Your past self was wiser than you know
Repetition compulsion, the allure of the familiar, and trusting your instincts
Back in March, I wrote a post about that pesky habit many traumatized people have of repeatedly seeking out relationships, living situations, jobs, or other life things that are bad for them, and often bad in the same way, over and over. In the course of writing it, I had a bunch of offshoots that I promised to write about later. This is one, and it’s a bit of a doozy.
Content notes: traumatic repetition, references to various kinds of abuse, including childhood abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect; discussion of victim-blaming, and other potentially activating material. Please take care of yourself.
This is dedicated to everyone who didn’t leave sooner.
If you didn’t listen when your friends said “watch out for that one.” If you kept going back even though they were mean to you, because sometimes, they felt good. If you didn’t know you had another choice than to take it, this is for you.
To all you lovelies who were taken in by narcissists. To all you teenagers who didn’t run away from home. To the ones that did, but then ended up somewhere worse, or had to come back. To the kids who stayed after with that one teacher. To the boys who kept going to church, even afterward. To every one of you who never told.
To everyone who chose that job, that university program, that career path, that roommate, that spouse, even though something deep within you was twitching, squinting tears, struggling to raise its little hand and say, “Um…”
This is for you.
And this is for me, too, for something I’m still working to settle into my bones after my therapist told it to me, and which I now want to tell you:
Your instincts are not broken. You can trust yourself.
Wait, what?
What do I mean by that? And, if you’re anything like me, you might also ask: how can that possibly be true?
How can it be that my instincts aren’t broken, that I can trust myself, when so often, I made the wrong choice? I trusted the wrong person? I let that happen to me?
If any of this resonates, you’re not alone.
There’s a concept that many of you are probably familiar with when talking about trauma and abuse, though you’ve probably heard it more often as an observation. It goes around communities in gossip networks; it shows up in romantic comedy scripts and Lifetime movies; it gets discussed at family events when someone brings up poor cousin Fiona who couldn’t make it this year.
The observation looks something like, “Wow, she sure knows how to pick ‘em,” or “Why does he keep getting in these kinds of relationships?” or “I wish they’d learn to make better choices, but what can you do? They never listen to me.”
The concept, as one of my fave trauma writers Pete Walker calls it (I think from Freud), is repetition compulsion. I’ve considered shifting what I call it even further, because the word “compulsion” feels pathologizing. But at the present moment, it’s still my favored term for this phenomenon: where a traumatized person, having learned deep, bodily lessons about what love looks like from abusive or neglectful parents, seeks out adult relationships that feel familiar to them.
Rather than moving toward what feels good, they move toward what they know, even if it’s terribly unsafe, frightening, and painful. Part of it may be going with “the devil you know.” But so much of it is unconscious, thus the term “compulsion” for this “repetition” of the dynamic you had with your earliest intimates: your caregiver(s). My partner has helpfully also called this phenomenon “the allure of the familiar.”
So how does repetition compulsion manifest?
Though everyone loves to dunk on Freud, he was right about a lot of things, but kept putting the emphasis in the wrong places. (Penis envy? Not a thing. Wishing, as a 19th century Viennese girl or woman, that you had half the agency and choice that men have, and having that lack manifest as mental health problems? Oh for sure.)
The idea of the Oedipal complex similarly has a strong kernel of truth that got irretrievably twisted by society’s frank inability to look at and talk about the reality of child abuse and its aftereffects. Is it true that all boys secretly want to sleep with their mothers and all girls with their fathers? Not really, no! Is it manifestly apparent that children seek out partners that replicate dynamics they had with their parents? My goodness yes.
With kids who had secure attachments and loving relationships with their parents, that happens in basically healthy ways: a daughter grows up and marries a guy who looks like or has a similar temperment to her dad. A son seeks out a woman who cares for him in similar ways to how his mother did. If your parents were good to you and also modeled a healthy relationship between them, you might gravitate toward or even consciously search for a partner with whom you can share a similar relationship.
Repetition compulsion is much more often the result of insecure upbringings. A severely abused child grows up not even having a sense of what a secure relationship would look or feel like, and instead moves toward intimacy that feels familiar: violent, unpredictable, intense. Someone charismatic and exciting, who at first seems like the promise of escape, often turns out to be another abuser, preying on someone already vulnerable to such charms.
Someone who grew up neglected might chase after people who ignore her or run hot and cold. She may have spent much of her life believing that affection and care was something she had to chase after or even beg for. She might be drawn to a partner who isn’t really into her, who always makes her feel a little like a burden or a consolation prize.
