Dan_Gero wrote:For some reason that I can’t understand, I feel uncomfortable reading certain words out loud, which I won’t tell anyone for feer of embarrassment. Yes, these are regular every day words, and they aren’t offensive in any way. It also bothers me to hear people say those words, but not nearly as much as it does for me to say them.
Without knowing exactly what triggers this reaction in you, I can't say for sure whether I can relate to your situation, but what you're saying does sound an awful lot like something I dealt with especially when I was a kid.
I'll give a few examples of how it applies to me. But of course I can't promise that it'll help you in any way.
One word that I struggled to say was reach. I'm okay with it now, but when I was a kid I had a hard time saying it because it was just an uncomfortable word for me to have to say, and now I partially know why.
One of the things that fascinated me as a kid was different aspects of piano playing, since I played piano myself. For some reason, I was always interested in the physical technique. Probably because I was super self-conscious about mine, and at one stage I switched teachers and ended up with a good but somewhat intimidating teacher who seemed to have a third eye for spotting uncurved fingers, badly placed hand movements and the like. The whole thing actually led to a fascination with hand dexterity which is too embarrassing for me to talk about on a public thread that has nothing to do with it, but suffice it to say that one thing I often thought about was the fact that I couldn't play a lot of the ideas in my mind. I always loved big chords, even though my hands weren't big enough to play many of the ones I thought of, and I wasn't good enough to give a clever illusion of playing them. Thus I had to take compromises which I knew other pianists who were better than me had either overcome, or didn't have to consider in the first place. My consciousness about it got so bad that, even when I was reading a story where for example someone was reaching up to a shelf to grab an item, I got this picture in my mind of them reaching for something they couldn't physically grasp, but they kept trying anyway, with the same frustration I had when I realized I can't play this epic thing in my head. It was, to be honest, very distressing for me, and the word reach just became this loaded word that made me uncomfortable. I also was conscious of how stupid it was that I couldn't say this simple sentence that has nothing to do with me personally, and on that vane, I just gritted my teeth, at least figuratively, and got through it, and hoped nobody noticed that I was being odd about it. I suspect they did notice, because I'm not good at hiding things. Lol
There are other words that I had similar feelings about too. Some were negative like the one I described, and others were actually positive. I overcame most of them now as I got older, but then again a lot in my life has changed, and I have friends now who I can talk to about odd things like that and we can have interesting conversation about topics that we don't talk about every day. So that helps me just unload my odd thoughts. And the simple act of articulating these thoughts is all my brain needs to disconnect from these connotations of benign words.
I'll give another example of a funny word association but this time it's a positive one. When I was really little, I believed I could tell the difference between colors by texture. I was never able to experience color, but as a little kid I of course believed I could experience it. If I couldn't see it, I could feel it. So when people would pass me something and call it purple for example, I tried to catalog that texture as purple.
Well one time we were reviewing shapes in a class. The teacher passed me a smooth circle piece, and asked me what it was. I said circle, then asked what color it was. She told me yellow, and the circle felt so smooth and shiny and pleasant that the word yellow just seemed to be a perfect explanation. Yellow is smooth. Yellow is shiny and sparkly, it's glassy and light. It's round, clean, finished to perfection without a single impurity. It was something completely unreal for my 6-year-old mind. I even liked the word, it was sunny and bright. But I always had an odd word-to-texture association game in my head, especially when I was a kid. Everyone thought I liked yellow because of the double l, but a double l wasn't important to me, and in fact the mention of l ruined it because l just sounds rough and jagged to me. Anyway, everyone kept buying me yellow things and I very quickly learned that color and texture have about as much to do with each other as rocks and the letter z. In other words, there's no link at all.
I guess in conclusion to all this, words and associations are very mysterious things that you probably aren't meant to understand fully, but knowing at least something about what sets them off gives you a lot of insight I think. There are even scientifically accepted reasons for certain associations (synaesthesia). But I don't think that's what I'm talking about, since a lot of my associations come from some sort of experience I've had.
Hope this was at least an interesting read, and that you come to understand your difficulties in mentioning certain words!
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
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