Yes, I think it's fairly common from what I have read. I mostly got re-traumatized by therapists who were too much like the fakish, codependent "nice ladies" I grew up with, and that I can be like, too. Ugh. I loved my family, don't like "speaking ill" of them, some are dead. It just was what it was. I didn't have any close fellow female friends after I got an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I stayed "safely" away from other females. So I guess the "re-enactment" that some people do with other relationships in life, I ended up doing with therapists. They were the "experts" I thought, it was therapy so OK and "safe", so I thought. I was wrong and got hooked.

I think it's horribly sucky that the therapists didn't realize it when I didn't/couldn't realize it either. How one can get "in touch" with that stuff, and "over it", without therapy, I don't know. Fortunately or unfortunately the last therapist rejected me, it was horribly disorienting, destabilizing, and re-tramatizing BUT 6 months later I did connect that feeling up with some I had had as a child and forgotten/repressed/dissociated. And have managed, with great difficulty, to make it on my own, with support from this forum and some other real life support groups.

I've read that repetition and reenactment is a way the psyche has to try redo and master a situation that was hurtful in the past. Sure wish there was a more direct way that it could do that! Or a way that other people could help that process go faster -- because, for me, therapy didn't much. It just kept me going round and round, like a hamster on a wheel.