The Pull of the Familiar: Why We Repeat What Once Hurt Us

pelletiermargaux
Oct 27
3 min read

Updated: Oct 27

There’s a strange paradox in the human nervous system: we are wired to seek what is familiar, not necessarily what is safe.

Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child, describes this through Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to recreate the emotional conditions of our childhood, even when they were painful or unsafe. For the child, familiar equaled survival. As adults, that association can quietly guide our relationships, our choices, and even the way we think.

The Comfort of What We Once Knew

If you grew up feeling powerless, unseen, or responsible for the moods of those around you, those sensations became your nervous system’s baseline. So later in life, you may find yourself unconsciously drawn to situations that echo those early experiences, not because they feel good, but because they feel known.

Russell Kennedy writes, if we grew up in dysfunction, the word familiar can split into family and liar, because we were taught false messages about what safety feels like. We learned that tension could mean love, anxiety could mean care, or chaos could mean connection.

The Unconscious Drive to Recreate

This is the nervous system’s attempt to resolve what was never completed. It keeps returning to the same story, hoping to rewrite the ending. But safety can’t be found in the same conditions that first created danger.

We see this in relationships, in work dynamics, even in our inner dialogue. The person who grew up around emotional volatility may feel strangely calm in the presence of conflict and unsettled when things are peaceful. Or the person can unconsciously seek or even create tension or conflict in the relationship because the body equates intensity with safety. It’s not manipulation or choice; it’s a survival pattern replaying itself. The nervous system feeds on what it knows, even if what it knows is chaos.

When Worry Feels Like Home

Many people with chronic anxiety are not just experiencing worry, they’re bonded to it. If a caregiver modelled worry, or if you constantly felt the undercurrent of their anxiety, vigilance may have become your form of safety.

In times of stress, the body naturally returns to what it knows: scanning, anticipating, rehearsing. It’s not logical, it’s physiological. Worry gives a sense of control, a false certainty in the face of the unknown. But it also perpetuates the same alarm that the nervous system is trying to soothe.

The Doorway Out: Awareness

Repetition compulsion only loses its grip when it becomes conscious. When you can name the moment you feel the “pull” in your body, you are no longer inside the pattern; you are observing it.

This is where somatic awareness becomes powerful. Instead of judging the pattern, you track it. You feel where it lives in your body, breathe space around it, and stay long enough to sense what it’s trying to protect you from. Over time, the body begins to learn that safety can exist in unfamiliar ground, in calm, in neutrality, in stillness.

From Familiarity to Freedom

Healing is not about rejecting the past, but about no longer reenacting it. It’s a slow, embodied re-education, teaching the nervous system that peace can be just as safe as vigilance, that love can exist without tension, and that stability is not the same as boredom.

That’s how we take our power back, by bringing awareness to what has been automatic and offering our body a new experience of safety.