Why We Keep Recreating the Pain We Swore We'd Avoid

A psychiatrist sits in a hiding place in Burundi, a small country most Americans could not find on a map, and asks herself how she got there. The answer she reaches is not about geography or bad luck. It is about a night in Baltimore nearly two decades earlier, a father she thought had died instantly, and a year of her own life that her memory had quietly deleted. In a conversation on the 10% Happier podcast, Dr. Suzan Song, a Harvard- and Stanford-trained psychiatrist and humanitarian researcher, lays out how unprocessed experience gets replayed in adult life, why the brain does this, and what it takes to find the script before it finds you again. The talk is built around a phrase she coined, "chasing the illusion of stability," which host Dan Harris said in the opening minutes explained much of his own anxiety about family, work, and the world.

How does a lost year turn into a repeated scene?

Song's story starts with a family business. When she was 15, her family owned a liquor store outside Baltimore. One robbery went too far: her father was carjacked in what was prosecuted as an attempted murder, and he later died. At the time, she told Harris, she did not think it had affected her much. Nobody in the house went to therapy. The response she remembers is a teenager's response: keep grades up, keep the activities going, get to college, build a life stable enough to protect her from something she could not name.

"I worked my three jobs. I went to college, med school, grad school, all the things," Song told Dan Harris on the 10% Happier podcast, describing the stability she built as a teenager.

That strategy worked for a long time. Then, nearly two decades later, she was in Burundi doing research on intergenerational stress among former child soldiers. In her third year there, one of the former child soldiers she was working with turned on her and threatened her life, and she went into hiding. Sitting in that room, she realized she had, in a sense, recreated the original scene, except this time the violence was aimed at her.

The most revealing part of the story is what she discovered while writing the book. For years she had believed her father was murdered on the night of the attack. Her agent asked her to say more about him, and she went looking. Her father died before the internet, so she searched what she could and found a small Baltimore Sun article that gave dates. The attack came a full year before he died. Song asked her mother how that gap made sense. Her mother said he had come home after the assault and lived in the family house. "You played violin for him, you made dinner for him," Song recalled her mother saying. Song had no memory of that year at all.

That gap is the spine of the conversation. A year of her life, including the most intimate time with her father, had been removed from her own record. Song's read on it is clinical and generous. "Our brains do something very protective for us," she said. The problem is what happens to the material the brain has protected. "When we never really address what had happened, when we have these fragmented stories, these fragmented narratives," she said, "it has a way to repeat itself."

What is repetition compulsion, and why do we do it?

Repetition compulsion is the term Song uses for the pattern in which people live their lives in cycles, reenacting an earlier painful dynamic without recognizing it. The mechanism is not masochism, and Song is careful about that distinction. As a teenager, she said, her psyche did not have the resources to take in the hopelessness, fear, or sadness. She could not touch down on those feelings, so she over-functioned instead. Years later the unprocessed material found a way back into her life.

Harris asked the obvious follow-up: why would anyone recreate a painful situation on purpose, even subconsciously? Song's answer is direct. "We want mastery," she said. "We just want control over the situation, because we didn't have control back then." The reenactment is an attempt to finish the scene differently. "So I would have the ability to stop the violence, to have a different ending," she said of her Burundi realization.

She offers examples that make the pattern recognizable outside a war zone. A woman who vows never to marry an alcoholic, because her father was one, ends up with a man who is not an alcoholic but has a work addiction, and she spends years trying to win his love the way she tried to win her father's. A C-suite executive who has been second-best in three consecutive jobs traces the feeling back to a family that always focused on her brother's addiction. In each case, Song says, the person does not see the pattern until they map the experiences side by side and ask what is driving them.

Why does the brain keep rehearsing the wound?

