Dr. Paul Conti

And a person will say, my last seven relationships have been abusive.

And I'll say back something sometimes like, well, look, if you tell me that you've had seven relationships that have been abusive in different ways, I'll agree with you.

I only say that because that's never what someone says, right?

But I think what you're going to tell me is you've kind of had the same relationship seven times.

So the light bulb that goes off, like I have not had seven different abusive relationships.

I have had one that I have repeated seven times.

And now we start getting to what's really going on and what needs to happen.

That person needs to face what happened in that original abusive relationship.

And it always comes down to the same sort of concepts of the person feeling terrified while the abuse was going on.

feeling guilty, feeling ashamed, feeling like, oh, they brought it on themselves, they deserve it, they don't deserve anything better, right?

Because the brain is trying to make sense of it, right?

Or I thought I could make that okay, but I couldn't, right?

And then there's more guilt and more shame.

And if that's stuck inside of someone, like that's bundled up inside of someone, you know, like a medical abscess inside a person, you know, a walled off infection inside the body, this is the same concept in the brain

then of course the limbic system is going to want to fix that.

And it fixes it by trying to let's recreate that situation and make it right this time.

I see that play out clinically over and over again.

And why do things get better?

Because we go to the trauma and we unlock it.

It's not hidden inside where it can control things, right?