On Trauma: Patterns That Repeat Keep Us Company
There is a peculiar longing in the way we return to where the hurt is.
In this post, an intrarelational-phenomenological perspective on traumatic repetition, I look specifically at the phenomenon of repeated patterns of a forgotten or remembered past.
I am currently editing a new poem and there is a line, broken over two—
“and though it hurts, I live
to think of the past”
Much like memory, I think some of us repeat the patterns of past trauma not because we are seeking pain, but because within the familiar architecture of deep wounds lies something recognised as home—even when that home exiles the I from itself.
Living with trauma is a bit like being a guest in your own home. You move tentatively through rooms of memory trying not to disturb anything, trying to ensure everything remains in its allocated place. Trying - always trying - and in that trying way, living a life becomes a trial.
From an existential psychoanalytic perspective, trauma is not merely what happened to the I, but how I organises being-in-the-world around its aftermath. The patterns I repeats being not pathological compulsions – I is not insane - but existential strategies—I’s way of making meaning, of creating something close to predictability from chaos. The root word meaning for pattern is something that serves as a model.
The Intrarelational Advantage
Trauma disrupts the intrarelational capacity—the ability to remain in intimate contact with the I who experiences and the self who witnesses experience. When overwhelmed, I become displaced, and the internal connection with self is fractured. A connection is no longer possible between the experiencer and the witness, now split between the one who remembers and the one who forgets in the living, between the part that knows all that it has experienced and the part that lives to forget, to repress, to suppress, in order to survive.
The repetition of patterns emerges as a result of this split. I recreate familiar relational dynamics out of a forgotten past not out of masochism, but because they offer a return to a known. A home I remains locked in, an internal landscape I knows too well. And which I returns to, each time with hope, because there is an unconscious desire to become guardian of one’s home, no longer mastered by that which was once master.
The body, home to the phenomenological self, is where each original wound is stored. And it is also where hope lies, because each repetition carries within it the blueprint of both the original wound and the possibility of its healing.
When I find myself in the same argument, the same relationship dynamic, the same point of no escape, the same feeling of powerlessness, I is not simply repeating the past, suffering itself without purpose, I is engaging in an intrarelational attempt, reaching for ourself in asking what can I do now to finish with this?
Each return to where the hurt resides is an attempt to complete something unfinished. The body remembers what the mind cannot bear to hold, and this is in a body that is primed to heal itself. That is not poetry —think about the mechanics of inflammation, tissue repair, the immune system's response to infection, cell regeneration, blood clotting, bone regeneration— the body-self, with its embodied intelligence and access to psychic unconscious material seeks to repair the architecture of its wounds. When there is unresolved trauma, it continues to seek resolution through re-enactment. Each pattern being a question posed by the unconscious: What this time is different? What this time can I choose.
Towards Awareness
Though resolution begins as a return to the site of the hurt, healing begins not with breaking these patterns but with developing the intrarelational capacity to be present within them. To hear and see ourself in the hurt, to notice the moment between stimulus and response, where choice lives. To develop an awareness that enables a capacity to stay with experience long enough to discover what our self is actually asking of us in this now, because now is not the past.
In my practice, both as an existentialist-phenomenologist psychotherapist and transpersonal coach, I say to clients that what I offer are invitations. Not as a caveat, but to call attention to the choice making mechanism we possess. Here, the invitation is not to transcend a pattern, but to inhabit it consciously, with awareness. To bridge aware contact between the self experiencing these repetitive patterns, and the self witnessing these repetitive returns.
Repetition leads to a formalisation of behaviour, pattern becoming a block, but awareness is a key intrarelational tool that can be gently applied to anything formed of mind to work away at it, revealing its foundations. With the development of awareness, it becomes possible to lessen suffering in the here and now. To see, bear, and choose.
Because intrarelationality is developed through practice, I invite you to consider, though only if it feels appropriate:
What patterns do you find yourself repeating?
What of the forgotten past might your patterns speak to?
Which pattern would you like to begin to train awareness on?