ABSTRACT
The word passion means both to endure great suffering, to hurt and to bear great pain as well as to desire, sexually long for and feel strongly. Both the past and the present of the passion – both suffering and strong desire – describe well the experience of working with couples that have endured severe trauma in their childhoods. For these couples, the pains of the past are tightly woven into the present. In this chapter the psychoanalytic concepts of repetition and reenactment are explored in the context of couples’ negative interaction cycles in therapeutic work where one or both members have a history of childhood trauma. It is considered how what is coined as the Dyadic Traumatic Reenactment can be understood, articulated, explored and resolved in couples dealing with intractable trauma-fueled negative cycles.
