Repetition compulsion is when you unconsciously recreate childhood dynamics with romantic partners, trying to get an unavailable parent to finally show up for you. If your caregiver was emotionally distant, you might pick an unavailable partner and spend the relationship trying to make them care, sabotaging what you actually want.
a deeper layer of this is there can be this thing called repetition compulsion, where we're trying to play out a loop with a romantic partner or someone that we're dating that actually links back to our childhood and having a parent or caregiver that's really unavailable. And so what that looks like is we turn this person into our mom, our dad, our caregiver, and then we try to make the unavailable person available. So that we can finally get our needs met in a way that they were never met. So it's kind of a sneaky thing, but it's really, really common.
