Perhaps the most important insight I have gained in recent weeks and months is how very true is the old Freudian saw about repetition compulsion, the

psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations that have a high probability of the event occurring again. This “re-living” can also take the form of dreams, repeating the story of what happened, and even hallucination (from Wikipedia, of course)

I  do this in my personal life, my work life, my everyday conversations, and of course all the freak over this blog.  I reread the same books, rewatch the same movies, listen to the same songs over and over again, and order the exact same entrees at each of my favorite restaurants almost every time.  And probably I will never stop repeating myself in some form or another, because it really is a very powerful compulsion.

But I am NOT the only one who does this, and probably not anywhere near to being the worst offender.  Consider, just a few of the cases with which I am personally all too familiar, and it is likely that you are as well.

• the relative who tells the exact same jokes and stories over and over again at every single family gathering, none of which are even remotely interesting to anyone but him.  (Who among us does not have one of these?)
• the angry colleague who will rehash exactly the same argument at every single department meeting and make the exact same proposals that have been voted down every time she has raised them before.  And who will then buttonhole anyone she can in the hallway afterward to tell them once again why it was a disgrace that the proposal got voted down and that this is the most idiotic place she has ever worked.  (I know at least 5 of these, both male and female, in my current workplace, and there has been at least one every other place I have ever worked.)
• the guy who tells every new girl he meets and every old girl he reconnects with the long sad story of the girl who truly broke his heart over a decade ago, or the very severe damage done to his heart by his parents, other men, or some other manifestation of the cruel, cruel world.  (This includes at least 75% of the guys I know, and probably most of the grrls.)
• the girl who repeats the same twisted sadomasochistic dynamic in every single romantic relationship that she developed in her relationship with her father, the first guy who really broke her heart, and/or the guy who raped her (and sometimes those are the same person).  (There are slight variations on this, but the only real differences are how damaging the original trauma, how pathological the repeating pattern, and whether she prefers to play sadist or masochist.  Not sure if guys do this quite as intensely and whether they relive their dynamics with their mothers or their own fathers, but I have quite certainly been with more than a few guys who occasionally confused me with their mothers, their fathers, and/or their first girlfriend.)
• the students who reenact in my classroom the same variation of hostile rebelliousness or pathetic desire for approval what is almost certainly their relationship with one or more of their parents.
• the grrl who once every three or four years subjects everyone she knows or has ever met to the exact same psychological profiling device until she reassures herself that she really does have them all pegged.  Or someone throttles her.  (not that any of you have ever met a grrl like that!)

And I could come up with many more versions of the same.  But that would itself be merely a repetition with only very slight variations, and so I will stop.

Why do we do this?  And more importantly, is it a healthy or unhealthy thing for us to engage in this kind of repetition?  And is there anyway to stop ourselves from doing it, if we decide that is what we really want to do?  I found a short but very smart article about this issue online, and there are undoubtedly oodles of others, because this is apparently one of the central questions among those who still practice psychoanalysis and those who practice newer forms of psychotherapy seem equally doomed to repeat those same debates (because they are just as compulsive as the rest of us!)  To summarize:

• Behaviorists apparently believe you can just train yourself to break the cycle.
• Cognitivists believe that if you replace the irrational thoughts driving the compulsion with rational ones, you can change and/or break the cycle.
• Freudians believe that once you understand the deeper trauma or impulse driving the repetition, it will just go away or something.
• Object relations folks think that you can dig down to the bottom of it and eventually work through it and redefine yourself and your relations to the others and the world in a way that can eventually stop the cycle, but acknowledge that this is a very difficult thing to do.

So, tell me, folks–what are your repetition compulsions, or those of the folks you know and love or hate?  Have you ever broken one?  How?  Do you want to break yours, or would you be sad to give up on your very oldest and dearest compulsions?