Why We Repeat Pain: Repetition Compulsion, Gambling, and the Nervous System
Hello there to all my loyal readers who have patiently stuck around and waited an entire 7 months for a new blog post to come out. Due to some changes in my work patterns, I suddenly found myself with absolutely no time to write. Days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months. As with all slipping habits, it gets harder to reinstate them. I am no exception, despite giving a good talk to all my clients about sticking with good habits and building momentum.
I hope you enjoy this new blog post relating to being hooked on unpredictability and inconsistency. This is a post about healing what lies beneath the surface. I hope it can be of help!
Repetition compulsion- why we repeat painful experiences
As a Psychologist who worked mainly with behavioural approaches, I still find some nuggets from Freud’s teachings truly fascinating. The concept of repetition compulsion is one of them. Repetition compulsion refers to the tendency to unconsciously act out past traumas.
Essentially, the nervous system puts its past learning on repeat by seeking out situations that will recreate a familiar set of emotions.
This drive to repeat painful or unresolved issues can be seen as a subconscious attempt to seek resolution or gain mastery. Unfortunately, this is rarely the outcome. Certainly not straight away. Instead, the pattern can drive a person to continue to reenact emotional pain and, as a result, often compound the negative experiences, leaving the person feeling even more trapped and powerless!
This pattern frequently occurs in addictions such as gambling and is also highly relevant to dysfunctional relationships. Gambling can create an illusion of providing a band-aid for challenging emotions that arise as a result of early unmet needs, neglect, abandonment and chaos. Meanwhile, the more conscious part of the mind will be wondering why on earth it is so hard to learn from the very real and negative current consequences of such behaviours.
“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”
Quote by Sigmund Freud
I tend to view these types of compulsions as the mind’s desperate attempt to make you understand and opt for new healing pathways. The unconscious mind, which is largely programmed by our past experiences (particularly early ones), cleverly helps you manifest the circumstances externally that have once hurt you to make you wake up and understand how to heal from it.
This theory offers one way of understanding maladaptive habits and destructive coping styles that can help explain the painful reality of continuing to seek out more pain even in situations when, consciously, you may want nothing more than to end the pain cycle!
Your nervous system is trying to help you, but it might be running dated ‘programmes’
Our brain (through processes like pattern recognition, heuristics and implicit memory) simplifies information to conserve energy and allows for quick decision making. As such, it will enable us to operate with simplified ‘codes’ for approaching everyday life. Sadly, the nervous system does not think in moral or long-term well-being terms. It does not inherently distinguish between the kinds of learning that lead to emotional growth and freedom versus those that reinforce long-term distress or fear. It simply favours simplification and efficiency.
As such, it can maintain patterns that were once able to keep us safe or that helped us survive, even if those patterns no longer serve us at all. An example of this is seen in trauma sufferers who frequently over-prioritise ‘safety’ in the form of avoidance behaviours and/or hypervigilance in maladaptive ways. Even when doing so such creates more pain and anxiety in the long term. Thankfully, there is a phenomenon called ‘neuroplasticity’, which means that we can retrain our nervous system to form more freeing patterns. Whilst we cannot erase past patterns, we can retrain our minds to rely more heavily on ways of being that serve us well in the present time. The drawback is that this work can be challenging, often requires a bit of guidance, and last but not least, it requires people to face up and take accountability over their own behaviours and painful life patterns.
Enlisting some help would always be the ideal, but even if you can’t, please make sure you choose to be gentle, kind and compassionate with yourself on this journey. Every little step towards healing is positive, but setbacks are common and expected!
How the nervous system got attached to inconsistency in the first place
Early intermittent rewards prime the brain for addiction
Our nervous system learns from repetition. If your childhood featured high doses of unpredictability, you might have learnt to survive and even find some odd sense of comfort in all the chaos. A child who is born into an environment where their needs only get met now and then will soon learn that attention and care come at a cost. This cycle will feature longing, desire, hope, delusion and not least the relief and reward when you finally where attended to.
