Episode 222 - Psychology : Stop choosing the wrong partners (understanding repetition compulsion in relationships)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Ayurveda and Psychology podcast. I am Charlotte Scoxberg, psychologist, Ayurvedic practitioner, and yoga teacher. This is a space where we explore the path of self-realization through the physical, mental, and spiritual spectrums. In each episode, I share practical tools from the ancient wisdom of Yoga and Ayurveda, as well as the modern approach to the human mind of clinical psychology. In order to help you reconnect with yourself, understand your nature, and live with more awareness. In this episode that focuses on psychology, I want to speak about relationships, but I want to speak more specifically on why we choose partners who tend to mirror our wounds. It's a topic that is mostly relevant and always a hot topic because, well, let's just face it, life is actually relationships. So let's kick off this new year with a really sweet spot of wounding. Why do we have this tendency to end up with the kind of partners that we have? Even better, why do we keep finding maybe similar partners over and over? Before we get into the episode, if you are new to the podcast, let me welcome you to this worldwide community and to also remind you that you can connect with us as well through the newsletter, and you find the link for that in the show notes. If you are coming back to the podcast, here is what I know about you. You're committed to a life worth living, and you are certain that this is achieved from knowing yourself because this anchors you and creates self-empowerment. Anyone who comes from an anchored and self-empowered place will go out into the world and create meaningful relationships. From the very first one, that is the one with themselves, and then extend that to the relationship with others. If you are here because someone in your life shared this episode with you, I would like to congratulate you because you are someone who people care about. I hope that you will enjoy the episode just as much as the person who sent it to you. It is interesting, I find, that many people will find someone where it seems very much at the start as if they complete each other. And then after some time, it feels as if they ended up with the person who is the most opposite to them. I somewhere read some kind of meme or something that said, in this world there's two types of people, those who find 10 p.m. being late, and those who find 10 p.m. being early. And they usually end up getting married. And there's a certain truth in this. And I want to clarify something that I believe is super important, and that is the tendency that many of us have towards this romanticizing when it comes to relationships, and especially when it comes to complicated situations, relationships that might not be very healthy, actually, where there's repetition of certain behaviors, and the romanticizing usually is linked to some kind of notion of chemistry. And I believe that our tendency is to romanticize because we are actually rejecting a reality that is much less flattering. Now, let's also put a disclaimer on this. I believe that there are various ways to approach the question of today. And I'm going to, because I said that it's an episode on psychology, I'm going to approach it from a psychological perspective. I'm going to base myself on the notions of Freud very much in that. However, I believe that, like I said when I started, life is actually a relationship, and that goes far beyond the fact that, well, we all have relationships, it's that life happens in a duality. Something exists in relation to something else. And therefore, the actual spiritual notion is unseparable from the psychological perspective, which means that I'm going to speak about two kind of perspectives, and why not one of them? Well, that they're one together. Maybe you have heard someone say, or even felt yourself, that they meet someone or you meet someone and it feels as if you've known each other forever. Or that the match you have with the person is incredible, and it's as if you've met in a different lifetime. And this is where, of course, we need to, you know, raise a finger and say, hold on, because it is very easy to go into spiritual bypassing around all of this and twin flames and soul contracts, and I don't know what other words or expressions have been used where someone is just feeling this like really strong chemistry. I'm not saying that it means that there's something unhealthy or not good with that kind of relationship. I'm just saying that there's a reality that also explains something less romantic behind it. And I believe that it's important to keep that in mind, especially if we do decide to finally enter a relationship with someone and have a conscious and adult commitment to them. When it comes to relationships, we really are masters at fooling ourselves. It's really the road to hell paved with good intentions or actually paid with spiritual bypassing over and over again. And there's a lot of truths, so don't get me wrong, in many of these more spiritual perspectives when it comes to love and making sacred commitments to another person. But I also believe that it leaves a lot of space for some of the biggest misconceptions and well, to use a very trendy buzzword, trauma responses, if you will. I believe that the biggest mistake we make, especially when we come from this more new age perspective on relationship, is the idea that it doesn't take effort, that there's nothing we need to work on, that it should just flow naturally. It could not be further from the truth. And I have seen relationships where there was not, let's say, so much effort in the sense that the two people just never actually had any kind of conflicts or fight really. But that also means that they didn't really show their true and naked and raw side to each other. So there's a certain lack of trust in that kind of situation. And is it really you or some kind of faux self that you're committing in this relationship? So I want to start with this more psychological perspective or psychoanalytical perspective, really. And then I'm going to come back to this more spiritual notion, which actually makes it so much richer, which is why it's actually growth for you. See, once again, relationship is life. Psychologically, if we would come back to our good friend Sigmund Freud, he would talk to us about a very important aspect of the unconscious mind that is very much at play in relationships, but in our adult life, especially when we do things that kind of escapes us. When we do things that we don't really get why we do them. Freud called this the repetition compulsion. And you have already experienced it, I'm quite sure, where there's something that just escapes you. Something about yourself, maybe a behavior or some kind of reaction from someone else of how you've been acting, that you just really can't wrap your head around. And so it sticks with you. Something that really escapes your understanding. Remember how humans really have this need to make sense of things. We need to understand the logic, see the patterns of recognition, if you will, which is actually kind of the same mechanism. And so as long as we haven't, we can kind of get stuck on it because if it doesn't make sense to us, we can't kind of let it go. And in many ways, especially when it comes to maybe someone's reaction to our behavior that we can't understand, it can very much be a question of our ego's necessity to well, to save itself, to keep itself intact. Because if there's something we cannot support, it's the idea that we are, well, bad, that we are fragmented. And when it comes to our experiences from the past, from our childhood, we're doing this exact same thing. This idea that there are things in the past that weren't logic or didn't make sense, and so it got stuck with us, and it's with us, and it sits there like a blockage. So wounds that happen back in childhood, but that were never healed, will therefore have this tendency to blossom up in current situations because it wasn't solved. So it's the idea of the trigger, right? When something is happening in our adult life and it triggers us a lot, and especially if it's a very strong reaction. Let's say even that it's such a strong reaction that others, or even maybe ourselves, would feel as if we don't understand why we react that way. It seems as if we are overreacting. That you can be sure is something from the past, a wound that wasn't healed and that has been triggered by whatever is going on in the current situation. Why is it triggered? Because the current situation is similar to what happened when the wound happened originally. Right? So if you find it hard to get that information, you will notice this even in your own physical body. If you have hurt your knee in a certain way and it doesn't really heal properly, you can walk around and be very careful of not putting your knee in the same position, and that will work pretty well. But if there is something much later on where maybe you've even forgotten about the injury, where your knee happens to fold in the same way that it did when the wounding happened, if this then wasn't healed, you will definitely feel that wound again. Makes sense, right? So it's really the same thing. Unconsciously, we will put ourselves in the same situation over and over to experience the same thing because somewhere inside of us, we are trying to make sense of the original wound with the hope that the outcome will be different so that we can heal. It's really very fascinating because this part there is part of this, what escapes us, right? The compulsion of repetition is really a mechanism that exists in our unconscious that is trying to make us understand, to learn, to remember something that we are, but that we have, for whatever reason, not been able to understand, to learn, or to remember. As long as this is not, let's say, integrated, understood, the unconscious mind will make us repeat over and over again, as if it's kind of this like someone's poking you until you become aware that they poke you, so you turn around and face the person. And it's fascinating to me because actually each and one of us, and very often in our lives, have these blind spots really. These things that escape us that we can't really wrap our head around, but that keeps happening. And this is of course what we have come to call later on self-sabotage. I would say that this is also why somewhere everyone, especially if you haven't really started looking into things about yourself, but even then there's there's a part of ourselves that is always going to be a bit of a mystery. Like understanding ourselves is actually not that easy because there's a part that just seems so mysterious that we don't grasp, and this is kind of we can say then, I guess, the unconscious part of us. So all of those things that are still active, but that we haven't been able to pinpoint and give a reason to and explain. Now, this is of course very, very active as soon as we come into situations where this repetition compulsion happens, meaning things from the past that haven't been resolved. You might ask me here, why is it then that there's certain things that we do learn and that there are things that we are capable of remembering so that we're not in this repetition? Well, usually it would probably mean that the