Many people wonder why they keep repeating the same unfulfilling kinds of relationships, be they romantic relationships, friendships, work relationships, or even why they may respond to their own children in the ways they hated their own parents responding to them. The quick answer is that our early relational experiences with significant caregivers and love objects colours our emotional world and becomes a significant part of our unconscious. In psychoanalytic theory we often refer to this as a person's internal object relations. This is because as small children we take these early relational experiences with significant others into our unconscious world (be these good or bad relational experiences) and these "internal objects" become unconscious psychic structures within us and take on a life of their own. This is ultimately because we unconsciously seek out what is emotional familiar to us, be this good or bad. We often do this because we wish to repeat these good and bad relational experiences. In the case of good experiences, this is not usually a problem, but in the case of bad experiences, we often unconsciously repeat them in order to better understand our early bad experience and correct what originally happened. What is interesting is that our internal objects can be changed and modified via relational experiences with others. One of the most effective ways of doing this is via psychotherapy, where the therapy relationship can be used to better understand our internal object relations and help us to become emotionally freer. I was recently reading the article below and thinking about how it relates to the concept of internal objects. You can read it by clicking the link below.