Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

01273 921 355
Online Therapy In the Press
  • Home
  • Therapy Services
    • Fees
    • How Psychotherapy Works
    • Who is it for?
    • Individual Psychotherapy
    • Child Therapy
    • Couples Counselling and Therapy in Brighton
    • Marriage Counselling
    • Family Therapy and Counselling
    • Group Psychotherapy
    • Corporate Services
    • Leadership Coaching and Consultancy
    • Clinical Supervision for Therapists and Trainees
    • FAQs
  • Types of Therapy
    • Acceptance Commitment Therapy
    • Analytic Psychotherapy
    • Body Orientated Psychotherapy
    • Private Clinical Psychology
    • CBT – Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
    • CFT – Compassion Focused Therapy
    • Coronavirus (Covid-19) Counselling
    • DBT – Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
    • Divorce & Separation Therapy
    • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
    • Existential Therapy
    • Group Analytic Psychotherapy
    • Integrative Therapy
    • IPT – Interpersonal Psychotherapy
    • Non-Violent Resistance (NVR)
    • Family and Systemic Psychotherapy
    • Schema Therapy
    • TA – Transactional Analysis
    • Trauma Psychotherapy
  • Types of Issues
    • Abuse
    • Addiction
      • Gambling Addiction Therapy
      • Porn Addiction Help
    • Affairs
    • Anger Management Counselling in Brighton
    • Anxiety
    • Bereavement Counselling
    • Coronavirus Induced Mental Health Issues
    • Cross Cultural Issues
    • Depression
    • Family Issues
    • LGBT+ Issues and Therapy
    • Low Self-Esteem
    • Relationship Issues
    • Sexual Issues
    • Stress
  • Online Therapy
    • Therapy for Anger Management
    • Online Anxiety Therapy
    • Online Therapy for Bereavement
    • Online Therapy for Depression
    • Online Relationship Counselling
  • Practitioner Search
    • Our Practitioners
  • Blog
    • Ageing
    • Attachment
    • Child Development
    • Families
    • Gender
    • Groups
    • Loss
    • Mental Health
    • Neuroscience
    • Parenting
    • Psychotherapy
    • Relationships
    • Sexuality
    • Sleep
    • Society
    • Spirituality
    • Work
  • About us
    • Sustainability
    • Work with us
    • Press
  • Contact Us
    • Contact Us – Brighton & Hove Practice
    • Contact Us – Lewes Practice
    • Contact Us – Online Therapy
    • Contact Us – Press
    • Privacy Policy

June 6, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

Let’s not go round again – How we repeat ourselves!

Earworm

Have you ever had a song go round and round in your head for longer than you’d like? I certainly have. It’s a common enough experience for which in recent years the term ‘earworm’ has been coined. More academically, it’s known through American Psychological Association research as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), defined as ‘the spontaneous recall and repeating of a tune in one’s mind’. 

A persistent earworm of mine belongs to a radio staple of my youth: the Scottish funk group Average White Band’s disco hit, ‘Let’s Go Round Again’. 

If you’re unfamiliar with it I hesitate to recommend you listen, lest I pass its catchy stickiness to you. But in the song the singer returns from unspecified travels to entreat a former lover to reconnect with him in the way they were and so ‘turn back the hands of time’. Mining a commonly held nostalgia for revisiting the passionate phases of former loves, I think the song’s sentiment succeeds most through its appeal to the very human need for repetition in relationship.

Repetition compulsion

Just over 100 years ago in Freud’s essay, Beyond The Pleasure Principle , he outlined long observed patterns of behaviour in his many patients as manifestations of a ‘compulsion to repeat’. He cites a case study of a little boy who created a game of regularly throwing and retrieving from his cot a favoured reel on a piece of string. He would throw it out to a word meaning ‘gone’, then retrieve it with a joyful sound meaning ‘there’. Within the context of the family, Freud offers the interpretation that the child’s invented game of disappearance and return was a way ‘to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him’. 

He goes on to speculate that children repeat unpleasant experiences in order to gain some kind of mastery over them and then observes that many of his adult patients show behavioural repetitions resulting in misfortunes ‘for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences’.

Psychological games

Later in the 1960s an analysand of one of Freud’s followers developed this notion of repetition in human behaviour, identifying common relationship patterns in those reported by his own patients. He named these patterns psychological ‘games’: repeated transactions played out of conscious awareness by both parties in a relationship. Eric Berne’s ‘Games People Play’ (1964) became a 60s best seller and is a founding text in the development of the modality of Transactional Analysis.

In essence, Berne extended Freud’s earlier insights to suggest that each of us in infancy develops a repertoire of repetitive behaviours that we use to protect ourselves. The proposal is that at a deeply unconscious level we seek relationships with others who will allow us to repeat roles and situations that for us confirm fundamental beliefs about ourselves and other people, in order to keep ourselves safe.

Whenever we encounter relationship issues in our lives, it can often seem as though our difficulties take the form of repeated patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The process of psychotherapy can support us with self inquiry into the types of repeated behaviours we favoured when small, with a view to us breaking our adult patterns. It can help us pose the interlinked questions, ‘How might I be different with myself, so I might be different with others?’

In the penultimate verse of Let’s Go Round Again, the lover sings, ‘Baby, I know that you think I will be different now. Inside of me nothing has changed. So, I’m asking you again, please.’ And of course, the prerequisite for repetition is for nothing to change inside. 

I like to think the old lover he is addressing greets the singer warmly but invites him this time into a different kind of relationship, where they can both explore new ways of being together that don’t leave them going round and round.

 

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Chris Horton, please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Chris Horton is a registered member of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) and a psychotherapeutic counsellor with experience in a diverse range of occupational settings. He works with individuals (young people/adults) in private practice.  He is available at our Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Chris Horton

How are you?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

 

References – 

1 Jakubowski, Kelly; Finkel, Sebastian; Stewart, Lauren; Müllensiefen, Daniel (2017) Dissecting an Earworm:

2 Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery,

3 Freud, S (2015) Beyond the Pleasure Principal, Dover Thrift Editions 

4 Berne, E. (1964) Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. New York: Ballantine. 

Filed Under: Chris Horton, Relationships, Society Tagged With: Change, Family, Relationships

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Find your practitioner

loader
Wordpress Meta Data and Taxonomies Filter

Locations -

  • Brighton
  • Lewes
  • Online
loader
loader
loader
loader
loader

Search for your practitioner by location

Brighton
Lewes

Therapy services +

Therapy services: 

Therapy types

Therapy types: 

Our Practitioners

  • Mark Vahrmeyer
  • Sam Jahara
  • Gerry Gilmartin
  • Dr Simon Cassar
  • Claire Barnes
  • Sharon Spindler
  • David Work
  • Susanna Petitpierre
  • Thad Hickman
  • Angela Rogers
  • Chris Horton
  • Fiona Downie
  • Dorothea Beech
  • Kevin Collins
  • Rebecca Mead
  • David Keighley
  • Georgie Leake

Search our blog

Work with us

Find out more….

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Charities we support

One Earth Logo

Hove Clinic
6 The Drive, Hove , East Sussex, BN3 3JA.

Copyright © 2023
Press Enquiries
Privacy Policy
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptReject Privacy Policy
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT