A working tool
What repeats without explanation usually comes from further away than it seems.
There are behaviors we recognize as our own but can neither explain nor stop: always choosing the same kind of partner who does us harm, sabotaging an achievement when it is within reach, a ritual we cannot stop performing.
In these cases, reviewing present thinking is not enough, because the logic sustaining the repetition is not conscious: it was built long ago, in another context, where it was probably a reasonable solution. The work consists of reconstructing that logic so that it stops operating blindly.
What shows and what sustains it
WHAT SHOWS
“Every time a relationship starts going well, I find a reason to end it.”
WHAT APPEARS WHEN TALKING
A scene from childhood: someone who left without warning. And a conclusion that was never put into words.
THE LOGIC AT WORK
“If I leave first, they can’t abandon me.” At six years old it was protection. At forty it is a prison.
None of this is deduced by reasoning: it appears through talking, in what is said too much, in what is forgotten, in what is embarrassing to tell.
Example: checking the stove eight times before leaving. You know it is off; you go back anyway.
Example: five different partners and the same ending. The person changes, the script doesn’t.
Example: when a project is about to go well, something comes up that ruins it — and you are the one doing it.
Example: everything is objectively fine and yet there is a discomfort that can be neither named nor located.
Speaking without first organizing what you are going to say. In the detours, the lapses and the “this has nothing to do with it”, precisely what does have to do with it appears.
Going back over scenes and stories from your own history, not to explain the present through the past, but to find where the conclusion that still governs was built.
What repeats outside also repeats in the therapeutic relationship. When that happens within the session, it can be looked at live — and there it becomes changeable.
It is the slowest of the three, and not always what is needed. For an anxiety that is urgent, we start with the cognitive-behavioral approach; if the knot is in a current relationship, with the systemic one. Sometimes one prepares the ground for the other.
