Why Do We Keep Finding Ourselves in the Same Place?
by Dr. Denise Renye
There is a moment that comes up often in psychotherapy when someone realizes, sometimes with considerable frustration, that they have been here before. The person is different, the circumstances have changed, perhaps years have passed, and yet there is something unmistakably familiar about how they feel.
Close-up of a tree trunk showing concentric growth rings, with natural variations in texture and pattern.
Maybe you are once again trying to get close to someone who remains just out of reach. Or you notice that you have become responsible for far more than you intended, wondering how you ended up carrying so much again. Sometimes it is simply the feeling that is familiar. The longing, the urgency, the disappointment, the sense that if you could just do something differently, the outcome might change.
These moments can be difficult because once we recognize a pattern, we tend to think we should be able to stop it. This is especially true when we have already spent a great deal of time understanding ourselves. We know where something came from. We can describe the pattern. We may even see it beginning to happen and still find ourselves pulled into it.
Knowing matters, but knowing is not always enough.
Psychoanalysis has long been interested in repetition, including our tendency to recreate aspects of earlier experiences rather than simply leave them in the past. I have always found this useful because it asks us to consider repetition as something more meaningful than a bad habit or evidence that we have somehow failed to learn.
Sometimes there is hope inside a repetition. Without consciously setting out to do so, we may return to a familiar emotional situation with the wish that this time it will end differently. Perhaps this person will finally become available. Perhaps we will be understood in the way we have wanted to be understood. Perhaps if we can get it right this time, something old will finally be repaired.
There can be protection in repetition as well. A way of relating that causes difficulty now may once have helped us stay connected to someone important or manage circumstances we had very little power to change. What was once necessary can become familiar, and familiarity has a powerful pull even when another part of us wants something different.
I have seen this become particularly apparent when someone finally encounters the very thing they thought they wanted. A person who has spent years pursuing unavailable people may discover that genuine availability feels surprisingly uncomfortable. Someone who is accustomed to taking care of everyone else may long to be cared for and then have difficulty receiving when care actually arrives. The new experience can ask something of us that the familiar pattern never did.
This is part of why I am less interested in asking, “Why do I keep doing this?” That question can turn quickly into an accusation against ourselves. I find it much more useful to wonder why this particular pattern has been so important. What has it allowed us to preserve? What has it protected us from having to feel? What hope might still live inside it?
My years of studying yoga have given me another language for thinking about some of this. Within yoga philosophy, samskaras can be understood as impressions left by experience that continue to influence how we perceive and respond to what comes later. Samskara is not the same thing as psychoanalytic repetition, and I don't think it is useful to make two traditions with very different histories say exactly the same thing. What interests me is that both recognize, in their own ways, that the past continues to participate in the present.
We carry history not only through the stories we can tell about ourselves, but through ways of responding that may happen before we have had time to think. Sometimes the first indication that we are somewhere familiar is bodily. We feel the pull toward someone, the urgency to act, or a sudden wish to disappear. Perhaps our breathing changes or we become preoccupied in a way we recognize only later.
Yoga, understood as much more than the physical postures it is so often reduced to in the West, offers a practice of paying attention to these movements within us. The aim is not to treat the body as an oracle or to assume every sensation is telling us what to do. It is to develop a greater capacity to remain present enough to notice ourselves while something is happening.
There is another yogic concept I find useful here: sankalpa. Those familiar with Yoga Nidra may know sankalpa as an intention or resolve held within the practice. I don't understand this as positive thinking or as an instruction we give ourselves in the hope that sufficient determination will override an old pattern. An intention can give us an orientation, but it does not erase the history that makes living that intention difficult.
Psychoanalysis has a useful concept here as well: working-through. We can have an important insight and understand something about ourselves that we had never seen before, but the work often continues as we meet that same material in different forms. We begin to recognize it more readily. Perhaps we tolerate a feeling for a little longer before acting. Maybe we make a different choice once and then return to the old one the next time. Change can be uneven, particularly when we are working with ways of being that developed over many years.
I appreciate this because it leaves room for how people actually change. We do not simply replace an old pattern with a healthier one because we have finally understood it. Often we move back and forth for a while, seeing something more clearly in one moment and finding ourselves caught inside it again in another.
Our sexual lives are one place where repetition can become especially interesting. Sexuality has a history of its own, and our erotic lives can carry meanings that are not immediately obvious to us. The people who draw us in, our experience of being desired, our capacity to receive pleasure, and what happens as intimacy deepens may all be influenced by experiences that came before.
That does not mean recurring fantasies, desires, kinks, or sexual preferences need to be analyzed for pathology. Human sexuality is far too varied for that, and difference is not dysfunction. But when something repeatedly brings us distress or leaves us in an emotional position we no longer want to occupy, there may be value in becoming curious about what is happening rather than rushing to eliminate the symptom.
Sometimes the thing that looks like a sexual problem is carrying much more of a person's history than the sexual concern alone would suggest.
I encounter another version of this in psychedelic integration work. Psychedelic experiences can sometimes make a longstanding pattern visible with remarkable clarity. Someone may suddenly understand a relationship, an old wound, or a way they have organized themselves for years. The insight can feel enormous and, at times, life changing.
Then we return to ordinary life.
The people in our lives are still themselves. The family dynamics have not necessarily changed. Our bodies still respond in familiar ways, and the defenses we developed still have reasons for being there. None of this diminishes what was revealed during a psychedelic experience. It simply means that revelation and integration are not the same thing.
The same is true of an insight that arrives in psychotherapy, a dream, meditation, Yoga Nidra, or another contemplative practice. There are moments when we see ourselves differently, sometimes with extraordinary clarity. Then comes the slower process of living in relationship with what we have seen.
Perhaps this is why I remain interested in repetition after so many years of clinical work. It tells us something about the difference between understanding ourselves and changing how we live. Both matter, but they do not always happen at the same pace.
The goal, as I see it, is not to become someone who never repeats. We are shaped by our histories, and familiar ways of being will continue to make themselves known. What can change is our relationship to them. We may become more able to recognize when an old experience has entered the present, understand why it still has a hold on us, and have a little more freedom in what happens next.
Sometimes that freedom is quite small. Something familiar begins to unfold, and we notice it sooner than we once did. We stay with ourselves for another moment or become curious about what is happening before automatically responding in the way we always have. The ending may not change all at once, but something in how we participate in the familiar pattern has begun to shift.
A Reflection
If there is an area of your life that carries the feeling of “I've been here before,” try becoming curious about it before deciding what you need to change. Where have you known this feeling before? What has this way of responding made possible for you, and what might it have helped you avoid or protect? You might also notice what happens in your body when the familiar pattern begins.
There is no need to force an answer. Sometimes understanding why we have needed a pattern is part of what eventually allows us to need it less.
If you find yourself understanding certain patterns intellectually while continuing to live them emotionally, relationally, sexually, or in the body, there may be more there to explore. Depth-oriented psychotherapy offers the time and space to understand not only what you repeat, but why a particular way of being has remained meaningful and what may become possible as your relationship to it changes. My work brings together psychoanalytic and depth psychology, sex therapy, embodiment and yoga, spirituality, and psychedelic integration when relevant. If you are interested in exploring this work together, I invite you to learn more about my approach or reach out to schedule a consultation through Whole Person Integration.