concept of learning it, of integrating it, was too painful in the moment that our psyche was not at a point where it was ready to learn. This is a really crucial thing to understand when it comes to relationships and when it comes to the therapeutic work you might do on your own or with some kind of guidance. Things will be integrated when your psyche has come to a point where it feels that it is ready to receive it. This is, for instance, the reason that some people need to feel really, really safe with someone, and then they're starting to remember things from the past that they had pushed away for a very long time. This is also why, when I say that in a relationship where two people are never in conflict and everything just flows, I wonder if that is really you showing your authentic self or some kind of faux self instead. Because really, I would claim that when we feel very safe with someone, that is when the stuff that are a bit more raw starts to manifest. Because we actually trust this is not to mistake from the kind of dramatic and painful dynamics that certain people seem to have in their relationship, and that it might even be the only way that they know how to relate to another person. Those are two very different things, and I would say that the biggest difference between the two is that the one that is raw and authentic and trusting, well, it feels trustworthy, and usually it has started with the whole honeymoon phase and all of that, where two people just get more and more in sync with each other, and then things from the deep starts to come to the surface. Whereas the other one tends to be a lot of play, role, role-playing, let's say, and and fakeness and games and things like that. And so there's nothing really of trust in there, and you know it because you feel it. If you say that you believe something else, it's usually because you don't really want to face the truth. So to make it extremely simple to explain this whole idea of the repetition of something from the past, it's kind of this I have a wound from the past because I had an emotionally immature parent raising me. And if I manage to get now in my adult life, this person who is emotionally immature as well, to commit to me, I will have healed my wound of the emotional negligence that I had as a child, which means that I will have broken the pattern. I will have been able to prove to myself that I am not wrong. There's nothing wrong with me, I am not broken. It's important, it's very important this for us because, and I've spoken, I believe, in the past about this, children will always automatically take on themselves when their parent is acting wrong. It is too threatening to our survival. To imagine that the parent is flawed or that the parent actually doesn't love us because it means that we're at risk of survival, right? And therefore, a parent who acts badly, let's say, we will first of all, as children, tell ourselves that, well, this is what love is, right? So the person is loving me, they will not leave me, and most probably if the parent did something wrong, I am to blame for it. And so, for that reason, when there was wounding, it had us believe that it was because there was something wrong with us, not with the parent. And even better, this is what we registered what love is. One of the reasons that the whole it feels so familiar, it feels so good, it feels like such a perfect match, can be a bit of a red flag, not always, of course, is this exact thing. See, if we have a record in ourselves of what safety, love, and home feel like, but that is not necessarily very healthy and doesn't make us feel trusting in because of a parent who mistreated us. Now, if that is recorded in us as what love is, and we meet someone who has those tendencies, we will recognize that and we will recognize it and put the equal sign on it with love. So this is why we also need to be quite careful when it comes to wow, it feels just so familiar. It seems to be a perfect match. Now, how does this play in to the fact that we tend to find partners who therefore mirror us? Well, because of this wounding that exists inside of us and the repetition compulsion, later on in life, whenever we meet someone who has a similar way about them. Now, this is far beyond the conscious mind actually, because it's a way we we feel it very, very intuitively. So we can say later on, but I didn't know that when I met them. There is something in there that will naturally speak to us. We will be very drawn towards it. First and foremost. And there's this part inside of us that tells us that this is it. This feels familiar, this is where I can heal my wound. I will feel complete if this person commits to me and treats me in the way that I wanted to be treated when the wound happened originally. But to make the whole thing even more interesting, the whole reason that that person has that quality is because of their wound as well. And they tend to be perfect matches to each other. Isn't that ironic? This is of course why we then have this whole running after someone who's running away, and then we run away when they come after us kind of dynamic. It is perfectly mirroring, repeating the patterns from our childhood with our parents, and the partner is therefore representing the role of the parent. And this is why we have the belief that we will heal as we win them over. So what makes this so difficult to detect, there's several reasons for that. One of the biggest ones is that the wounding that happened from our parents is something that already in childhood we would not acknowledge as a default in our parent. And much later on in adult life, we might be ready to see that, to see the flawed person that the parent is, to take