The nervous system will learn:
To tolerate high emotional ambiguity
feel activated or alert when exposed to unpredictability and anxious anticipation
Equate inconsistency and unpredictability with excitement and ‘joy’. This pattern is not necessarily a conscious one. You may not be walking around consciously thinking ‘aaahhw wouldn’t it be great with some inconsistent unpredictability now’, but if you watch your patterns carefully, you may just find that your relationships with humans as well as that with gambling feature some degrees of chaos, unpredictability and highs and lows. And more alarmingly, when things feel stable and predictable, you might rate them as ‘boring’.
Your nervous system learns patterns — it does not care if those patterns make you feel good or bad. It cares about the fact that they are predictable! Concerningly, if inconsistency is what your brain has come to expect, that can be predictable as well.
‘This is what love looks like..’ is the learning’ from a childhood marred by emotional unpredictability, chaos and conditional affection. Now - gambling is not love but if you really think about it, the nervous system does not really ‘understand’ what is what. If an activity can trigger a coctail of similar neurochemicals and make you feel activated, achieve a headrush and also the illusion of a safe comfort blanket being wrapped around you at the time of a win the brain will suggest ‘give me more of that’. It is actually fairly logical. It does not know what precisely it is urging you towards, only that it felt really great last time you did it.
When you are being exposed to intermittent reinforcement on an ongoing basis, the brain gets so used to existing in a state of hungry undernourishment with the odd emotional ‘feed’ coming your way that you eventually will have retrained your entire being to feel like a small win despite many terrible losses still feel like a major win!
The scary thing about this is that you are continuously overrating the importance of wins while downplaying the long-term and very chronic impact of continued gambling and losses.
The childhood wounds need to be addressed
In childhood, we have no choice but to adapt to the environment we are born into. If the environment offers on and off parenting, neglect or even abuse, a child will learn to suppress or sideline their own needs in order to be loved and approved by the parent. Despite the fact that doing so is causing harm. This is because survival rules and a small child without a guardian has little chance of making it through.
Unfortunately, the habits of emotional suppression, self-neglect and the lack of training in emotional awareness and coping leave long trails. In therapy, it is not unusual to see fully grown adults who are still trying hard to gain approval, validation and a drop of being out of the parent. Sometimes the parent has been replaced by a partner or whoever else is around. But so long of the habit of outsourcing one’s wellbeing to someone other than the self is still going strong.
An alternative adaptation can be seen in those who have learnt to cut themselves off from their emotional needs, denying them (often even to themselves) and becoming hyperindependent. Whether the unmet needs have led to hyperindependence or incessant neediness, the hypervigilance and dissociation, and the felt need for avoidance are going to create an unhealthy breeding ground for activities such as gambling to get a foothold.
This is not the only condition that will create a pathway towards addicted gambling, but it definitely is one of them. Gambling mimics the emotional rhythm of early intermittent caregiving - inconsistent, thrilling, and laced with uncertainty.
Addiction to unpredictability- an unregulated nervous system seeks escape or excitement
An unregulated or chronically stressed nervous system is extremely vulnerable to external regulation through a range of unhealthy behaviours. Here are some examples of the experiences your brain might be seeking as a way of feeling ‘better’ in a moment of dysregulation:
Dopamine surges from- this could be from gambling or other addictions (or multiple co-occurring ones). You can get a dopamine surge from ordinary healthy behaviours as well but these often require more effort and don’t tend to provide a ‘spike’ in quite the same way.
Distraction and avoidance from emotional discomfort. This means looking for emotional ‘escape’ through other, more intensely stimulating activities so that one does not have to sit with those difficult emotional states when they arise.
The seeking of relief from activities that can only ever offer soothing in the very short-term. In a nutshell, gambling becomes a way to self-soothe and/or override the internal dysregulation that the person never learned to manage safely in childhood.
A sense of hope that gets generated by an upcoming gambling session, despite the many repeated disappointments from the past. This is because the excitement is produced by unpredictability and hope rather than by certain facts. With gambling, unpredictability never stops. Even when there is a less than one in a million chance of winning - there is still that chance, and the brain quite likes to cling to that hope.
