This woman kept saying the same thing in every session: “I knew it would hurt me. I did it anyway.”
She wasn’t clueless or naive. She knew exactly what she was doing, while doing it.
And that’s what I want to walk you through today. Why people who are fully aware of the damage still walk straight into it. Why rational knowledge doesn’t stop emotional repetition. And what’s actually driving your decisions, when you think you’re in control.
Let’s see.
When Knowing Isn’t Enough: Why We Keep Hurting Ourselves
There’s something particularly frustrating about the kind of pain we see coming and don’t avoid. Not because we didn’t know, but precisely because we did.
You know they’ll let you down again, and still you call.
You know the argument will escalate, and still you engage.
You know the decision will hurt, and still you make it.
Not out of ignorance, but in full awareness. It’s moments like these that reveal a painful truth:
Our conscious knowledge is not the ultimate authority in our inner life. Aha!!!! There’s another force at play, one far less reasonable, far less visible, and far more persistent. Please, welcome:
The unconscious.
The fallacy of rational control
We are trained, especially in modern discourse, to believe that information leads to change. Aka couching narrative and the likes.
That if someone understands the damage a behaviour causes, they will naturally stop. That knowing better will eventually lead to doing better.
But anyone who has ever lived through a recurring emotional pattern knows this is not how it works. Knowing is not the problem. The problem is that knowing rarely reaches the part of us that decides.
This is what psychoanalysis has pointed out for over a century: that there is a split in the human psyche. That we are not one coherent voice, but a system of often competing forces. That beneath our thoughts and intentions lies a territory ruled by a different logic. And that territory, the unconscious, can be the true author of our decisions, even the ones that harm us (specially those ones).
When desire overrides logic
Imagine this:
a nutritionist who has spent years studying healthy eating, knows the biochemical implications of every ingredient, and yet chooses to eat some chinese takeaway, some nice sweet and sour chicken, some nice chips, some nice curry, with a big glass of red wine at the end of a long day.
Is it ignorance? No.
Is it a lack of discipline? Maybe. Maybe not.
But more fundamentally, it’s a moment where knowledge is overridden by another force: desire.
Desire doesn’t ask for permission from reason. It doesn’t need to justify itself. It doesn’t care what you know. Because it lives somewhere else entirely.
In psychoanalytic terms, desire belongs to the unconscious. And unlike conscious reasoning, the unconscious doesn’t operate with language, logic, or moral consistency. It follows associations, fantasies, fears, and unprocessed memories. It acts, often abruptly, based on internal patterns developed looooooooong before you had words to name them.
The death drive: when we choose what hurts
This is where Freud’s idea of the death drive becomes deeply unsettling, and deeply relevant.
Alongside the human impulse to survive, connect, and grow (the life drive), Freud observed another, darker force: a tendency to return to earlier states of tension, disorder, or even destruction.
Not because we enjoy suffering in itself, but because, for many, suffering is familiar. Predictable. Strangely safe. Normal as in it is what they’ve experienced in their family home most of their lives.
The death drive manifests not only in extreme behaviours like addiction or violence, but also in subtle patterns of self-sabotage, the likes of:
Staying in a relationship that depletes you.
Procrastinating the one action that could move your life forward.
Tearing down what you’ve built the moment it starts working.
In these moments, something inside you seems to push against your own best interest. And unless that “something” is recognised and understood, you might spend years stuck in cycles that appear irrational, but no, they are deeply coherent to the unconscious.
Repetition compulsion and the familiarity of pain
One of the most tragic realities in psychological life is that we often repeat what once wounded us. Rings a bell?
It’s not because we want to suffer, but because we were shaped by that suffering. What was normal for us.
If you learned that love meant inconsistency, you may now equate intensity with affection.
If you grew up in chaos, peace may now feel suspicious or boring.
If you were abandoned, you might chase the unavailable, again and again, hoping this time it will end differently.
This is what Freud called the repetition compulsion—a drive to relive early experiences, in the hope of mastering them. Of rewriting the ending. Of finally winning the love, the validation, the safety that once were missing.
But the unconscious doesn’t change the script easily. It really doesn’t recognise new faces; it recognises old dynamics. And it will drag you back into familiar pain, not because it’s good for you, but because it’s known. Familiar, normal, what you are used to.
The inner conflict that defines us
To sum it up: there is a battle inside each of us.
A part that wants to evolve, protect itself, and move on. And a part that wants to linger in the known discomfort, even if it’s toxic.
We are not unitary beings, like many people out there, so called professionals of the mind, want to teach you. Humans are ambivalent creatures, full of contradiction. One part of us can dream of a better life, while another sabotages every step towards it. Again, and again, and again.
And both are equally real.
Mind you, this is not a flaw. It’s a fact of being human. That’s it.
But denying the existence of this internal tension only gives more power to the forces we refuse to see.
So what’s the way forward?
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking:
“I knew this would happen. Why did I do it anyway?”
You’re not alone. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.
But you are mistaken if you think the answer lies in reading more, learning more, trying harder.
What’s needed is not more information, but a different kind of attention. Listen to this: a willingness to sit with discomfort, to question your impulses, to explore the emotional logic behind your choices.
It’s not an easy path. It requires honesty, patience, and often the help of a trained professional.
Maybe you’re not ready to start therapy. Fair enough.
But if you’re starting to suspect that logic isn’t running the show… this is a good place to begin: Subliminal, a book by Leonard Mlodinow, walks you through how the unconscious shapes what you do, even when you know better. You can listen to it on Audible. First one’s free, if you’ve never used it: try it here.
Love,
Noemi
P.S. Not ready to dig deep? Fine. Let your unconscious whisper in your ear first. Subliminal’s here.
