, we can even learn from intimate partners, if we’re ready to let them close enough. The dance that such closeness requires, some days, feels like a lifelong process. But luckily, it’s also a dance.
More on this topic soon, as at least two entire other posts threatened to grow out of this one. In my desire to post more frequently, I’m also working on making the posts more manageably sized. As always, please let me know your thoughts on this concept in the comments!