What drives trauma survivors to unconsciously recreate their traumatic experiences? Why do some people feel compelled to seek out situations that mirror their past trauma?
In Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine explores the concept of repetition compulsion, which sometimes happens when people’s bodies naturally attempt to process traumatic events. Too often, however, this experience does further harm.
Keep reading to discover why trauma survivors may unconsciously reenact their past traumas, and learn how this pattern affects their path to healing.
Repetition Compulsion & Trauma
Levine details something that occurs when the body’s natural psychological healing process goes awry: repetition compulsion—a trauma survivor’s unconscious drive to repeatedly act out the incident that originally traumatized them.
This compulsion comes from an instinctual drive to process the traumatic event. Unfortunately, if someone lacks the awareness necessary to allow their body to finish processing their trauma, this drive can cause them to play out the traumatic event in the real world rather than internally.
Repetition compulsion can lead to dangerous or self-destructive behaviors. For example, someone who experienced emotional abuse in childhood might repeatedly seek out romantic partners who are critical and demeaning, unconsciously recreating their childhood dynamic. Or, a person who experienced food scarcity in their early years could develop an eating disorder as an adult: They might alternate between periods of binging food and intentionally starving, reenacting the cycle of feast and famine from their past.
Levine explains that this kind of repetition offers a way for the body to release some of its pent-up traumatic energy. For this reason, it can make a person feel better—but only temporarily. Ultimately, unless they fully complete their body’s natural trauma recovery process, they’ll unconsciously chase the relief of repetition and reenact the traumatic event for the rest of their life.
| Repetition Compulsion as an Escape From Numbness In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk offers an alternative explanation for why people feel compelled to reenact their traumatic experiences. Traumatized people often go through life feeling emotionally numb and disconnected from their lives. According to van der Kolk, reliving the traumatic event provides them with a rush of emotions that’s otherwise absent in their day-to-day lives. There’s a physiological explanation for the craving of intense emotional stress: Trauma survivors become addicted to the stress-induced endorphins that their brain secretes when they relive their traumatic experience. In their daily lives, they experience withdrawal from these endorphins as pain. Although finding a way to reexperience something traumatic isn’t necessarily pleasant—and it’s potentially dangerous and self-destructive—it helps relieve this pain. |
