Why We Repeat What Hurts Us: The Pull of Familiar Pain
TL;DR: Psychodynamic therapist Rick Cox explains how repetition compulsion keeps you stuck in destructive relationship patterns. Discover how depth work targets unconscious conflict and builds the courage needed for emotional freedom.
We walk the same spirals not because we want the pain, but because it’s the only path we’ve ever known
The Strange Comfort of Familiar Pain
Why do we find ourselves back in the same toxic relationships? Why do we keep quitting jobs right before success, or suddenly push away the people we care about most? The patterns are painful, yet they return with relentless, exhausting predictability.
This is the central paradox of psychological suffering: The familiar pain feels safer than the unknown, until we realise repetition isn’t protection.
I see this phenomenon as the engine of unconscious conflict. Your system is not intentionally choosing suffering; it is attempting to manage old, unhealed wounds.
This article explores why your mind is pulled toward destructive, familiar territory, and how therapy is the courageous act required to break the cycle.
How the Cycle Works: Feelings → Anxiety → Defences → Repetition
When a feeling starts to surface: anger, grief, shame, anxiety rises.
To manage that anxiety, we defend:
We rationalise. We please. We withdraw, and each time we defend, we avoid the feeling that could have changed us.
This is the FAD in motion, and because the feeling never gets processed, the story restarts, new person, same pattern.
The Logic of Repetition: A Failed Attempt at Mastery
The repeating patterns, relationship struggles, self-sabotage, and the surge of anxiety are not random. They are the unfinished businesses of your life.
The unconscious mind operates under a desperate, hidden logic: by re-enacting the scenario you lost in the past (e.g., abandonment, criticism, emotional neglect), you give yourself one more chance to master it, to change the ending, or simply to survive it again in a predictable way.
This creates a pervasive sense of being stuck. The fear of the unknown outcome of healthy change feels far more dangerous than the known misery of the familiar repetition. This clinging to the familiar pain is, tragically, a defence mechanism against the terrifying vulnerability required for genuine emotional growth.
Breaking the Cycle: The ISTDP-Informed Approach
We engage in depth work because surface-level coping strategies only provide temporary relief. To interrupt the automatic pull of familiar pain, we must directly confront the emotional avoidance that feeds the cycle.
Drawing on ISTDP principles, therapy focuses on using the relational space to expose the pattern in real-time as it happens, strengthening your ability to manage the feelings rather than discharge them through repetition. We apply The Therapy FAD Framework (Feelings–Anxiety–Defence) to this destructive loop:
• Feelings: By tolerating the anxiety, you gain emotional access to the emotional truth fully experienced and named in real time. When the original, buried feeling is processed, the unconscious need to repeat the pain dissolves.
• Anxiety: The courage in therapy lies in developing your capacity to tolerate your own anxiety and sit through the distress rather than running back to the 'comfort' of the familiar pattern.
• Defence: The repeating pattern (the argument, the withdrawal, the emotional numbing) is the immediate defence that protects you from the underlying core feeling.
Where Fear Meets Freedom
You came to therapy because you are tired of emotionally surviving. You want a life that feels more your own, more connected, more grounded, and more yourself.
The most profound realisation in this work is that the pattern is simply a burden you've been carrying. The pain you feel isn’t who you are. Psychological pain doesn’t define you. Breaking free from the pull of familiar pain requires courage to face the fears that have held you captive, but it is exactly where freedom begins.
Repetition and avoidance are siblings, one circles pain, the other flees it. Two Types of Emotional Avoidance in Relationships shows how both keep love at a distance.
If this reflection resonated, you might explore:
You’re Not Relating. You’re Re-Enacting…
Why Therapy? The Real Question Nobody Asks
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
Familiar pain holds you in a double bind; it’s survival. Until safety is real.
Explore more in depth
Are you repeating things that hurt you?
If this topic connects with your experience, discover how I help clients work through it…
FAQ: Why We Repeat What Hurts Us
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Because your nervous system recognises familiarity, not safety. You’re drawn to what once felt unresolved.
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It’s a sign that something inside still needs to be felt and integrated. It’s an opportunity, not a failure.
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By noticing the pattern in real time and learning to stay with the feelings that drive it, instead of escaping them.
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That part is protecting you from pain. In therapy, we respect its purpose while exploring what lies beneath it.
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Awareness is the first step, but feeling is what completes it. Change happens when insight meets emotion.