Familiarity - this is perhaps the most important point of all. For someone who has been conditioned to expect nothing other than unpredictability, it is important to understand that the nervous system will ‘warm’ to this type of environment even if it is not at all healthy. It feels like home for the nervous system despite the many distressing consequences.
Hyperarousal and reward sensitivity
These are somewhat complicated terms, and I will do my best to explain them.
Hyperarousal means that the brain is in a state of overdrive. Your nervous system is on high alert. You might notice elevated heart rate, increased muscle tension, faster breathing and heightened sensory processing. Hyperarousal can be part of an anxiety response and is also a place where many sufferers from trauma get ‘stuck’ in for long stretches of time. It can feel exhausting to be stuck in hyperarousal as the mind is working overtime to be in a state of ‘readiness’. It will keep your mind in a perpetual obsessional state.
Reward sensitivity refers to the degree to which a person’s brain responds to rewarding stimuli (money, food, novelty, social approval, risk etc). If you have a high reward sensitivity, it means you might need more stimulating activities to achieve the same feeling of reward as someone else gets from a more ‘normal’ activity. Those with ADHD often have an elevated reward threshold, leaving them particularly vulnerable to being attracted to highly stimulating activities such as gambling.
During states of hyperarousal, the mind and body are essentially scanning the environment for stimuli that are emotionally relevant and important, such as threats, rewards etc. Unfortunately, gambling here fills the role of ‘reward’ much as it may no longer feel like it. It will seek it out like a target missile, particularly in situations where gambling has previously been associated with a way of ‘regulating’ from a state of feeling overstimulated.
The addicted mind does not just like rewards - it feels like it ‘needs’ them. The dopamine spikes that gambling activities can provide are almost unparalleled by day-to-day behaviours, hence it is no wonder that a brain that has been primed to seek this ‘cocktail’ out as though one’s life depends on it will find it particularly great when it finds it.
For those whose nervous system is on the ‘lookout’ for activities that create a dose of dopamine and feelings of reward, gambling sadly represents an extremely appealing option. Try to take a step back when you notice yourself becoming activated and ‘excited’ by something that is unpredictable and unhealthy. What other times have you had this experience? Can you connect the dots to very early experiences? If so, you might be able to recognise that feeding the brain with more drama at a time when the experience calls for soothing or regulation is never going to work out well.
The problem is that intense reward focus can override long-term thinking and risk assessment as the nervous system is hyperfocused on emotional reward no matter how unsafe or damaging achieving those can be!!
In spite of providing spikes of rewarding feelings, gambling will over time dull the reward system down. As the brain is continuously flooded with dopamine, the receptors become desensitised. More gambling will then be needed to achieve the same emotional effect. This leads to compulsive behaviours and more chasing, even when the actual win is not going to happen (or wins would result in more gambling and more losses).
At the far end of addicted gambling, most people will recognise that they no longer feel that excited even from gambling. The ability to feel the thrill is now isolated to events that offer some sort of extreme intensity. For the most part the gambling will feel more like a compulsion. Something that needs to happen just to so you can stop craving for it.
Familiarity is not synonymous with healthy
One of the key things to learn from this blog post is the fact that what feels familiar may not necessarily be healthy. When I ran homeless groups for gamblers, many clients would get uncomfortable when they finally entered fixed housing. Although this was clearly a step in the right direction, they would be overcome by fear and panic about the stability, responsibility and the unfamiliarity of having to live ‘as normal’. Some of them even ensured they became homeless again so that they would not have to prolong this new sense of discomfort.
Likewise, you might find that your entire being somehow ‘rejects’ stability and safety. Please be aware that this is not healthy and it must be addressed. Feeling at home in unpredictability and chaos, while burning yourself out in search of external fixes that can provide short-term relief, is not a healthy way to live and will never result in meeting your needs. Or healing your wounds.
