Why Do We Repeat the Relationships That Hurt Us?

Repetition, Internal Objects, and the Search for a Different Ending

By Evgeni Karapenchev, Psychoanalyst and Group analyst

The clinical vignettes presented in this article are composite cases based on recurring themes encountered in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Identifying details have been altered to preserve confidentiality.

“I knew from our first date that he wouldn’t really be available,” she said. She looked at me almost apologetically before adding, “I think that was exactly what attracted me.”

She was describing yet another relationship that had ended painfully. Different man. Different circumstances. The ending, however, felt strangely familiar. “I saw it happening,” she said. “Part of me knew how it would end. I kept telling myself to leave. But I couldn’t.”

This question lies quietly beneath many analyses: why do people return to relationships that repeatedly wound them? Why does insight so often fail to protect us from repetition? Why do intelligent, thoughtful people continue to choose partners who seem destined to disappoint them?

These questions have been answered in many ways. Contemporary psychology speaks of attachment styles, maladaptive schemas, and dysfunctional beliefs. These perspectives are valuable and clinically useful. Psychoanalysis, however, asks a different question: what if we are not simply choosing another person? What if we are returning to an internal relationship that has remained emotionally unfinished?

Freud first recognised this paradox when he noticed that patients often recreated experiences they consciously wished to avoid. They did not merely remember painful relationships; they found themselves living them again. He described this tendency as repetition compulsion.

The concept remains strikingly relevant because repetition rarely announces itself as repetition. It presents itself as hope. Every new relationship feels unique. Every beginning carries the promise that this time the ending will be different. Yet the analyst gradually begins to notice that, although the people change, something remarkably constant remains. The emotional drama seems to have been written long before the patient meets the next partner.

The repetition is seldom only of external events. It is a repetition of an internal world.

Waiting

Nearly six months into our work, the patient mentioned her father. Not because I had asked, and not because she considered him especially important. “He travelled a lot,” she said. Then she smiled. “I suppose lots of fathers travelled.”

What followed was not a story of abuse or dramatic neglect. It was a story of uncertainty. Every Friday evening, her father promised he would return home the following afternoon. Sometimes he did. Sometimes work delayed him. Sometimes there was no phone call at all.

“I remember standing by the window,” she said. “I used to promise myself that I wouldn’t wait anymore.” She became quiet. “But I always waited.”

Something shifted in the room. We were no longer speaking only about a woman in her thirties and the man who had recently left her. We were also speaking about a little girl who continued to wait.

Melanie Klein proposed that our earliest relationships become internalised as internal objects: enduring emotional representations that shape how we experience ourselves and others. These are not literal memories of our parents, but living emotional realities that continue to organise our expectations, fears, and desires.

From this perspective, the patient was not unconsciously searching for rejection. She was searching for a different ending. Every unavailable partner carried the hope that this time someone would stay.

This is one of the most moving aspects of repetition. It is not only the persistence of suffering. It is also the persistence of hope. Unfortunately, unconscious hope often recreates precisely the emotional conditions from which it seeks liberation.

When Familiarity Feels Like Love

Another patient once told me, “Whenever someone is consistently kind to me, I lose interest. But if someone keeps me guessing, I can’t stop thinking about them.” He laughed. “I know how irrational that sounds.”

Months later, while talking about his childhood, another story emerged. His mother suffered from recurrent episodes of depression. Some days, she was affectionate and emotionally available. On other days, she seemed psychologically absent despite being physically present.

As a child, he learned to observe every subtle change in her mood. He became highly attuned to the moments when she briefly seemed reachable again. Without knowing it, he had come to associate love with uncertainty.

As an adult, emotionally available partners often felt strangely flat. Unpredictability, by contrast, felt intensely alive. What he experienced as chemistry was also recognition.

Winnicott argued that a child needs more than love. The child needs an environment capable of holding emotional experience with sufficient reliability. Only then can the child gradually develop an internal sense of safety. When this process is inconsistent, uncertainty itself may become emotionally familiar.

This is one of the quieter tragedies encountered in clinical work. People do not necessarily seek what is healthy. They seek what feels like home.

The Past Appears in the Present

One of the most remarkable discoveries of psychoanalysis is that the past rarely returns as memory alone. More often, it returns as experience.

Patients do not simply describe abandonment, criticism, or longing. These emotional realities gradually begin to organise the relationship with the analyst.

Several months after our conversations about her father, I told the patient that I would be away for a week to attend a conference. She nodded politely. The following session, she arrived unusually withdrawn.

“I almost didn’t come today,” she said. “I thought perhaps you had lost interest in working with me.”

Objectively, nothing significant had happened. Emotionally, something very old had become alive. For her, my temporary absence had become inseparable from an expectation she had carried since childhood: people who matter eventually disappear.

As she spoke, I noticed an unexpected reaction within myself. I found myself wanting to reassure her immediately. For a brief moment, I even caught myself hoping that she would believe me without question. The feeling passed quickly, but it was clinically meaningful. Something of her internal world had entered the analytic relationship.

This is what psychoanalysis understands as transference. Earlier patterns of relating gradually become alive between patient and analyst.

Equally important is countertransference: the analyst’s emotional response, not as personal interference, but as a potential source of understanding. When reflected upon rather than acted upon, it may illuminate aspects of the patient’s internal object world that have not yet become available to thought.

