Repetition Compulsion: Why do I Keep Sticking my Head Back in the Lion's Mouth?

The now widely accepted notion of repetition compulsion is often seen in survivors of any kind of psychological trauma. In the more severely afflicted among them, it is almost always in play. And that compulsion is almost always rooted in the earlier repetitions of psychological trauma.

The inner child who was neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, rejected, invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslit..., scapegoated..., emotionally blackmailed and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom it depended for survival in the first few years of life lives on in a default mode network in the brain of the abused child called "the not okay inner child."

And if it does not collapse into permanent Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity, it will try and try and try to find a way to UNDO the original situation by getting CONTROL of a new one.

Put another way, if one was abused by a major figure in childhood, they are often programmed, imprinted, habituated and normalized to such treatment... and will then "pair" (or associate) such treatment with what little "love," protection and/or security (s)he did get. And because (s)he direly needs to get ALL the "love," protection and/or security (s)he needed as a child to develop into a reasonably secure adult... or prove to him/herself that (s)he doesn't need it because (s)he's now in control, (s)he may resort to the obsessive control imperative many compensatory narcissistic survivors develop.

But it never really works because (s)he either gets abused again or drives "good" people away, and the illusion of control turns out to be a disappointing delusion.

Our original abusers so often "loved," and protected -- as well as abused -- us in Karpman Drama Triangle mash-ups. We were "baited" here and "bitten" there. So many times that we could no longer separate the bite from the bait. And we go looking for the same bait over and over again, telling ourselves "I won't get bitten this time." But, of course, we usually do.

I know that's a lot to wrap one's mind around, but once one allows all that to sink in, it almost always starts to make sense. And then we get to use something like Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing or one of the other therapies listed in section 7c of this earlier post to "digest" what has been sensed.

If interested, see also:

Transferred Trauma Bonding & How to Deal With It in the Heat of the Moment in the OP and not-moses’s reply thereto on that Reddit thread

A Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma

Resources

See Courtois, Farmer, Miller, Walker, and Whitfield in section one of A CPTSD Library; Beck, Briere, Carnes, Courtois et al, Fisher, Heller & LaPierre, Kaufman, Schwartz, and Van der Kolk in section two; pretty much anything in section four (as repetition compulsion is a core feature of that diagnosis); Block & Block (2010), Chapman et al (2011), Follette & Pistorello, Fox, Marra, McKay & Wood, Raja, Schwartz, Van Dijk (2102), Weiss, and Williams & Poijula in section six; and...

Van der Kolk, B.: The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma: Re-enactment, Re-victimization, and Masochism, in Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1989.