The conversation returns repeatedly to the idea that the mind is organized around prediction and that instability is a design problem for humans. Harris frames the larger issue as an urge for normalcy and a wish to control outcomes, and Song builds on it. Life changes constantly, but the human mind wants permanence. Repetition compulsion, she suggests, becomes a kind of baseline of stability: even a painful script is predictable, and predictability feels safer than the open-ended uncertainty of a new situation.

This is why "chasing the illusion of stability" is such a sharp phrase. People try to build a permanent order against a world that does not hold still. The strategy can look like success, as it did for Song's teenage self, and still leave a person exposed the moment the structure cracks. Harris said the phrase described his own anxiety almost exactly, which is why the episode leans on it.

How do you find the subconscious scripts running your life?

Song's method is practical rather than mystical. Identify the pattern, then identify the feelings that were ignored when it began. Ask what role you are protecting right now and whether that role is under threat. The episode's shorthand, as described in its own notes, is to follow the resentment. Resentment often marks the place where a script is still running: a sense that you are again second, again overlooked, again doing more than your share.

She also stresses that the patterns are usually invisible from inside, and that this is normal rather than a personal failing. Memory itself is a case in point. Song says memory is reconstruction rather than video playback, and she points to how people who lived through the same event often remember it differently. Each person's account is assembled from what they could take in at the time, what they have since rehearsed, and what they needed to believe. That is why a single narrative, held without examination, can quietly govern a life.

Can you rewrite a script you never remember writing?

Song's answer is yes, but not by simply reframing the story in a more positive light. She describes a sequence that begins with safety. A narrative cannot be updated until a person feels safe enough to look at it. Only then can cognitive restructuring do its work. Song says plainly that reframing is important, and she is also clear that it is not the whole process.

For the rewrite itself, she points to the research of Herminia Ibarra on how people change roles and identities. Ibarra's work, as Song describes it, emphasizes trying things out: people iterate, experiment with new roles, and change what they do and how they are responsible within an identity. The shift in identity comes through action as much as through insight. For someone stuck in an old role, the move is to test a different one in small, reversible steps.

Song's framing of rewriting runs on a simple order: first safety, then the pattern, then the feeling that was ignored, then a new way to act on it.

She also gives a concrete example of how a person might act differently inside a familiar dynamic, such as the executive who keeps being second-best. Options exist: she can talk directly with her husband or her employer, name what she needs, and change the terms of the role instead of silently absorbing it again.

What does resilience look like beyond bouncing back?

Song resists the popular version of resilience. "I always wonder, like, bouncing back to what?" she told Harris. For her, resilience is less about returning to a previous state and more about engaging with the world after instability has changed you. The goal is not to be unaffected by storms. It is to keep building a life that includes them.

She connects this to what the episode calls the Three Friends of Winter: narratives, rituals, and purpose, which the episode ties to an Asian art motif. Song's comments on purpose are direct. "Purpose gives us direction," she said, and she adds that people often already live out their purpose in daily ways they do not name. On rituals, she observes that people have routines they perform every day, and that deliberately including more of them in personal life can give structure when life loses it.

Her cross-cultural point is also worth taking seriously. Song observes that Americans tend to individualize suffering, treating it as a private matter to be solved alone. Many other traditions place pain inside relationships and communities. The relational self, she suggests, is a stronger container for the storms every life contains than the isolated individual trying to manage everything alone.

Where to go from here

If the conversation lands for you, start with a small, specific exercise. Write out three or four recurring situations in your work or family life where you ended up in the same role, the same fight, or the same feeling of being second. Next to each one, note the earliest time you remember feeling that way. Then look for the resentment. It will tell you where the old script is still active.

Song's book, Why We Suffer and How We Heal, goes further into the clinical and humanitarian research behind these ideas. The 10% Happier episode itself, hosted by Dan Harris, is the best place to hear Song tell the Baltimore and Burundi stories in her own voice, with the pauses and self-correction that make them land. Her central point holds up without the stories: the script you swore you would never repeat is probably still running, and the way out is to name it, feel what it was built to protect, and try a different ending.