them down from their pedestal. But actually, often that is also very hard because there's so much guilt linked to recognizing this. We might in adult life see that maybe there's something there, but we feel so guilty in the as the adult to acknowledge it that this becomes a really sore point in our psyche. And so, of course, like we do with anything else that feels painful, we will find all kinds of ways of avoiding it. For instance, by pretending that it's not there, so deflecting away from it, and instead just allow the unconscious to repeat the situation over and over again with various new partners, for instance, always hoping that at some point this will heal and it will prove that I am not back. The other part of this, which also makes it very hard, is that because of how this was registered inside of us, our nervous system does not actually feel very safe with it. And we have then turned this into this, you know, chemistry idea of butterflies in the belly and so on and so forth. The fact that the more we have to work for something, the more desirable it is, and so on. If things are very kind of logical and safe and kind of just structured, all of a sudden we get the feeling that we've lost the touch, that that you know, Hollywood romantic feeling isn't there, that it almost feels like an arranged situation instead. And so this is the second thing that makes it so hard to first of all acknowledge pinpoint and then actually try to work on it. Remember, I have said it more than once before, the very famous quote from Carl Jung that says that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it faith. So that's also why a lot of the time there is this romantic romantic idea of it being faith, of it being destiny. And what the reality tells us is that there's a pattern inside of us that makes it repeat certain behaviors, which is why we will, you know, like the hand inside of a glove fit perfectly with someone that has the similar wounding, wounding, but been put in the opposite dynamic with the parent. Which leads me on to a very important part, which is the responsibility that you need to take yourself in the situation that you are in. When we have relationship dynamics that are not healthy and where we end up feeling as if we repeat similar dynamics, it's very easy to go into the whole all men are this, all women are that kind of thing, right? And yes, the other person might put you in a certain role, right? Of the savior, of the mother, of the safe one, or whatever it might be. But you have also accepted that role from them. As long as you cannot acknowledge that you've accepted to have that role that they wanted you to be in, you cannot change anything because you are still putting yourself in a victim role. So that is really important. Whatever situation you are in with a person, and it doesn't feel as if this is good, it is far too easy to paint the other one in black, let's say, and say that they're the shameful one. But you are part of that dynamic. It takes two to tango, like they say. And this is going to be a very important part of the process of getting out of those dynamics. Because, yes, there is a possibility to get out of the dynamic with that person, and there's also a possibility to get out of the dynamic and start meeting other kinds of people, if that is what you think is more important. Now, because I've spoken about that, I really want to get into the more spiritual aspect of things. And I'm going to come back to what I said earlier on about how life in itself is relationship. So we can really base ourselves on this idea that we live in a dualistic universe. This means that everything exists in contrast to something else. We know what white is only when we've integrated what black is. The contrast is what creates our understanding and therefore makes everything into a relationship. If we would acknowledge the idea that we come into this life with a goal of expansion. So I want to keep it very broad by saying that, not necessarily going into Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianism, and whatever, because actually, if you look into most faiths, belief system, there is some kind of notion that there is a purpose for our being in this life. And that that purpose has a capacity to expand, to enlarge. Very often we just even speak of we're here to love. Love is expansion, creation, connection. As opposed to fear, that would be more contraction, rejection, right? Moving away from separation. If we integrate, therefore, this idea that we come into this world as with a goal to expand, and that we live in a universe that is dualistic. In order for us to expand, we need to experience contrast. In order to experience contrast, we need to enter relationship. What I find the most fascinating with this idea is that for that reason, we enter relationships almost somewhere knowingly, as if the collective consciousness knew that that specific relationship is going to be a really good way to expand. All of a sudden, this would also, from a more spiritual place, therefore, explain why we would enter relationship with people who would absolutely trigger those wounds that we haven't healed from the past, because it gives us the opportunity to actually learn and grow and stop repeating. I have an Ayurvedic Lifestyle cookbook, and if you sign up right now, you will get a free recipe sent to you from that cookbook. You find the details in the show notes. Personally, I believe that one of the best ways this understanding has helped me is how I choose to position myself in relationship to another person. Because it's very easy to go into this idea of blaming the other one. This person is making me feel this and that and the other, and therefore they are bad. I know that I didn't come into this with any bad intentions, and so if this is happening and I'm feeling all this shame or guilt or whatever it might be, it must be because they are bad. And so instead of then, for instance, just feeling like a victim, ending that relationship, and move on to the next, where once again we fool ourselves that it's the one and it feels so much chemistry, and this time, this time, I'm going to be the chosen one. Maybe what we need to do is to, well, just dig where you stand, to start to look in what is going on here. How can this reveal something about myself that maybe I need to learn? Now, disclaimer again. Obviously, I would never encourage anyone who is in an abusive relationship to stay in that relationship. There might be several reasons that you need to end that relationship and leave, and then you can work on things on your own. 100%. However, if you are with someone where you feel that both of you are actually interested in making this grow, that there are good intentions and that there is some level of capacity to communicate with each other, there's hope. And more importantly, you gotta want to. If both of you are actually interested in making this something for you a growing time, let's say this relationship, there is potential. And one of the first things is maybe to begin recognizing in certain situations with one another that are conflicts of some kind or where you don't feel good, noticing what it is that you are feeling in that moment. So, for instance, to take an example in order to illustrate this a little bit better, maybe, I was having this conversation with a patient of mine, and the typical thing of a conflict with the partner. And for instance, and this is definitely something I can relate to myself, if someone becomes angry, right? When there's like this burst of anger that comes out of your partner, notice how that makes you feel. If it makes you feel as if all of a sudden you are very, very small, that you are helpless and powerless, then maybe you are reliving something from the past. Because, of course, as a small child, when a parent becomes very angry, you literally are powerless. You're small, you're probably not at that age capable of even removing yourself from the situation. And so you're really in their power. But when you are with another adult and you're an adult and you've managed to do lots of things in life, you are absolutely capable of maintaining your own power in that situation. You might even be capable of seeing that that person is getting angry. But because they're getting angry is not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are bad or wrong. Maybe they get angry because of their wounding. But if you allow their anger to empower you that much to make you feel the freeze, you know, like the deer in the headlights, it's as if you've forgotten in that moment that you are now that adult. So in conflictual situations, it's really interesting to see if you can make a pause and observe what you are experiencing, and then see if what you're feeling is adequate to the current situation, or if it's something that you would say belongs more to a child version of yourself. Another thing that I just want to mention here that I think can be interesting as you work together with someone. This is sometimes actually called sattvik uh communication. It is when there is this conflict or a misunderstanding, and you know how it happens, people are yelling at each other, no one's really listening. Like active listening is such an important part of this, and so many people are completely incapable of doing it. And why is that? Of course, because they were never treated with active listening as children. But one thing that can be super interesting to do is instead of allowing for that conflict to trigger you and to react, choose to act, which means that you let the person speak until they stop, however long that is. I know that can be hard. And then you choose to reformulate basically what they are saying. You say, if I understand, you're telling me this, this, this, this, this. And you will notice that it kind of disarms the anger of the other person. Because actually, when we get angry, it's because we're trying to outpower the feeling of helplessness that really lays there underneath. And the helplessness usually has come in because there's a lack of acknowledgement or listening. So the simple fact of being listened to, to be heard, is going to take the anger away. Alright, now If this is something that you would like to expand on more, I would absolutely invite you to take action, even just for yourself, whether you are in a relationship or not, and start looking into the potential patterns of behavior that has been repeated in various relationships with yourself. And you might want to do this in the situation of a therapeutic journey. Do not forget that you can absolutely get in touch with me for a free discovery call in order to see if it is something for you and to also see if, well, the way I do things work for you. You find the link to booking this free call in the show notes. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Ayurveda and Psychology Podcast. If this content resonated with you and you feel ready to go deeper in your healing journey, you can book a personalized session with me or explore my programs. At the website, you find the link in the show notes. You can also follow me on Instagram at iurveda.psychology where I share rituals, tips, and weekly reflections. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who might need it or leave a review. It helps this community to grow. I'll see you next Friday with a new episode. Take care and stay grounded.