It is fairly common for autistic people to associate almost everything they experience with something else. These associations and/or memories can be either positive or negative, simple or complex, and can completely affect the way the person perceives something. In my personal experience, they can resurface seemingly at random and change the way I view something as a whole. For example, as a child, I had multiple bad experiences in swimming pools, all resulting in me slipping underwater and having to be dragged out. This happened many times throughout my childhood, and all of those times I was at family reunions. I may not have noticed it right away, but I was always reluctant to go to family reunions after that, and was so relieved when my family decided to stop going to them. I realize now that these pool incidents played a sizable role in why I hated going to family reunions, as well as the general sensory overload. They also play a major role in why I hate water, why I still can’t swim, and why even just the thought of learning how is extremely frightening for me. I only became aware of this very recently, because the memories of the pool incidents resurfaced a few years ago and now I am absolutely terrified of pools and have not gone in one since as a result. It took me a long time to actually figure all of this out, because of my struggles with alexithymia and never knowing how I’m feeling about anything, but with help from my talk therapist and my grandparents, I was able to finally understand what was going on in my mind, even though I haven’t quite figured out what exactly caused the memories to resurface the way they did. These memories were complex, as there were multiple occurrences of the same event, but there can also be more specific, simple memories as well. A few summers ago, my dad and I went out shopping to get my brother some birthday presents. It was supposed to be a quick trip, but it ended up lasting much longer than expected, and we had to go to multiple stores, which would have been fine since I was bored that day and wanted to get out of the house. What made it really stressful though was that there was a sudden thunderstorm while we were in the car driving to the second store, and I didn’t have my headphones or even my jacket with me, which made me upset to the point of a mini-meltdown/panic attack because I always bring them everywhere I go just to be prepared for anything. Luckily my dad was very patient with me and I was able to buy some things too, which made me associate a positive memory with that trip as well as a negative one. While the positive memory is very simple, the negative one is extremely specific. Not only did this trip make me absolutely have to bring my headphones and jacket with me everywhere and keep them with me at all times, but I also remember the exact amount of steps it took me to get from the car to the entrance to every place we went that day (Kohl’s (47), Best Buy (33), and the mall (52)). Anything to do with those numbers makes me remember how upset and scared I was to be outside in a thunderstorm, since I already have a strong fear of thunderstorms, but thankfully, the positive memory of that trip typically overshadows the negative one (for once). It's even happened to me with fictional characters before...multiple times!
Autistic people do not TRY to associate things like this, it just HAPPENS. It's how our brains work since they're literally wired differently! Trust me, I WISH I could stop associating things, but no matter how hard I try, I just can't. It happens regardless. It is something I literally CANNOT help, and I wish allistic people would understand that and stop telling me to "let it go" or "you've been associating *insert thing here* with *insert thing here* for a WHILE now...can't you stop doing that?" No. No I can't "stop doing that", it's literally how my brain works and I can't help it, and it makes me upset and stressed that allistic people don't understand that I don't like this either. The more I think about it the more I realize that my parents really don't understand me and the way my brain works and my special interests and how THOSE work, and that makes me sad. They keep pushing me past my limits and I swear they still believe in the functioning labels...I'm NOT "high-functioning", I'm BARELY functioning right now! But that's a post for another time. I hope you all learned something about autism and associations today! That would be really great, especially if you're autistic yourself and learned a bit more about how your brain works! Or if you're allistic and learned a bit more about the autistic person/people in your life, that would be great too! Either way, I'm just trying to spread information and correct misinformation as an autistic person myself who struggles with this and many other things on a daily basis!
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