Have you ever listened to a piece of music or seen something and been reminded of an event so strongly that you are able to feel the same emotions that you felt at the time of the original event? It's called association and it can become very weird!
I was listening to a piece of music this morning which reminded me so much of Stellenbosch and going ice-skating with the dance society and just from the music, I could remember exactly how I felt while going round and round the ice-rink and watching the figure skaters show us some of their moves. It was awesome!
There are bad association too of course, such as a friend and lasagna, I don't know all the details of the story but I know that at age 6, she didn't want to eat her supper and so her father pushed her face into her lasagna and covered her face in it. She has not since touched lasagna and the very thought of it makes her feel ill.
People used to, some still do, use bad association with their children in the form of spanking. If the child does something wrong and they get spanked, they learn to associate pain and humiliation with doing something wrong. I'm not a parent but I know what my psychology books say about spanking and it isn't a good idea to promote violence as a means of solving a problem but that's not what this is about.
I know a woman who has a sort of infatuation with a man. The woman is married to a man she loves very much and the man to a woman he loves very much and the man and woman in this case are first cousins. While incest is not a good idea, the infatuation happened for her due to association from when they were teenagers.
They only really got to know each other as teenagers and they had a fair bit in common and they used to go out and have fun together. The woman then learnt to associate her cousin with fun and close friendship, something she does not experience with her own husband. The man, however, had fun but the emotional connection was a lot more one-sided and he did not create the same associations.
Years later, the woman gets quite possessive of the ,man around his wife and demands his full attention and tries to exclude the wife from conversation and involvement in activities or photos. She's reasonably nice to the wife when they're not around the husband but the woman likes to remind the wife now and then how close she is to the man.
Now while this story is rather disturbing to me, apparently the fact that they're cousins has nothing to do with it, it's just a bit of a yucky coincidence.
It never fails to amaze me how even now, having studied (and should be studying this very minute too. Procrastination.) about how unusual or abnormal some people's behaviour can be, I'm still surprised. People are so complex, no two people are exactly the same so those "All women drive badly" or "All men are pigs" really mean nothing.
If you're the type of person who ponders over other people's behaviour, association isn't always the answer but often it can be. Why does Johnny want to kill someone every time he eats a mango? Maybe because Johnny was given a mango every time a violent movie was on (I'm exaggerating, please note). Or why does Mary want to laugh every time she sees a person wearing pink pyjamas? Maybe there was a lady who dropped her kids off for school in her pink pyjamas every day and her hair was always in curlers and she looked hilarious.
The other thing is how other people form associations with yourself. If you find people disliking you for no apparent reason, perhaps they've learned to associate you with something that they dislike. Like maybe you spoke about how often your stomach works or something the first time that they met you and they're sensitive and now all they see when they see you is an image of you on the toilet.
The good news is that associations can be changed, nothing is set in stone so don't worry too much about how people are creating associations about you. As for your own association, try to associate things you have to do, like studying, with good things or happy things so that you'll want to them more and it won't be a schlepp. Oh, just one last thing on the associations of other people with you, sort of like a golden rule: Don't stink!
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