"I don't like you." Why?

I was in a meeting on Monday. Twelve people, with ages ranging across thirty-five years. Two men and ten women. Plus the boss.

The boss’s boss came into the room to remind us of a new health and safety regulation.  She had spoken to the group briefly on a couple of other occasions and no-one had made any remarks afterwards. A perfectly ordinary, middle aged woman with a Scottish accent. She had an upbeat and friendly manner and explained the regulation in a normal voice. She left the room five minutes later.

One person expressed a dislike of the way she felt she had been spoken down to. Suddenly there were murmurings from around the room, which became more vocal.  The feelings about this woman ranged from a strong dislike to thinking she was perfectly okay.  Personally, I found her immensely irritating and had no idea that others held strong feelings, until the bubble of politeness burst.

The matter passed and we went about our work. But I was fascinated with what I’d just witnessed. I also knew had the subject for my next blog. Andrew Murray’s emotional immaturity will have to wait, along with Fergie’s. (See a previous blog.)

The strong negative reaction to this woman would be perfectly understandable if she had been unpleasant or threatening in any way, but she hadn’t been at all.

Why do we take against people for what appears sometimes, to be no particular reason? Of course, the opposite can be true too. The clue lies in the emotion felt at something about them.

Our brain processes thousands of pieces of information at any one time. It files most of them away and without any particular attached emotion. Some of that information will ‘match’ with information already filed - a memory. If the memory is triggered in some way and if there is a strong emotion attached to that memory, then our brain can momentarily ‘hijack’ us with that emotion. As children, we learn to feel the emotion and then control it, should the need arise. As adults, we're not always good at doing this.

Emotional immaturity occurs when there is little evidence of control being used. When can you tell? Either you may want to say, “Oh grow up!”  (back to Andrew Murray and Fergie) or maybe that’s been said to us. Time to take note.

So what happened with the boss’s boss?  Each person would have had a different memory match and therefore a different emotion. Her tone of voice seemed to upset some people. I have a feeling her physical appearance had been the trigger for others. Maybe her accent too. Thinking about my own reaction, I found her jollity too false, too ingratiating. It jarred. I feel she was trying just a bit too hard. Which is interesting in itself. This woman held a prominent position, but I felt she was covering up an insecurity.

This type of situation is universal. People say, “I don’t know why so and so doesn’t like me.” The person doing the disliking may not even really know why. 

A head of department came to see me when I was working for a large local authority. She enjoyed her job, but found one particular member of the team difficult to get on with. This person was good at their work and reliable, but there was something annoying about her.

I explained how our brain can pattern match and certain memory matches can give us a strong emotion. She came back the next day and told me, “I’ve got it. Sitting on the train going home, I was thinking about what you said. Snap! Her tone of voice is exactly like my mother’s. I feel about five years old in her presence.”

I could identify with that memory. 

The memory match can be anything connected to our senses: a look, a voice, a taste, a smell, a touch. It's also rarely an exact match. Hence the use of "It's like..." to describe things. Or "They're like..." to describe people.

An interesting workshop exercise can be to use certain objects or words and ask for immediate reactions. I remember at one, saying the name ‘Dave’. The reactions ranged from nothing in particular, to loathing about a brother-in-law to tears of grief over a dog that had recently died.

The smell from a bunch of lavender evoked a sad memory of visiting someone dying in hospital and a happy memory of a cat rolling in a shrub.

I was sitting with a man I loved very much. I looked at him lovingly. He looked up and spoke sharply to me, telling me to stop looking at him like that. This happened well before I ever learnt about how the brain functioned, but I recognised that I was on the receiving end of something that didn’t belong to me. It had happened before in my life. So I challenged him.

It turned out that my loving look, was similar in a way that a previous girlfriend had looked at him. She turned out to be a little emotionally unstable and my father had mental health problems. Snap! A match. Pity it was the wrong one.  Fortunately, talking about it solved any problems that might have arisen. But using that example, it is easy to understand how decision making can become skewed on occasion and opinions formed.

A client may have expressed a thought that one of their parents didn’t like them and was nasty to them. I would ask them if their parents got on well. Generally the answer was negative. I then asked them which parent did they most resemble? The answer would be the kinder parent. I suggested that they were being ‘dumped’ on. 

I grew up with the ringing tones of “ You’re just like your father” in a none too complementary manner. Of course, with hindsight,  I know what that was all about. Though funnily enough, as I challenge authority and question doctors, maybe there’s some truth in it. As he wrote a great deal too, my father would probably have loved blogging. New technology came just a fraction too late for him to enjoy it. I'm still sorting through thousands of pieces of paper.

Freud calls this type of behaviour, transference. If the consequences are negative, I call it 'emotional dumping.' 

For advertisers, marketing and designers, memory matching is used all the time. As mentioned in the blog of June 12th.

Names of children we were at school with can influence our adult name choices, both negatively and positively. My daughter is called after some good friends with the same name. My son is called after a good friend of his father’s at the time. We may match girlfriends with mothers or sisters and boyfriends with fathers or brothers...with differing results.

With the name of Rita, I used to get irritated in the 1960s and 1970s, when scriptwriters often gave the name to peroxide blonde tarts. It’s now Sharon, Tracey or Kylie, which must annoy them too. Being matched to a traffic warden by The Beatles didn’t help the name’s credibility. But what I do find interesting is that people who haven’t taken in the name properly, will call me Ruth. They hear the first letter, see me or hear my voice and match me to Ruth. It’s always Ruth. 

Though I did once introduce myself to someone who took my hand and then burst into tears. “That was the name of my neighbour when I was a little boy. She was the only person who was kind to me.”  A probable case of emotional immaturity.

'Don’t judge a book by its cover'. But we do, don’t we? We're all guilty of making judgments about people that may not be based on anything other than...well what? Today there is a news report of two tabloid newspapers and their reporting of a man who lived next door to a murder victim. Because he looked eccentric, they thought him guilty...but he wasn’t and is now suing the newspapers.

If the memory match has an element of fear attached, then the brain’s alarm system may sound a warning. A serious warning can lead to a panic attack. That’s when we need to take a moment to consider whether the threat is real, imagined...or just remembered.


I've had a great day today. Meeting a group of people in London, who shared the extraordinary experience of being on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour in 2009. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_%26_Other) With thousands of people milling around, I indulged my favourite hobby of people watching.


So many people, so many lives, so many memory matches...

©RitaLeaman2011