You’re Not Relating. You’re Re-Enacting…
TL;DR: Psychodynamic depth work explains why you repeat painful relationship patterns. Discover how therapy targets repetition compulsion and emotional avoidance to help you break free from the past and find genuine intimacy.
Re-enactment is the body’s way of remembering what the mind forgot.
The Invisible Script
Why does every relationship eventually end in the same argument?
Why do you keep choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable?
Why do you suddenly push away the very person you crave closeness with?
The painful feeling is that you are cursed, wired to ruin the connections you most desire. But this pattern isn't random failure; it is a profound, unconscious attempt at protection.
In depth psychotherapy, we recognise this repeating cycle not as relating, but as re-enactment. Your relationships are not unfolding spontaneously; they are following an invisible script written long ago, a script dictated by old, unresolved relational wounds that silently guide new attachments.
The anxiety and disappointment you feel in the present are the symptoms of this past living on inside you.
The Necessity of Repetition
Why do we repeat what hurts us? As a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I see repetition compulsion not as a mistake, but as a desperate, unconscious attempt to master or finally ‘win’ the scenario you lost in childhood.
• The Unconscious Pattern: If intimacy meant abandonment or rejection early on, your mind will unconsciously seek relationships that contain those familiar risks, and then sabotage them before true closeness can solidify. It feels safer to return to the familiar pain than step into the terrifying unknown of healthy connection.
• The Comfort of the Known: The internal world believes that if you can replay the trauma with a predictable outcome, the argument, the withdrawal, the distance, you maintain a measure of control. The defensive pattern feels necessary, even if it leaves you feeling trapped and stuck.
In therapy, we understand that these patterns, the self-sabotage, the defensive walls, are the strategies you’ve used to survive. But surviving emotionally is not the same as living fully.
The Therapeutic Crucible: Breaking the Cycle
If you want to move beyond these destructive cycles, you must first bring the unconscious pattern into the light. This is the core task of psychodynamic therapy.
We use the therapeutic relationship itself as a crucible to identify the re-enactment as it happens. When you fear opening up, when you try to prematurely end therapy, or when you find yourself projecting old feelings onto me, that is the repetition trying to play out.
In line with ISTDP principles, breaking the pattern requires courage and active engagement.
1. Naming the Script: We identify the specific defence mechanism you use to protect yourself (e.g., intellectualising, blaming, withdrawing).
2. Connecting the Past to the Present: We link the present impulse to destroy closeness back to its root cause in your history.
3. Feeling the Truth: We gently, yet firmly, confront the emotional avoidance that maintains the cycle, encouraging you to experience the original feeling (grief, anger, pain) that you never allowed yourself to feel fully before.
When you fully feel that emotional truth within the safety of a non-re-enacting relationship, the old script loses its power.
From Repetition to Connection
You are not destined to repeat what hurts you. You come to therapy tired of feeling stuck and ready to invest in long-term change.
True relating happens when you are guided by your authentic self, not by the defences built in your past. This involves transforming fear of closeness into the capacity for intimacy.
Therapy is the courageous step toward recognising that the pain you feel isn’t who you are; it’s what you’ve carried. When you stop relating through old pain, you finally discover what changes when you stop running from it. This is where your emotional freedom begins.
Re-enactment and repetition are twin defences, one relives pain, the other avoids it. In both, love becomes something we circle instead of claim. See how we avoid in;
Why We Repeat What Hurts Us: The Pull of Familiar Pain
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
The Psychology of the Inner Critic: How the Voice Inside You Took Power
Re-enactment isn’t proof you’re broken, it’s proof your pain is trying to finish a story.
Explore more in depth
Are you re-enacting?
If this topic connects with your experience, discover how I help clients work through it…
FAQ: You’re Not Relating, You’re Re-Enacting
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Re-enactment is when old attachment wounds replay in present relationships. Your body and emotions react to current events as if they were past threats, pulling you into familiar cycles of pursuit, withdrawal, or collapse.
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Insight alone doesn’t rewire the nervous system. Until the body feels safe enough to experience love differently, it defaults to the old survival map. Therapy helps bridge that gap between knowing and feeling.
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Therapy provides a safe, attuned relationship where old dynamics can surface and be worked through consciously. Over time, the nervous system learns that closeness no longer equals danger, and connection becomes possible without collapse or defence.
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They’re related but distinct. Trauma bonding involves dependency and reinforcement within an unsafe relationship. Re-enactment is the unconscious repetition of earlier emotional patterns, even in otherwise healthy relationships, until those patterns are brought into awareness.
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Notice and name what’s happening in the moment. Labelling activation: 'This is old' re-engages the thinking brain and interrupts automatic emotional memory. From there, regulation and reflection become possible.
