🔁 Coaching the Loop: Understanding the Repetition Compulsion with Julia Rogers MCC

🔁 Coaching the Loop: Understanding the Repetition Compulsion - with Julia Rogers MCC

In this captivating lecture, Julia Rogers - ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), EMCC Senior Practitioner, and coaching supervisor - explores a profound psychoanalytic concept that continues to play out in the coaching space: the repetition compulsion. Drawing from her background in psychotherapy and transformative coaching, Julia invites us to consider what happens when our clients find themselves stuck in familiar loops - returning to the same emotional patterns, relational roles, and internal narratives.

🌀 What Is the Repetition Compulsion? Julia explains the origins of this concept in the work of Freud, and how it shows up when clients unconsciously repeat past patterns in an attempt to resolve them. She shares how these loops can manifest in coaching sessions, and why recognising them can be key to unlocking deep transformation.

🪞 Coaching as a Reflective Mirror: Rather than pathologising these patterns, Julia views them through a compassionate lens. She offers a nuanced understanding of how the coach-client dynamic can become a microcosm of the client’s wider relational world—providing an opportunity for awareness, healing, and new choices.

🧩 From Insight to Integration: With practical reflections and examples, Julia illustrates how coaches can gently inquire into these repeating patterns without falling into analysis or interpretation. She shares how bringing curiosity, presence, and a light touch can support clients in seeing the loop, staying with it, and stepping into something new.

🗣️ Language That Liberates: Julia introduces powerful language cues and questions that invite clients into deeper reflection. She explains why naming the pattern, with warmth and neutrality, can open space for the client to make conscious decisions—often for the first time.

🧠 A Psychological Perspective for Coaches: Whether you’re trained in psychotherapeutic models or not, Julia makes this material highly accessible. She bridges psychological theory with real coaching practice, showing how coaches can engage with depth work ethically and skilfully, without stepping outside the coaching frame.

💬 Practical Applications: Julia offers simple yet profound ways to support clients when the loop shows up—from slowing the pace and deepening awareness, to exploring the felt sense of the pattern and creating space for alternative responses.

🎓 Ideal for Coaches Ready to Deepen Their Practice: This lecture is essential viewing for coaches who want to work at the level of the client’s inner world, recognising not just what is happening, but why it may be repeating. It’s a reminder that the coaching space, held with care and presence, can be a powerful site for transformation.

Press Play ▶️ and join Julia Rogers as she guides us through the subtleties of the repetition compulsion—and how to coach beyond it, towards insight, choice, and freedom.