Mastodawn

I'm not proud of this but as a moderator I crack down on people who repeat the same messages or pictures in the chats I manage. I am severely, severely allergic to repetition.

If a social media creator has a catchphrase they repeat in every clip they make, I will find their work unwatchable and skip it the second it comes up in my feed.

Like the guy who does GREAT clips about plants but finishes his introduction with an overconfident 'Let's botanize!' (Ugh, cringed just typing that out.) Gorgeous food creator Tiffy who shares great recipes but finishes every one with 'Look... at... thaht!' Or SG food idol Ken whose catchphrase is 'uwansum?'

It only took a second of reflection to work out why repetition is such a problem for me. I grew up as a caregiver for an 'unsafe parent' — my sole parent — who had diagnosed but untreated mental illness and severe obsessive paranoia. This parent constantly repeated the same delusionary accounts of persecution by their ex (my other parent), their family, and the court system.

If something set them off — the tiniest cue in our discursive environment — I could count on getting a 45 minute lecture about how the world was set against them. There were serious holes in the logic of these narratives but if I pointed that out then suddenly I was the persecutor and I became the target.

Often this happened in the car, and I've done EMDR x narrative therapy to rescript those memories, reworking a powerful sense of being trapped to the feeling that I can unbuckle and open the car door and just walk away.

So anything repetitive triggers a powerful sense of discomfort in me and I don't feel at peace until I've nuked the instance of repetition.

Oddly enough there's one creator, psychiatrist Dr Ruth Dottin, who starts every video with boilerplate ('I'm a board certified adult psychiatrist and I talk a lot on this app about informed consent and safety prescribing...') and I'm absolutely fine with it. I am really curious about this.

It could be because she edits her videos for 1.5X playback so the repetition happens really quickly. But I think it's because I know her content and trust her judgement implicitly; her videos and comments demonstrate that she listens to her audience and responds thoughtfully to them. It's a very different experience interacting with Dr Dottin compared to my unsafe parent.

I would love to get to a point in my life where I can hear repetition and maybe just note it and feel neutral about it. I don't know how I'd ever get to that point, though.

I can practice all the CBT in the world and I'm just going to feel resentful that it's me doing the work again instead of my parent going to fucking therapy.

I can and have done the trauma therapy and I no longer feel trapped and distressed by those memories, but the behavioural pattern of avoiding repetitious cues remains just as strong.

I've tried exposure therapy, like sitting with the repetitive content for progressively longer periods of time before I delete it, but I'm pretty sure the intense relief I feel when I delete it just reinforces the behavioural pattern.

On the off chance anyone else has experienced this 'psychic allergy' to repetition, I'd love to know how you're travelling with it and if anything has helped you to overcome or manage it.

A reminder of my acronyms to put this post in context: #AuDHD #bipolar #BPAD2 #CPTSD and #ED. (That's eating disorder, lol, not the other one.)