Why You Keep Choosing People Who Hurt You

We all desire love. What differs from person to person is in how they love, and their belief of what love means.

In childhood, we love openly and without question. As our experiences pile up, we begin to form a blueprint for how to be in a relationship. When dealing with a narcissist, love means sacrificing yourself on the altar of the grandiose false self. For those who grow up in abusive environments, love means losing sanity and control. An emotionally unavailable person leaves us believing that love means fighting for scraps. Over time, these blueprints solidify and inform every budding relationship in our lives. Sigmund Freud referred to this as transference.

Transference is a repeating life drama, wherein we cast people in our present into the roles of key people from our past. Anyone who looks, behaves or sounds like someone from the past can awaken our transference. We get lured in by a person’s posture, facial expression, voice tone or the shape of their eyes. How they treat us might draw us in, as well as how they see us. Their demeanour or emotional coldness could resonate. As a result, your dynamics with a close friend may echo those of a sibling or cousin. You could notice yourself looking for approval from your yoga teacher as though he were a father figure. You might find your girlfriend or wife scolding you as though she were your mother.

Transference fuels black-and-white thinking. Someone in our present resonates with our past, and we find ourselves either hopelessly attracted to or intensely repulsed by them. Instances of transference usually come with associated feelings, needs, expectations, triggers, fears or fantasies. If you find yourself giving someone more meaning in your life than they might otherwise deserve, your relationship with them might be one long flashback to the past.

What you might not realise is that the culprit for all of this drama is C-PTSD. Humans respond to trauma in peculiar ways. Firstly, trauma has a way of leaving a person frozen in time, unable to move beyond what happened to them. For example, war veterans often flash back to battle, randomly finding themselves teleported to the moment they suffered the trauma. Secondly, in order to move beyond the traumatic event, humans feel a need to re-experience it. This time around, however, rather than being powerless and out of control, they need to feel empowered and in control. That is, they need to renegotiate their relationship to the trauma from higher ground.

For those plagued by C-PTSD, transference is an attempt at re-experiencing those relationships that first created their complex trauma. However, relationship trauma is not based on a singular event, but rather a long web of interactions, including anything from abandonment, neglect, abuse, humiliation, deception or betrayal. To relive years-long relational trauma, you will need to create a real-life ‘stage show’, and cast characters into their required roles. Mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, ex-friend, ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, any of them could become tied to the core trauma, and anyone you meet is susceptible to being cast into one of their roles.

Furthermore, to achieve this seemingly impossible feat, you will need to mould the people in your life to behave like the original person. That is, the dynamics between you and the new person will need to resemble the original relationship.

If you experienced deception, betrayal, abuse or emotional neglect with the original person, you will generally gravitate toward people who treat you the same way. If someone does not behave as you had hoped, you will unconsciously make them behave that way. This leads to what Freud called repetition compulsion, which is a pattern resulting from transference. If you experienced abuse in childhood, you will attract and tolerate abuse in adulthood because a) it feels familiar, b) you believe it is the only way to be in relationships, and above all, c) you believe you can achieve a different outcome this time.

Transference is why some people repeatedly find themselves in relationships with narcissists and other toxic and unavailable people. They want something healthier, but only feel attracted to a specific type of person. In truth, they have unfinished business.

Trauma can dominate and disrupt our lives beyond imagination. However, trying to resolve it using other people is counter-productive and destructive. Allowing the past to act through us without addressing it only leads to us deceiving not only others, but ourselves.