Repetitive relationships

Sometimes people recognize that they seem to have the same unhappy relationship over and over. They seem perpetually to find themselves repeating the past and its relationships. They marry the same person in different shapes but the same personality; they keep falling in love with gamblers or drunkards or abusers or even just with people with poor health. They wonder where they find these people or how these people find them. Sometimes it even seems to them that a promising new relationship slowly slides back into the same pattern as old unhappy relationships.

Psychotherapists call that "transference". We mean that people repeat important relationships out of their past. That's not difficult to understand. We learn how to relate to others in our early family life. We learn skills and techniques that fit our situation and help us to survive in it. If we survive to adulthood, we must have gotten fairly competent in using those skills.

So it isn't surprising that we do best in familiar situations, ones that build upon the skills we learned as children and adolescents. We know how to function there. Our "maps" of what to expect and how to respond work well or with minor changes.

It's a little less obvious that our very skills and attitudes tend to pull others into a reciprocal relationship. Here's an example: As a child of a sometimes rageful alcoholic father, a young man learned to deal with any conflict by shutting up, becoming over-compliant and fearful, and avoiding any confrontation. As an adult, the same man dealt with conflicts with significant others in the same way. Faced with a difference of opinion, he became silent and withdrawn, even appearing mildly fearful. The other person, faced with this helpless and passively fearful reaction, became increasingly impatient and frustrated, which the man took for anger and threat. In turn, his own withdrawal was strengthened while the other person acted more and more like his father.

My point is that not only do we repeat ways of relating to others that we learned in our past, our behaviors elicit or "pull" complementary behaviors from the others around us, thereby reinforcing the "rightness" of our original behavior. A friend of mine once said "You can identify the spouse of an alcoholic because after spending 30 minutes talking you find you want a drink".

In Transactional Analysis Stephen Karpman identified three primary roles which describe patterns of behavior learned in childhood: Persecutor, Rescuer and Victim. While these roles are fairly self-explanatory, a brief summary might be helpful. The role of the Persecutor is to correct, punish and rectify; the role of the Rescuer is to help others who don't realize they need help; the role of the Victim is to be helplessly mistreated or unable to cope without assistance. The Persecutor operates out of a framework of "righteous indignation" towards Victim types, and "contemptuous impatience" toward Rescuer types. The Rescuer operates out of a framework of "condescending over-helpfulness and protectiveness" toward Victims and shocked moral superiority toward Persecutors. The Victim operates out of a framework of "frightened submissiveness" toward Persecutors and "passive inadequacy" toward Rescuers.

Persecutor/Victim/Rescuer relationships are all dishonest. Their goal is never a positive one, whatever the performers (and we all do it) say. The goal is to skillfully manage current relationships in the same way that worked in the past, thereby controlling the outcome. In fact, the performers in these roles are perennially hoping that this time the outcome of the relationship will be a positive one, as they wanted it to be with a parent in their childhood. It is fair to say that the person is perpetually trying to make their childhood work better by turning others into their parents.

What is significantly different about this approach from more conventional descriptions of "transference" is that it recognizes that the person engaged in the role of Persecutor, Rescuer or Victim is "pulling" or eliciting complementary behavior from others. Persecutors pull Victim or Rescuer behavior from others; Victims pull Persecutor/Rescuer behavior and Rescuers pull Victim/Persecutor behavior. Something like this was described by Otto Kernberg as "projective identification", but his approach is considerably more complicated without being any more useful.

As long as people stay in their unhealthy roles, they will find equally unhealthy partners on which to blame their unhappiness.