Your Mind Is Trying to Heal You (By Hurting You)

Many of us dimly sense that despite ourselves, unfortunately and mysteriously,

we keep ending up in some very similar dark places.

Perhaps another relationship with someone who doesn't seem to love us properly

or another breakdown of trust at work

or another panic about reputation

or sex or else the repeated patterns involve a return to a background mood.

Yet again, we feel highly anxious.

Yet again, we feel convinced

that everyone hates us

or that something terrible is about to happen.

Psychotherapists have given all this a name in

so far as we keep steering ourselves back to some familiar negative circumstances

or emotions.

We may be in the grip of what is known as a repetition compulsion.

We aren't here again by coincidence.

We are in an unconscious part of our minds steering ourselves to a place

of pain with hidden intent.

This is a hugely perplexing notion to have to take on board.

It's bad enough to keep winding up in particular trouble.

It's even worse to have to think

that we're being driven towards it by some kind of inelectable internal force.

We naturally want to repeat pleasure, but why seek to repeat frustration, sabotage,

and alarm?

Psychotherapists have a suggestion.

We can never let go of any negative experience, they tell us,

until it has been fully understood.

An issue will remain active for us, even if it's decades old,

so long as it's not been acknowledged

and its emotional resonance identified

and allowed to dissipate.

The experiences that we are driven to repeat are,

these therapists go on to say,

precisely those that we've not been able to square up to.

We repeat what we've sidestepped and left unagnowledged.

A part of our minds is committed to forcing us back to a zone

of original difficulty,

not in order that we suffer aimlessly,

but so that we may eventually find freedom through understanding.

Therefore, in this account, we aren't seeking simply to be unhappy.

An emotional conscience is pushing us towards the location of our buried truths in

the name of eventual release.

Our sad and anxious rehearsals are like ghosts

that keep manifesting themselves until a foundational injustice is uncovered

and worked through.

Psychotherapy points out that the patterns we are most likely to be repeating are

ones that date back to childhood

because this is the period

when we are both least able to understand what's going on in ourselves

and most at the mercy of adults around us.

We may in our search for release from our repetitions need to be very

brave in remembering what might have gone on many years before.

Matters were perhaps not as simple as we might have assumed.

If we keep nowadays finding ourselves in a panic

that someone will try to humiliate us

or if we seek love from distracted

and incapable people or spoil our professional chances.

We may need to wonder how might our negative patterns be following in the

tracks of earlier pains.

What our impulse to repeat is in essence inviting us to do is to

pause and mourn.

Just as we have to do when someone we love dies,

we need to stop evading our suffering

and give ourselves time to absorb it from a range of angles at multiple

points of day and night

and in relation to different moods.

We may have to mourn

that our father's sexuality was far too complicated

or that our mother couldn't deal with our vulnerability

or that a sibling was favored

or that we've made a mess of our adult love lives

because we've grown up without an ability to trust

or assert ourselves.

The reward for doing this painful work is

that eventually our minds can be expected to relent.

Once we've kept an appointment with our primal griefs,

we can gradually hope to drift away from them.

and the patterns to

which they've given rise.

The part of us

that isn't able to rest until the truth has been exumed will let us

plow new,

less frightened tracks once it's sufficiently convinced that we have finally mourned and understood.