Often, until and unless traumatized people truly addresses their trauma, they will have a really hard time not repeating these relationship patterns. Not because there’s something wrong with us, or our judgment is fundamentally flawed. But because these are the only patterns we saw modeled, and these are the meanings of love that got encoded in our bodies.
Back to the idea of broken instincts…
So where does that leave us — those people, myself included, that I dedicated this essay to back at the top?
Those of us who stayed, who went along, who kept going, who never told.
Until the pattern is broken, repetition compulsion can leave us thinking that it must be us. However much we may rebel against the idea of victim-blaming, there can still be a powerful internal — and at times, external — drive to believe that we are broken. That we’re fucked up, that we don’t know how to make good choices, that we keep falling for it whenever someone comes along that we think is going to save us.
It’s easy to get into a self-fulfilling trap of imagining that we simply can’t trust ourselves to do the right thing, to notice when something is off, to make a different choice. It can make you think it’s something wrong with you — if you keep picking people who treat you this way, maybe you really are defective.
Here’s the thing, though, and this is what my therapist told me that I’m still sitting with, months later:
My instincts were right. The trauma didn’t break them. It just made me stop trusting them.
I talk about complex trauma sometimes as a series of events that breaks a person’s internal compass. People often come into adulthood without a hugely coherent sense of who they’re supposed to be or what they’re supposed to do, or why any of it matters. This can lead to actions and decisions that can look pretty wild from the outside. But it’s awfully difficult to “make good choices” and “use your judgment” when you’ve been told (or shown) for most of your life that your choices don’t matter and your judgment is bad. Or to know what you want in a given situation when the message you got was “do what we want or else.”
I’ve often heard people’s abusive behavior — gaslighting, undermining, bullying — described as “head-spinning.” This disorientation can persist well into adulthood, where, without meaning to, we orient ourselves the only way we learned how: toward situations where we feel at least some sense of direction (only to get spun around again, more often than not).
But here’s the thing about broken compasses: magnetic north always still exists. And the iron in our blood still points toward it.
Less metaphorically, this is to say that the instinct in us — for survival, for safety, for seeking the good — persists. In the core of every human is a primal being that knows what it needs, and cries out for that against all odds. It’s what our bodies are made to do from the start — otherwise, we don’t survive.
That may not feel very true to you, reading this. It may seem ridiculous to imagine that the paths you’ve walked, the relationships you’ve chosen, the things you’ve suffered, were anything other than signs that your spirit has been broken, and is unfixable.
But your body is still always looking for safety, comfort, and good feelings, while also on the alert for danger. The signals get scrambled and weakened, but the signals are still there. It’s just a lot easier to ignore the warning klaxons inside when something feels intense and thrilling, or numbing and comfortable, or familiar in some other horrible way. Meanwhile, genuine good feelings tend to feel untrustworthy, tenuous, or false. They’re strangers, after all, and, seemingly paradoxically, it’s the familiar that feels safest.
When I met the man who would blow my life apart, become my husband, and wreck me over the course of nine years, I fell for him, hook, line and sinker. Years later I would torture myself over it, wondering how I could have ignored the cautions my friends were trying to give me, how I could have fallen for the romantic nonsense. I remember it feeling like I was ensorcelled, fated to be with him, like I had no choice other than to follow my destiny.
But underneath that feeling was another one, one I dared not admit to my full consciousness. I knew, somewhere deep, that there was something unreal about him. I saw the red flags, and ignored them. My instincts weren’t broken. I just didn’t trust them.
Why was it so comforting, even as it was shocking, to hear that from my therapist? Because it told me that what I’d been told about myself when I was younger — that I was naive, didn’t know the world, didn’t know how to make choices — wasn’t true. Did I make some poor choices? Yeah, yeah I did. But it wasn’t because I was defective, and it wasn’t something I was doomed to repeat.
You might be wondering, what difference does it make?
Who cares if my instincts about safety and danger are intact, if I can’t act accordingly? If it’s called repetition compulsion, if I really am compelled to repeat these destructive patterns, how do I stop?
I wish I could tell you “it’s easy.” Instead, as usual, it’s one halting step at a time. It’s teaching our bodies; it’s bringing the unbearable to consciousness, it’s shedding the shame of what happened to us and bringing it into the open, telling it so we don’t have to show it, don’t have to repeat it. It’s maybe the hardest work there is, because I have to tell my body: stop, it’s okay, be patient, we’re safe, when everything it’s learned is saying I know this, I recognize this, this is death, play dead, and also somehow at the same time oh god I’m going to be abandoned, quick, do anything to make them not leave.
Because it isn’t the deepest, truest part of me telling me all that. That part, the sweet, true north part, just keeps waving its flags.
If I let in some light, I can even see what color they are.