Why do people who felt ignored growing up sometimes find themselves fighting desperately to be heard by a partner? Why might someone terrified of abandonment pursue reassurance so intensely that their partner pulls away?
The past is often present. Our early relationships can shape how we connect with others as adults (Fraley et al., 2013; Tan et al., 2016). We may be drawn to partners who physically resemble our parents (Bereczkei et al., 2004). And even when our partners are quite different, we can find ourselves recreating similar emotional patterns (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2006) we experienced growing up (Fraley, 2002).
In over 15 years of helping clients navigate relationship struggles and trauma, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: Sometimes, in our attempts to heal old wounds, we can unintentionally reproduce them. Most of us have seen this happen with friends or family members who continually seem to find themselves in similarly painful situations. And if we look closely enough, we can probably recognize some version of this pattern in ourselves.
Freud (1920/1955) called this repetition compulsion: the tendency to revisit painful experiences or patterns, even when doing so seems to defy what we wish most deeply for ourselves.
One clinical explanation is that part of us is seeking a different ending. If I can finally get this unavailable person to love me, perhaps I can undo or heal the pain of the one who didn’t. But in trying to change the ending, we can find ourselves reliving the same story.
Why The Familiar Can Feel So Right
We’re drawn to what’s familiar, often without realizing it. Advertisers capitalize on this through the mere-exposure effect: Repeatedly seeing a product or brand can make us more likely to favor it, even when we don’t consciously remember seeing the advertisements (Janiszewski, 1993; Shapiro, 1999; Zajonc, 1968). But the mere-exposure effect can lead us to overlook a crucial truth: What feels familiar isn’t necessarily good for us.
This offers a useful analogy for why familiar relationship dynamics can feel so compelling, even when they’re unhealthy, potentially retraumatizing, and/or painful. Consider someone who grew up with a critical, emotionally distant parent. As an adult, they’re particularly sensitive to a partner’s distracted tone. They press for reassurance, then protest when it doesn’t come quickly enough. Their partner feels attacked and withdraws. Then the person is left feeling as they did growing up: alone, unwanted, and desperate to be understood. Neither partner intended this outcome, and their original hurt was real. Yet what began as an attempt to secure connection helped engender disconnection.
Research supports aspects of this pattern. Downey and colleagues (1998) found that women’s anxious expectations of rejection were associated with conflict behaviors that helped explain their partners’ more rejecting responses. Simpson and colleagues (1996) similarly showed that attachment orientations shaped responses to stressful relationship discussions. Bessel van der Kolk (1989) described how traumatic reminders can reactivate familiar responses, even when they perpetuate suffering.
But repetition compulsion is a clinical framework, not proof that people unconsciously seek mistreatment. A systematic review on revictimization found associations with prior maltreatment as risk factors but noted that these mechanisms are not completely understood (Fereidooni et al., 2024). None of this should ever blame someone for another person’s abuse.
These aren’t diagnostic criteria, but they may be clues to a repeating pattern worth getting curious about:
- A new conflict feels strangely like an old one, even with a different person.
- You react more intensely than the moment seems to call for.
- You keep choosing people who are unavailable in familiar ways.
- Your go-to move (i.e., pursuing, withdrawing, pleasing) tends to produce the very response you fear.
- You know what to do differently, but can’t seem to do it when it’s most needed.
When Protection Keeps the Wound Open
One idea I keep coming back to in my writing is how the very things we learned to do to protect ourselves can eventually hurt us. In my article on personality versus trauma coping, I discussed how what looks like a fixed personality trait can sometimes be a response to earlier pain or trauma. Hypervigilance, people-pleasing, withdrawal, or relentless attempts to be understood may have helped us cope in the past, but can work against us in the present. This connects with my malnutrition metaphor for trauma: When something essential was missing, we may keep searching for it, sometimes from people who cannot give it. I touched on a similar paradox recently on addiction: our attempts to escape painful disconnection can sometimes leave us feeling even more disconnected.
How Do We Break the Cycle?
First, you can notice any emotional familiarity. Ask, “When have I felt this way before?” As I’ve written about emotional triggers, they can provide clues to unhealed wounds rather than simply problems to suppress.
Second, you can identify your protective move(s). When you feel unwanted, do you pursue, criticize, overexplain, shut down, or disappear? What are you hoping it will accomplish? And then: what does it actually elicit? What are you trying to protect yourself from feeling?
Third, you can work to create a genuinely different experience. I’ve argued that communication skills alone can fail when the deeper sense of safety is missing. Sometimes we need to work through the experiences that taught us to respond this way (such as with EMDR therapy), rather than focusing exclusively on changing our current behavior. In a qualitative study, my colleagues and I explored therapists’ experiences integrating EMDR and emotionally focused therapy to address both past wounds and the relationship patterns and/or cycles they may perpetuate (Linder et al., 2022). Although promising, this integration needs further outcome research.
In practice, creating something different might mean expressing hurt instead of attacking, asking for comfort rather than criticizing a withdrawing partner, or acknowledging feelings of overwhelm instead of shutting down. It might mean setting a boundary despite fearing someone’s disappointment, or grieving the care a parent couldn’t give rather than repeatedly seeking it from someone similarly unavailable.
The challenge isn’t merely knowing what to do differently. It’s learning to tolerate uncomfortable, sometimes unfamiliar feelings accompanying it.
And the goal isn’t to find the perfect person who will finally rewrite our childhood. It’s to recognize when the past is directing the present and gradually create something different.
The deep irony is that we don’t heal the original wound by winning the old struggle, but by no longer having to keep fighting it.
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