All of us make mistakes; we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.
But some past failures or mistakes have a habit of being repeated time and time again. These could be work related, like promising yourself that you’ll hand in an assignment ahead of time, only to leave everything to the last minute and deliver something below your best.
Alternatively, patterns of failure can repeat in more serious ways, such as making poor financial decisions like overspending or getting into debt. They can repeat in behaviours like isolating yourself from those who care for you in a time of need. They can repeat in romantic endeavours, such as continually dating people who treat you badly.
Repeating past failures has the potential to provide endless frustration, confusion, and suffering. And on the surface, it seems completely counterintuitive and unhelpful; why would anyone want to relive their failures or traumas?
It’s possible that these repeated behaviours are not random mistakes that we temporarily forget we’ve learned, but actually our unconscious mind’s way of trying to overcome and solve unresolved problems from the past.
To try to understand this further, I turn to some of the insights presented by Freud’s 1920 paper ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.
Mastery and control
Freud noted that one reason we repeat past failures is an attempt to gain mastery over an original experience or trauma. So by repeating this event in a new situation, that we’re in control of, it gives us an opportunity to try again in more favourable circumstances. A chance to do better than before and master the experience, as well as feel triumph and pleasure when we survive it.
So, to understand this, let’s revisit the example of the person who leaves their assignment to the last minute. Let’s call him John. It’s possible that John had a painful childhood experience where he’d been criticised or humiliated for failing to meet expectations or perform – perhaps at home or school. These painful emotions and memories are likely to remain unprocessed and alive within him, even when he’s not aware of them. So where there’s an opportunity to re-do this experience and master the feelings associated with it, like with his work assignment, he might unconsciously recreate it through performing poorly.
Process difficult emotions
Building on the idea of mastery, Freud also discovered that sometimes we unconsciously re-create past failures or painful experiences, to give ourselves another chance at understanding the emotions we couldn’t fully process when they first happened. When an event in the present echoes a past trauma, our mind could interpret it as an opportunity to work through what was once too overwhelming to face. Our unconscious mind has a frustrating habit of prioritising resolving past challenges, over helping us to succeed in the
now.
So, going back to John, let’s suggest he struggled to learn to read as a child, making him a target for teasing and criticism from his parents or siblings. Perhaps this continued throughout his schooling, where he didn’t perform well in tests at school. At the time, John may not have had the emotional tools to fully understand or process these experiences, so the pain remained unresolved. Now, as an adult, when faced with a challenging work assignment, John unknowingly finds himself procrastinating, leading to criticism from colleagues or managers for delivering subpar work. This new experience gives him another opportunity to process the emotions he couldn’t manage or understand as a young boy.
Resistance to change
We are all at times resistant to change, even when change is preferable for us. But past experiences, both negative and positive, often seem preferable to new experiences that have the potential to be worse. The expression ‘better the devil you know’ comes to mind. By repeating a past failure, we can reconnect with familiar feelings that make sense to us, rather than expose ourselves to a vulnerable unknown.
To explore this, let’s look at the example of the person who continually seeks partners who treat them badly. Let’s call her Penelope. It’s possible that her early experience was that of being mistreated by her parents some way. Perhaps she never received attention from her father or had a mother that criticised her a lot. So when Penelope has an opportunity for connection in later life, she might seek similar relationships with others, who are likely to treat her in the same way. Despite being painful, recreating these past relationships, where she’s criticised or ignored, feels familiar and safer than being treated with kindness or respect.
Self-destructiveness
Whilst we’re all naturally driven to seek pleasure, survival and creativity, there’s also a counterforce pulling us in the opposite direction, towards aggression, destruction and self-sabotage. Depending on our temperament and past experiences, some of us have a larger capacity for self-destruction than others, which can cause us to repeat behaviours that harm us and those around us.
Let’s link this back to Penelope. We all want and need people in our lives that love and care about us. But with her parental experience growing up, she didn’t get this feeling. Being criticised and ignored became her understanding of normal and safe. This might have caused her to take on the belief that she didn’t deserve to have others care about her. So when she’s in a situation where she needs support and care, she pushes others away, re-enacting her experience with her family in a self-sabotaging way.
Breaking the cycle
Unfortunately, repeating past failures is rarely a good strategy for stopping these cycles from happening again. It could be seen as an outdated method our brains use to cope with unprocessed and overwhelming past experiences. However, there are ways to break the cycle, one being long-term psychotherapy.
The work of psychotherapy is to identify these negative patterns of behaviour and look to understand what is being repeated and why it’s unresolved. Through processing these memories and emotions in a safe environment, within a reliable therapeutic relationship, we can attempt to build self-awareness, stop repeating the past and create a future where more healthy choices are possible.
Joseph Bailey is a psychodynamic psychotherapist, offering analytic therapy to individual adults in Brighton and Hove. He is registered with both the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Joseph is available at our Brighton & Hove Practice and online.
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