Why do we choose things that do us wrong and repeat what hurts us?

That which insists and is repeated in our behaviors, our ways of thinking and in our choices, has always been something that deeply questions us as people and psychologists., but even more, when what insists is something we would like to get rid of and despite our varied and multiple attempts we do not succeed and we find ourselves with the same thing over and over again.

That which has an air of fatalistic destiny in psychology and psychoanalysis we call repetition and it constitutes a fundamental tool to know the depths of each being and guide the direction of the cure of the patient.

In this article I would like to talk about repetition and develop certain questions that revolve around it; What is it repeating? Why do we repeat what we repeat if many times it is something that hurts us? Why does repetition have such a compulsive character? And how can we get out of that place?

• We recommend you read: "The pain of no longer being"

The problem of repetition in humans

Philosophers like Plato, Nietzsche and Kierkegard already spoke of repetition before it was a topic addressed from psychology

, but it was not until Freud that it began to be taken as a serious question in analysis, since affected the therapeutic process, the patient-therapist dynamic, and the patient's choices and general life. subject.

After Freud, many authors have continued to develop research on the matter and even with that, new questions always open up. This is because what is repeated constitutes a central axis of what must be worked on in analysis and one of the greatest sufferings of each person.

Many times our choices not only do not give us pleasure, but they take us to a place quite far from what is pleasant., which is presented to us as a mystery, since, if we think about it, we could suppose that as thinking beings we would tend to choose what suits us and do what is good for us, but in reality this does not always happen like this and rather, more and more often we see how we ourselves and people around us, we are prisoners of choices that harm us but we cannot change no matter how hard we try and as many times something that does us harm insists and is repeated.

"In the soul there is a strong tendency to the pleasure principle, but certain other forces or constellations that they annoy it, so that the final result cannot always correspond to a tendency to pleasure” ~ Freud.

Freud discovers that there is something that goes beyond the search for pleasure within all of us., but it also recognizes that if we repeat something unpleasant, it is only because that repetition is connected to a gain of another kind.

There are many contrary forces and constellations within ourselves, some of them opposed to each other, such as; that something that causes us pain and also gives us pleasure, that what we want is not what suits us or that we do not really want what we want for ourselves. Analysis, in this sense, becomes a fundamental place to address all these issues and dilemmas of being and make an attempt to solve them or for the person to learn how to handle them better, but let's understand where arise…

Why do we repeat what hurts us?

Jouissance is one of the things that is put into play many times in repetition. Enjoy or look forward to what is not convenient, a suffering that has a hidden pleasure that is difficult for us to get rid of because there is precisely a pleasure at stake that catches us. But repetition is not only that, Freud understood it as a special way of remembering that arose in those instances in which the person did not remember anything about it. what was forgotten or repressed and then lived it again and reproduced it no longer as a memory, but as an act, where it is repeated, without knowing that it is repeated behaviors, ways of being, ways of acting towards others, ways of giving answers, ways of being in a relationship, inhibitions and pathological traits of our character.

"Fate is the particular way in which the signifiers of the subject have taken over these hazards to imbricate them in repetition" ~ Lacan

That "destiny" that repeats itself to us over and over again is what Freud called the repetition compulsion, but which in Reality, more than a destination, has to do with the appearance of something that is part of what is most typical of our unconscious. Repetition, as Freud understood it, is repetition of trauma, and in that repetition there is something that goes beyond the pleasure principle, because it traumatic if it is not pleasant, then the gain appears in the compulsiveness that is an attempt to make something appear that is always escape.

But well, a symptomatic repetition of a behavior or a choice can awaken in us the desire to want to know what it is about, in our case In particular, why we keep doing what we don't want or what keeps us tied up and that is the reason why many patients come to consultation.

But here we must highlight the difference from case to case, and the non-existence of general rules, each person repeats something that has to do with the depths of themselves. Analytical therapy is an invitation to open those questions that can bring us closer to an indication of answers that help us stop the repetition. and to understand what was at stake in it and then, once understanding that, to be able to change the course of our destiny, but this time taking the helm.