It is extremely key that you realise that emotional deprivation sets you up to become dependent on external reward seeking. Meanwhile, the only way you will ever be able to fully achieve a sense of security and emotional safety is by working on yourself and in a way ‘reprogram’ your nervous system until it fully understands that love, comfort and safety will arise from a completely different set of behaviours to what it is used to. It will be achieved primarily by reestablishing trust in yourself to reject the instinct that leads you towards destruction! This type of work takes time and requires patience but is incredibly rewarding in the long term. Getting some professional help on this journey is always recommended. In cases where this is not possible, please know that even the efforts you do all by yourself to better understand your unmet needs and provide better for them is still worthwhile.
Healing your nervous system requires working with the body, not just the mind
On the bright side, deciding to heal means that you can start to recognise that gambling has been an illusion. You don’t need the money, it does not give you money and even if it did it would act as empty calories for a very hungry belly.
On the less fun side, healing means a lot of invested work and effort. It typically means putting yourself through some of the painful feelings that were suppressed once upon a time and paved the way for your current predicament. Your nervous system needs to accept that chasing highs and the excitement that can come from an emotional win, following on from existing on the emotional breadline, are not part of healthy learning but rather what your relationship trauma is made of.
Healing your relationship with consistency is somatic work, not just cognitive ( in the ‘mind’) . This means you will not be able to think your way out of this situation.
You will have to experience your feelings fully while also learning to act in ways that will feel counterintuitive for you.
‘But how can I stop obsessing about gambling’'? Why do those losses haunt me so much?
Well, you will continue to be prone to obsessing and experiencing a haunting sensation so long as your brain believes it is hanging on to gambling in the interest of your emotional survival. Your job now is to teach it otherwise. You will not be able to use logical reasoning to stop a behaviour that was never rooted in logic. Gambling addiction is emotional, even when the reasoning in the mind may tell you otherwise!
Much like you cannot think your way out of an addiction, your mind needs to recognise that it does not hold all the answers. And if you can quiet the mind (or at least not engage with it) and give way for your body to pursue some healing, this can change. Many people get confused about the role of the body in emotion regulation. To simplify your understanding, it means that you start considering what is going on inside of you on a deeper physiological level when you experience your feelings. You have to train yourself to stay present, make room and respond more healthily to challenging feelings. This helps regulate the nervous system and teaches us how to trust ourselves and calm ourselves down when we feel feelings that have previously been known to draw us into unhealthy behaviour patterns. It could mean that you opt for a warm shower or to hold something very tight when you are craving. It might mean that you learn to take a walk and call a friend when you feel lonely. Or that you do a grounding exercise with deep breathing when the mind is going wild with obsessional thoughts about how you can overcome a challenge and win some more money, even if you lost most of what you had already to gambling.
What you are seeking from gambling is what you need to provide for yourself emotionally
Peace is not something that you need other people or activities to provide for you —Getting to a point of trusting yourself means you don’t need to white-knuckle through life wondering when next you will be up against a trigger. It is still important to have your safety measures (money restrictions, blocking software etc) to ensure that you are never caught off guard. This also includes avoiding those triggering situations where you know from prior experience are a culprit for emotional derailment and loss of control.
You will need to be consistent with yourself in identifying the triggers that hook you in and your ability to resist acting on them. Allow yourself to stay with those challenging feelings with a guarantee that you have your own back no matter what. You are effectively taking on the role of an inner parent to your inner child.
Breathing, grounding work and self-compassion are all important parts of healing. Your nervous system needs to learn that feelings of safety, security and love are positive experiences that will result in trust in ourselves and our inner world. On the reverse, we need to teach ourselves to reject feelings of activation and excitement that come on the back of unpredictability, chaos and drama. Think about a rescue dog that needs to learn that your proximity, physical contact, and regular attention equate to safety. The human brain is not that different. Be regular and consistent in your efforts with yourself, and choose to disallow inconsistency, high drama and situations that leave you in a state of anticipatory anxiety unless they are not at all within your control. Last but not least, take whatever time it takes you to process and stay present with the feelings that come up when you embark on your journey of recovery.
With love,
Annika