The book "Drama of the gifted child" calls the "the compulsion to repeat".

I'm noticing I keep engaging with people and situations that in reflection, I should have known (or definitely knew!) how things would end up.

I'm trying to quit but it's like an addiction.

In other books I've seen this referred to as externalizing pain, transferring and projecting onto someone else - and then attacking that projection.  So like maybe as a kid I couldn't express to my parents the way I needed because they were dismissive, neglectful, etc.  So the pain and trauma is stuck in my head, like a rotten seed.  A voice in my head - a daily script.  "I'm being oppressed".  Then I find someone who can "own" this for me, project it onto them, and then attack them.

Internal pain, perhaps unrealized &gt;&gt;&gt; [transference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transference) / projection &gt;&gt;&gt; attack

Can I get an amen?

edit:

**Repetition compulsion**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion

&gt;Here he [Freud] noted how '*the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed*, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it....For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical toward his parents' authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor'