You may have noticed that something seems to repeat itself in your relationships.
Perhaps you keep becoming involved with people who are emotionally unavailable. Perhaps you find yourself giving too much, withdrawing when someone gets close, becoming anxious when a relationship begins to matter, or feeling that you somehow end up in the same situation despite knowing that you wanted something different this time.
You might even recognise the pattern while it is happening. And yet, knowing that something is a pattern does not necessarily make it possible to stop repeating it. This can be one of the more difficult things to understand about ourselves. If we know what is hurting us, why do we keep returning to it?
Psychoanalytic therapy approaches this question differently. Rather than assuming that repetition is simply a bad choice or a failure to learn from experience, it asks what the repetition might be expressing.
When something keeps returning
We often think of repetition as something we should eliminate. If a relationship ended badly, for example, we might decide that next time we will choose differently. We may make a list of warning signs, establish boundaries, or promise ourselves that we will not tolerate the same behaviour again. These things can be valuable. But sometimes something continues to repeat despite our conscious efforts to avoid it.
The same feelings appear.
The same doubts.
The same conflicts.
The same difficulty with closeness.
The same sense of not being enough.
The same kind of disappointment.
This does not necessarily mean that we are deliberately choosing what hurts us. Something may be operating in our experience that is not entirely available to conscious decision-making. This is one of the places where psychoanalysis takes seriously the idea of the unconscious.
Knowing is not always enough
There can be a significant difference between knowing something about yourself and actually being able to relate to it differently. Someone may know, for example, that they become anxious when another person becomes distant. They may understand that this has happened in previous relationships and even recognise where some of these feelings began.
But when the situation occurs again, the knowledge may not prevent the anxiety. The feeling arrives before there is time to reason with it. This is because our ways of relating to ourselves and to others are not formed only through conscious ideas. They are also shaped by experiences, relationships, desires, conflicts and meanings that may continue to influence us without being fully understood.
Therapy can therefore involve more than identifying a pattern. It can involve asking why this particular pattern has come to matter in the way that it does.
What does repetition tell us?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, repetition is not simply meaningless behaviour that needs to be corrected. It can be something worth listening to. A repeated situation may contain a question that has not yet been articulated.
Why does this particular kind of person attract me?
Why does distance make me want someone more?
Why do I lose interest when someone becomes available?
Why do I repeatedly find myself trying to prove that I am worthy of someone’s love?
Why does being cared for sometimes feel uncomfortable?
Why do I keep returning to situations that I consciously say I no longer want?
These questions do not necessarily have straightforward answers. And sometimes the most important part of therapy is not finding an immediate explanation, but creating enough space to discover what the repetition means for you.
Repetition and desire
Psychoanalysis is interested in something that can seem paradoxical: sometimes we do not simply pursue what we say we want. There can be a difference between what we consciously believe we want and what continues to organise our desire.
This does not mean that we secretly want to suffer. Nor does it mean that everything that happens to us is something we have chosen. Rather, it suggests that our desires can be more complicated than the conscious intentions we have about our lives.
We can sincerely want intimacy and simultaneously experience intimacy as threatening. We can want a stable relationship and find ourselves drawn towards uncertainty. We can want to be recognised and yet repeatedly place ourselves in situations where recognition remains out of reach. These contradictions are not necessarily problems to be quickly resolved. They can become important material for understanding ourselves.
You are not simply repeating the same mistake
It can be tempting to judge ourselves when we notice a recurring pattern.
“I should have known better.”
“Why do I always do this?”
“What is wrong with me?”
But self-judgement can sometimes make the pattern harder to understand. A psychoanalytic approach is less interested in blaming you for the repetition and more interested in listening to it.
What is at stake in this situation?
What does this relationship make possible?
What does it prevent?
What are you seeking from the other person?
What happens when you get what you say you want?
What happens when you don’t?
These questions can open up a different way of thinking about experiences that may previously have seemed simply frustrating or inexplicable.
Therapy is not about telling you what to do
There are many situations in which practical advice is useful. Sometimes we need to establish a boundary, leave a harmful situation, communicate more clearly or make a difficult decision. Psychoanalytic therapy does not replace these possibilities. But it begins from a different question.
Instead of asking only, “What should I do differently?”, it can also ask:
“What is happening here that I have not yet been able to hear?”
This shift can be significant. The aim is not to provide a formula for choosing the right partner or guarantee that a particular pattern will never return. It is to create a space in which the things that repeatedly trouble you can be spoken about and explored without reducing them to a simple diagnosis or a list of behaviours to correct. Over time, this can make possible a different relationship to what has been difficult.
A pattern can be revisited
Changing a pattern does not always begin with forcing yourself to behave differently. Sometimes it begins by becoming curious about what you have been repeating. What once seemed like simply “bad luck” may begin to acquire another meaning. What seemed like an inexplicable attraction may become something you can speak about. What felt like an inevitable reaction may become something you can approach differently.
This does not mean that the past can be changed. It means that our relationship to what has happened, and to what continues to return, is not necessarily fixed. Psychoanalytic therapy offers a space to revisit these experiences and to explore what they may reveal about your relationships, your desires and the ways you understand yourself.
Sometimes the question is not simply how to stop repeating the same pattern. It is what the repetition has been trying to say.
Exploring relationship patterns in therapy
If you find yourself repeatedly experiencing the same difficulties in relationships, you do not necessarily need to arrive at therapy with an explanation. You can begin with the experience itself: something that keeps happening, something that feels difficult to understand, or something in your relationships that you would like to approach differently.
Psychoanalytic therapy provides a space to explore these questions with care and without judgement. If you are considering therapy in Sydney or online across Australia, you can learn more about psychoanalytic therapy and the first session or get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.