Same story, new cast
Find the plot that keeps repeating in your life, the part you play in it, and one move to change.
Key takeaways
- Freud noticed that people repeat painful old patterns instead of remembering them, and called it the compulsion to repeat.
- A repeating story has a plot: how it starts, what you do, how it ends. The cast changes; your part usually doesn't.
- Find your move in the plot, the one that is up to you, and pick the moment to do something different. Expect it to feel wrong at first.
The cotton reel
Freud once watched his 18-month-old grandson play a game with a wooden reel on a string. The boy threw it over the side of his cot so that it disappeared, with a long "o-o-o-o", which the family took to be fort, German for "gone". Then he pulled it back with a delighted da, "there". He played it again and again.
Freud connected the game to the boy's mother, who sometimes went out and left him for hours. The boy couldn't stop her leaving. In the game, he was in charge of the leaving and the coming back. Freud thought adults do something similar with the painful situations of their past: they keep recreating them, as if trying to get them to come out differently.
“The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”
Freud's later explanation for why we repeat, a "death drive", has not held up. The observation has. Later therapies kept it and gave it new names. Schema therapy, for example, calls these patterns lifetraps: the same painful plot, recreated in new places with new people.
How a story repeats
Some familiar plots:
- Partners who seem exciting at first and turn out to be unavailable.
- Jobs where you end up doing everything and feeling unappreciated.
- Friendships you end at the first real disappointment.
- Bosses you always end up fighting.
Stories repeat in a few ways. Familiar feels right, so the old kind of person can feel like chemistry and the safe kind like boredom. You make the same moves, and they tend to pull the same responses from other people. And you read new situations through the old story, so you see the ending coming before it's there, and sometimes help it arrive.
Question 1 of 2
Which of these is most likely a repeating story?
Changing the plot
Finding your story
- Collect the episodes
Write down three or four times things went wrong in a similar way.
- Find the plot
How does it start, what happens in the middle, how does it end? Look for what's the same, not what's different.
- Find your move
What do you do each time? Not who's to blame, just the part that's yours, because that's the part you can change.
- Name where you learned it
When did you first live this story? You don't need a full history, just a recognition.
- Pick the moment
"Next time, at the point where I usually ___, I'll ___ instead." Expect the new move to feel wrong, or even dangerous. That's what unfamiliar feels like.
Freud called the slow part "working through": seeing the pattern once isn't enough, and you'll catch yourself halfway through the old plot many times. Catching it halfway is progress. If the story goes back to something traumatic, work on it with a therapist.
Sofia's friendships
Three times in the last five years, Sofia has become very close to a new friend very fast. She does a lot for them: favors, rides, long talks at midnight. She never asks for much back. Then, one day, they forget something that matters to her, and she ends the friendship with a long message about how she always gives and never gets.
Her newest friend, Hana, has just canceled their dinner on the day, for the second time. Sofia is drafting a message.
Question 2 of 2
Sources and further reading
- Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). Standard Edition, Vol. 12.
- Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, Vol. 18.
- Young, J. E., & Klosko, J. S. (1993). Reinventing Your Life. New York: Dutton.
Finish the lesson
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