Yes I have. I remember when memories started to return I discovered I had been sexually abused as a child, raped repeatedly at 13 & 14 and then raped again at 24. The day I realized the repetition of sexual abuse I looked at my therapist and said "WTF! I had to go through it over and over for some reason!?" I was livid... Not with her of course...but with how I had been treated. And I figured if there was a God how in the world could he have done this to me so many times?

Remember in another post I said that we come here to learn? Well...sometimes we need to go through something over and over until we DO learn it. For some reason 7 years of abuse didn't help me learn so I 'needed' the rape to happen. I think I 'get it' now.

As for hooking up with people who are like your family....I did that too. Like most women I married a man very much like my father. My father was not abusive to me and neither is my husband. But they are both very quiet and non-confrontational. I have also had friends who were like my family - angry, mean at times, etc. But as I have grown and healed those people have gone away and been replaced by new people who are very nice and caring.

I would say that now that you have recognized that this is something you do I would offer up a question my therapist always asks me "Why do you keep them in your life? What purpose do they serve?" If the answer is that they don't serve any purpose in your life then let them go and move on. Shed them like a snake sheds it's skin. Decide what purpose you DO want people to serve and then put that out in the universe and you will find them.

We are creatures of habit. You learned abuse as a child so you search out the same type of people. Perhaps you are hoping for a different outcome. You have recognized this pattern which is amazing, so now you can start to learn what a healthy relationship looks like with the help of your therapist.

My repeated issue,since my ptsd, is that I become overwhelmed and self implode. I also have a lot of all or nothing thinking that I keep repeating. I also push people away because I am afraid they are going to hurt me. This comes from being assaulted at my x employers and the hostile work environment. I got really emotionally beat up there and I do not trust people anymore

Yes. In spades.

If my trauma induced amnesia has taught me anything, it has taught me that the harder I work to forget a thing, the more doomed I am to repeat it. Mine was the very definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

How do I change it? Small steps, big faith and lots of prayer have worked best so far. Add in my tendency to self-flagellation and I needed to add in allot of self-forgiveness and self-tolerance. Not even The Arf gets to wake up a self-declared different person in the morning. Exerting my formidable will to that solution would be one of the things I kept doing over and over while expecting different results.

Be patient with the process, muji. The good stuff is worth the wait. . .

I did this with personalities like my sister's (not my dad, interestingly enough)....

I was in my early 30s when it hit me, "I am trying to make a relationship with someone like my sister! ACK!"

Then I realized, "That's why it sucks!"

And I wasn't even in therapy at that point. I just... realized that I needed to think about what in these people was like my sister. Usually the way they'd manipulate others by being charming and then needy and then... Yeah.

When I start feeling a need to please a person, I stop and ask myself *why*.... 80 percent of the time, it's that similarity. The other 20, I'm just being my usual insecure self.

It's tough. I've gotten better at identifying them and therefore avoiding them, but it's soooo hard sometimes to overcome that wanting to heal the (dead) damaged relationships using a (toxic) proxy. Did that make sense?

I dated so many men who were like my father. Married one of them, divorced after barely three years. The hardest fight for me was in becoming comfortable and safe in my solitude. Once I did that my relationships started to shift towards the positive because I no longer felt like I HAD to be with someone no matter what.

It's frightening to let go of patterns, especially the painful ones that we feel like we absolutely must fix instead of letting them go. Our brains trick us into accepting things we shouldn't and we don't ever really realize how bad it is until some outside force, be it a therapist or an article or whatever, shocks us into seeing it all.

Muji.....I was going to say I don't do that. But then I regained consciousness and realized I sure as heck did. When I married my first wife, I married for all intensive purposes my abusive mother to a tea. A true creature from the deep. And then I married my second wife, the true narcissist. As far as she was concerned, she did me a huge favor by letting me marry her. She saved me from myself. And my payment to her for saving me was to allow me the great fortune to do absolutely everything inside and outside of the house. And then I guess that got old and she needed a little spice in her life.

Now I have no traditional family nor any social life at all. And for now, this is exactly what I want. I am in a healing process and I will not be distracted from the process. For me, it will never happen again. Never again will I allow anyone to take advantage of me, ever. My guard is way, way up for now, and that is where I want it. I know in time, dropping that guard will be a process in and of itself.

As to why it happens to you and me. It just happens and we don't even know it is happening at the time until we see enough of the behavior of the other people to see a pattern. By the time we see the pattern and say, WTH is going on here, by then we feel obligated to that person to continue on in the relationship. It's a self-esteem issue in my opinion, as I have it too. We feel like we are the other person's property instead of being an equal member in a 50/50 relationship. Hope it makes an ounce of sense.

Yes I do. I have a slight problem with compulsiveness and also putting myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. All of my life I did, and even got raped because of it.

You all saw my repeating rages on the board here. My social anxiety plays that out for me. All people are not abusive. I am realizing that all over again - after my last bad therapist, and both compulsion and repetition go in streaks for me. I did let out all that boiling steam, which felt kind of good - after having to hold more than my share of all of that in, for a couple more years.

For me all I knew was abuse, then again most of the people who I always spent my time with - my friends and true love being the exception, were all abusive. I was always putting myself in danger.

Whenever I am able to get on DS, I either black out or have severe cramping in my feet or legs which I have now. Keep trying muji, and be patient - it is sometimes a long process. I wish you nothing but peace.

Maybe you pick similarly abusive individuals in order to subconsciously try to resolve the unstable dynamic from your past. If you make it work with the current abusive relationship, you might experience a feeling of achievement, of conquering the negativity and setting things right?

I believe that its a sign of a deep, internal urge to have hope for humanity. You dont want to be let down, so you try to hold on to that hope of them changing, or you being able to somehow change them. A form of possible denial. Not wanting to accept the brutal reality that some individuals are shit and will always be shit.

I was able to stop such thinking by educating myself. I read plenty of books on criminology and dangerous personality disorders. Its important to realize that you have the power to avoid people like that and to keep yourself safe. You deserve better.

Hi Muji, I've had repetition compulsion. That is, I found myself as a young woman with a compulsion to prostitute myself. I fought with it for years, then acted out for a long time. The length of time I stayed there was compounded by poverty and mental illness.
And, it really did feel like a repetition compulsion.

In fact, one night I was in the house we worked from. i had a strong sense of being little and behind a thick pane of glass. My family were all on the other side, oblivious to me.

So - I got up and walked onto the street, and waited for a car to come and pick me up for a sex job. this felt like I was doing something to be noticed (by the public), as a response to the image I'd had of being ignored by my family.

So, i got picked up and luckily for me the guy was safe - after the job, he drove me back where he picked me up.

I hope you don't feel too bad for being attracted to abusive people. I just think that the more therapy you do, the more whole you become, it won't happen.

I have too.
I was raised basically in isolation and I have given myself the isolation chamber too as an adult....its a very common phenomenon maybe only thorough constant questioning our motives and self-analyzing can't stop us.

I meant CAN stop us....not can't

The informative years and our childhood is soooo damned powerful... I wish it wasn't to muji... I think that there's a lot of theories that make sense however I think also when a grotesque amount of damage has been done as it has been to many of the people on here we do the best we can with the tools that have been provided for post abuse
It's what's familiar to you muji... It's been what relationships have looked like to you since you were a young tyke so unfortunately it makes sense... Gentle hug .
I don't have the ability to trust and I haven't ever been able to figure it out... My heart and head aren't on the same page... xo

We can learn as children that hurting and loving go together hand in hand

Thanks, everybody, the way you've shared your experiences really reduces my embarrassment at my realization of how this "repetition compulsion" has played a role. It's played a role in my life even after getting away from my abusers. It's a deep subject, and I'm sure there are many dimensions of it to learn from.

I guess a lesson i'm getting from my own experiences and yours shared here is this. When a kid has had only negative attention, then as a grown up, negative attention might seem better than no attention at all. And so out of a fear of loneliness, I stayed in relationships in which people scolded me or berated me, figuring it was better than nothing.

Now I'm learning that I don't have to worry about being alone so much that I will make that bad deal for myself and be with someone hurtful. I can be OK on my own. That was the threat my mother would hurl at me when what she did to me would hurt me as a kid. "You don't like it you just see how you do on your own. You wouldn't last a second. You need me and nobody else will have you, etc."

Some of that may have been true--not that I deserved abuse, but that I couldn't yet be on my own ok as a kid. By definition a kid needs a care giver. That's no excuse to abuse a kid, but the fact that a kid needs someone else is true. Now as an adult, though, I seem to have carried that message on into adulthood. I believed I couldn't make it on my own.

When, in fact, it's totally my option to be with someone or not. And I can be ok alone instead of in a bad relationship. I'm a competent, self-sufficient adult, plenty capable of meeting my own needs. I am entitled to some self confidence about that; it's not arrogance or foolishness, as my abusive parent said.

Duh, I know. But better to learn it late than never, huh? Still learning.

Muji, as I have told you before, my toughest days are the days that I don't work. When I go to church on Sunday and come home to an empty house and know that I will be all alone that day, I do get I guess what you could call a low-level depression. I guess it just isn't the way I would have drawn it up on the board of life when I was a teen or young adult.

But then I consider the alternatives or what I had my whole life and this living alone thing is not all bad for now. When I was in the discovery phase and figuring out what the truth of my childhood was, I needed absolute calm and quiet, no distractions. I was on a fishy dating site and went on a few dates, but the vast majority of them were a disaster. I got nothing out of it but drama and confusion. I also dropped that other popular social site for the same reason, nothing but drama and confusion.

And now that I am smack dab in the middle of my recovery, the only socializing that I will do will be that which is wholesome and helps me in my healing and recovery process. My friend, you are beyond a good man. I hope you will adopt my new mantra......"Never again will I ever allow anyone to use, abuse, or take advantage of me at any time for the rest of my life."