“I keep choosing the wrong partner. It feels as if I keep stepping on the same rake over and over again...”

At first glance, it may seem that the problem lies in repeatedly choosing the wrong partners.

From Otto Kernberg’s perspective, however, the issue is not only whom a person chooses, but also which internal object relations dyad is being unconsciously activated within the space of intimacy.

Our patients are often genuinely puzzled by the fact that they repeatedly find themselves involved with people who devalue them, control them, become emotionally distant, humiliate them, or ultimately abandon them.

On the surface, these partners may appear entirely different.

Yet the emotional outcome remains remarkably similar.

From the perspective of object relations theory, this may reflect the unconscious repetition of internalized object relations dyads that were established in early developmental experience.

Along with these dyads, familiar affects, representations of self and other, and habitual ways of seeking love, dependency, and acting out aggression are reenacted. 

From a neuropsychoanalytic perspective, a child attempts in various ways to obtain love, warmth, and care during childhood. When these repeated efforts prove unsuccessful, the child resorts to particular, often destructive, ways of coping with the feelings of pain, panic, and depression that arise from the failure to establish good relationships with their parents.

Over time, the need itself becomes dissociated. The emotions of pain, panic, and depression recede into the background, while compulsive behavioral patterns that once helped the child cope with unbearable frustration remain embedded in unconscious memory.

Relationships themselves then come to be experienced through the paradigms of control and submission, sadism and masochism, fusion and rejection.

What was once painful may nevertheless remain psychologically familiar.

And what is familiar is often experienced by the psyche as safer than something new and unknown.

For this reason, a person may unconsciously gravitate not toward a partner capable of providing a different relational experience, but toward someone who helps recreate a familiar internal scenario.

Kernberg described such processes as the repetition of pathological object relations patterns.

In these situations, a person is not simply choosing a partner.

Rather, they are unconsciously reenacting a familiar role within an already established object relations pattern.

The partner gradually comes to occupy the position of the object associated with an unresolved internal conflict.

New relationships then become a stage upon which the same experiences of abandonment, humiliation, dependency, fear of intimacy, or fear of losing love are replayed again and again.

This is why the problem is not always a matter of simply being “unlucky.”

Sometimes a person encounters different people, yet ends up living through the same story with each of them. Alternatively, people who might offer a different relational experience are experienced as uninteresting or fail to evoke attraction.

In such cases, therapeutic work involves more than simply establishing appropriate treatment goals with regard to relationships.

Equally important is the exploration of which internal representations of self and other become activated within relationships, which conflicts underlie this repetition, and why a particular type of relationship continues to feel so familiar and compelling despite the pain it brings.

For at times a person repeats the past not because they seek suffering, as may occur in masochistic pathology, but because they are unconsciously attempting to resolve a conflict that was never fully worked through.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy