The reenactment of trauma

The reenactment of trauma, or repetition compulsion as Freud called it, is everywhere. In our own individual lives and collectively.

If we don’t know about this phenomenon, we’ll think we’re being persecuted, punished, cursed, because we’re bad, shameful, unlovable or unacceptable. Insert whatever adjective was used to ever deride you and any conclusion that you came to as a result of how others treated you and your experiences.

Being traumatised is like being in a perpetual state of indigestion. It feels awful and we’re often desperate to resolve it once it starts to bubble up from our too full barrels: causing us debilitating symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety and depression.

We wouldn’t walk around for 40 years with a piece of food stuck in our throats but we walk around with many many undigested experiences because they felt and feel too overwhelming to feel. That’s why we dissociate, dissociation is what creates trauma as defined by psychiatrist Ivor Browne: unexperienced experience. And it’s good (and essential sometimes) that we dissociate, it’s a brilliant survival mechanism until it becomes a noose around our necks.

Sheskinmore, County Donegal, Ireland

I believe trauma repeats so we can resolve it. We don’t often see it that way though, and nor do others. There are many who rush to condemn us when we show signs of unresolved trauma especially when it is acted out, rather than in. Examples of act outs are violence, abuse, bullying and examples of acting in are agoraphobia and chronic illness to name a few. Many see the signs of trauma being reenacted as evidence of disorder and mental illness. I see it as a sign of unresolved trauma or as Freud said*: “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”. We literally cannot stand it, or thrive, when things are left incomplete, unexperienced and undigested.

The repetition of trauma gives rise to the most agonising frustration that whatever we’re going through will never end which leads us to feel hopeless and that we can’t escape our situation. It’s like a merry-go-round we can’t get off. But we can get off.

When you see repeating patterns in your life, write them down, write how they make you feel, feel into your answers, even if only for 10 seconds. Try feeling for a bit longer the next time, maybe 15 seconds. The repetition is an opening, an invitation to see the real truth of who you really are before any muck obscured your vision.

*Freud S: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), translated and edited by Strachey J. New York, WW Norton, 1961