Repetition compulsion and rocking back and forth
In tsunami, I asked whether a high level of self-awareness is a blessing or a curse. Now I think it’s simply an instinct deeply rooted in most people’s nature, especially in the highly sensitive ones.
Am I one of them?
Definitely, yes.
As I’m finally writing this, while sarcastically listening to Flora Dee Robinson’s You Cheated On Me, which I still genuinely enjoy, I clearly remember a very cinematic dialogue that feels like it happened just yesterday:
— The dog bit you. Did you get closer to it afterward?
— No.
— Then why would you come closer to me now?
Several days later, when my brain finally decided to rescue me from “freeze mode,” I found an answer that says everything about me:
“I always find a justification. I know the dog was truly, deeply hurt and didn’t really intend to bite me…It was just a reflex. Same with you.”
Spring taught me what repetition compulsion is: entering another cycle of all-too-familiar triggering conversations and complex emotions, with one aim: to change the scenario.
But is changing the scenario…
really a form of victory?
I overthink a lot and…yes, that’s my nature.
Reading several scientific research papers taught me that elephants are so much like us, or perhaps we are so much like them.
Stress caused by diverse factors, such as isolation, loss of familiar surroundings, easily makes them pace endlessly in circles or rock back and forth for hours. A repetitive behavior that leads nowhere.
C-PTSD, empathy, and emotional intelligence —
that’s what we share.
Our memory doesn’t let us forget what we couldn’t change.
A young elephant who had witnessed the culling of its parents may return to that place and pace uncontrollably in circles, even when the danger was gone.
It is a form of returning to the “heart” of trauma because the body is still stuck there.
Yet it is not proven whether elephants hold a “hope” for a different la fin.
I repeated trauma through conscious choices, while elephants unconsciously return to the place where it all happened.
I consciously entered the repetitive cycle. I rocked back and forth, repeating: “I really don’t need this. I just want to end it differently.”
Lesson learned: you can’t change the scenario when the film has already been released.
Part 2 is always about something new.
With love and
drama,
which I hope to never ever experience again,
Agness