The consulting room therefore becomes something more than a place where childhood is discussed. It becomes a place where the past is experienced once again - this time within a relationship capable not only of surviving it, but of thinking about it.

From Experience to Thought

One of Wilfred Bion’s most original contributions to psychoanalysis was the idea that psychological change begins when emotional experience becomes thinkable. This may sound deceptively simple.

In clinical practice, however, many patients do not suffer because they cannot describe what has happened to them. They suffer because certain emotional experiences have never been fully symbolised. Instead of being thought, they are lived again and again.

Repetition is often the language of emotions that have not yet found words. A painful relationship ends. Another begins with strikingly similar emotional dynamics. The patient recognises the pattern only after it has unfolded once more.

The analyst’s task is therefore not simply to explain repetition, but to help transform it into something that can be reflected upon rather than enacted.

I Always Leave First

A third patient, a successful executive in his forties, came to analysis because of repeated conflicts at work. “I’ve changed companies six times,” he said during our first meeting. “At the beginning, everything feels promising. Eventually, I become convinced that my manager no longer values me. Then I resign.”

Each resignation initially felt like relief. Within months, however, the same story began again.

For a long time, we spoke mainly about his professional life. Only gradually did another memory emerge. Whenever he became upset as a child, his father responded with the same sentence: “You’re overreacting.” His mother usually remained silent, uncomfortable with emotional conflict.

Neither parent was deliberately cruel. Yet there seemed to be little room for his emotional reality. His feelings were not explored. They were dismissed.

Looking back, he said something that stayed with me: “I didn’t know what to do with my feelings.” Bion might have said that no one had helped him think them.

Without a relationship capable of containing emotional experience, feelings often remain psychologically undigested. Instead of becoming available for reflection, they seek expression through action.

Gradually, something similar appeared within the analysis itself. Whenever our conversations approached emotionally painful territory, he became distant. Sometimes he criticised my questions. Sometimes he questioned whether therapy was useful. Once he arrived saying, “Perhaps we’re not getting anywhere.”

At first glance, these reactions appeared to concern our work together. Gradually, they revealed something else. The expectation of disappointment had entered the consulting room. Leaving the relationship had become more familiar than remaining emotionally engaged within it.

For the first time, however, this pattern did not have to culminate in another resignation. It could be observed, thought about, and understood.

The Capacity to Stay

People often imagine that therapeutic change consists of making different choices. Sometimes it does. More often, it begins with developing the capacity to remain emotionally present where one previously had to withdraw.

To tolerate disappointment without immediate escape. To experience dependence without humiliation. To survive uncertainty without recreating it.

Winnicott described one of the great developmental achievements as the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. Paradoxically, this capacity develops not through isolation, but through sufficiently reliable relationships.

When such relationships have been absent, even temporary distance may be experienced as abandonment. This is why apparently minor events within therapy - a cancelled session, a holiday break, a thoughtful silence - can awaken unexpectedly powerful emotions.

From the outside, they appear insignificant. Within the patient’s internal world, they may reactivate experiences that have remained emotionally alive for decades.

These moments are not interruptions of the analytic process. They are the analytic process. The past has entered the present in a form that can finally be recognised.

When Repetition Becomes Memory

Patients sometimes ask whether repetition ever disappears completely. I am not sure that it does. Our earliest relationships remain part of the architecture of the mind.

The aim of psychoanalysis is not to erase them. Nor is it to blame those who shaped them. Its aim is something both more modest and more profound: to loosen the unconscious necessity to repeat.

One morning, the first patient arrived smiling. “He called yesterday,” she said. I waited. “A year ago, I would have cancelled everything to see him.” She looked out of the window for a moment. “I realised that I didn’t actually want to.”

There was no excitement in her voice. No dramatic breakthrough. Only quiet surprise. Then she added, “I think I’ve spent most of my life trying to make unavailable people choose me.”

The room became silent. Not because an interpretation had been offered, but because an experience that had previously required repetition had become available to thought.

The longing had not disappeared. Neither had the sadness. What had changed was her relationship to them. For the first time, she could observe the pattern without immediately becoming trapped within it.

She no longer needed to confuse hope with love, nor familiarity with intimacy. The repetition had become a memory.

A Different Ending

Freud observed that what cannot be remembered is often repeated. More than a century later, psychoanalytic psychotherapy continues to suggest an equally important possibility: what can be experienced within a relationship, reflected upon, and symbolised no longer needs to be lived repeatedly in search of a different ending.

Analytic change is rarely dramatic. It often appears in moments that seem almost ordinary: a patient pauses before sending the familiar message; someone recognises that longing is not the same as love; another discovers that emotional availability, once experienced as strangely empty, now feels quietly safe.

These moments rarely attract attention. Clinically, however, they represent a profound transformation. The internal world has begun to reorganise itself. Old internal objects no longer dictate every expectation. Relationships gradually become encounters with another person rather than attempts to repair unfinished chapters of one’s own history.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest hopes of psychoanalysis. Not that we become free of our past, but that our past no longer has to determine our future.

When that happens, love is no longer an attempt to obtain a different ending to an old story. It becomes the possibility of beginning a genuinely new one.

This article reflects my understanding of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as it has developed through clinical practice, ongoing psychoanalytic training, and the enduring influence of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion. Any shortcomings remain entirely my own.

Suggested Reading

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W. R. (1967). Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann.

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.

Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works.

Ogden, T. H. (1994). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 3–19.

Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent–Infant Relationship. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock