What is intellectualization?Refresh my memory.
What is intellectualization? If you want to re-read part 1 in its entirety, here it is! Simply put, intellectualization is going up into your thoughts, focusing heavily on facts, rationality, and logic in a situation, and analyzing it from a detached perspective. Now, let’s be clear that thinking and rationality are not bad; in fact, thinking & meaning are important doorways into our own experiences. However, we want to be able to access our emotions, our behaviors, our images we may see in our mind, and our body sensations as well. When we intellectualize, we move away from thinking as a way to understand to thinking as a protective strategy to disconnect us from feelings, emotions, and body sensations that might feel uncomfortable or too much. Intellectualization is an adaptive, protective strategy that was developed as a way to make us feel safe in an environment that felt too much (or not enough). It helped (and helps!) us make sense of the world and disconnect from feeling overwhelming feelings. It’s important to understand that intellectualizing is NOT a deficit or something wrong with you, but rather a way you learned to stay safe and in connection. Oftentimes, people who are intellectualizers are people who have developmental trauma. Those of us with developmental or complex trauma formed these very protective and adaptive strategies, like intellectualization, that supported us in not feeling so overwhelmed all of the time and gave us that sense of safety that we as humans crave and need. As adults, intellectualization offers us a sense of safety that may be getting in the way of us moving toward what we want. It keeps us pulled back and disconnected from our full experience of being alive and may make us feel disconnected and empty. How did this happen? Simply put, it doesn’t really matter why it happened. What matters is that you cannot think your way out of these patterns- no matter how hard you might try. For an overthinker, this can be hard to hear. No matter how smart we are, how hard we think, how many lists or spreadsheets we make, we cannot think our way back into more safety and more authentic connection. This is why many intellectualizers get the feeling of being “stuck” and repeating the same (overthinking) patterns…even with their therapists as they go through therapy. In fact, intellectualizers often get told in therapy how smart or self-aware they are, they may even be told they don’t need to be in therapy because they already understand themselves. How do I stop being an intellectualizer? There is no magic pill/book/way to do this. If only! We can start by being curious about the adaptive patterns we have built in our lives, thinking about how intellectualization has served us and how it might not be serving us now. Maybe it’s disconnecting us from living in the present and moving towards what we want for ourselves. Often, addressing intellectualization from a behavioral standpoint doesn’t work, because feeling all the feelings can lead to overwhelm and shutting down. What is helpful is to practice slowing down and being more present in the current moment, little by little. Curiosity does wonders because it’s realistic and often easier to be curious about something than to make a radical change. Try to notice the small moments and observe yourself, especially when you notice yourself slipping into intellectualization behavior. Naming 3 things you see, 3 things you feel, and 3 more things you see is a perfect grounding exercise that helps us orient to our environment and bring a pop of safety to our nervous system. It’s important to know that many of us may live in systems where it isn’t safe to be fully in our bodies for a variety of reasons. You, in no way, HAVE to come back into your body or be fully present from moment to moment. Instead, you can be curious about tiny little moments where you might feel 1% (or .01%) safer to allow you to have more access to your agency in the present to show up for yourself and connect in ways that feel good. This might allow you to reconnect to yourself in small ways and reconnect to others to build community and connection - if that’s what you want for yourself! Intellectualization + Therapy/Support If you’re searching for a therapist and you identify as an intellectualizer, you will want to find a therapist that is equipped to help intellectualizers: look for a therapist who works with developmental trauma or complex trauma, often called complex PTSD. Some helpful therapy modalities include IFS (internal family systems), Somatic Experiencing, and NARM. You may also want a therapist who uses liberation psychology, feminist therapy, or systemic lenses. This will help you understand how the systems you grew up in contributed to this. For example, I am trained in NARM- Neuro Affective Relational Model, and this is a great modality for working with overthinkers or intellectualizers. Using this model helps the therapist and client recognize that intellectualization is a survival strategy; a way that we learn to stay in connection with the people around us! In therapeutic settings, addressing intellectualization often involves encouraging clients to explore and express their emotions more openly. First, therapists must support their clients in deepening their felt sense of safety in the present. This can be a process that unfolds over time because we are often undoing years (or decades) of feeling unsafe and disconnected. As a felt sense of safety and connection grows, we become more able to consider reconnecting to our emotions and our body sensations. By fostering self-awareness, connection with our body sensations, and a bigger “bucket” to feel our emotions, therapists can help individuals feel more present in their lives and move more toward what they want for themselves. It’s important to note that some clients may take a bit of time to feel safe enough to drop out of their survival strategies (like intellectualization). This is absolutely okay! They will do it when they are ready and feel safe enough. They are not trying to be resistant or “difficult,” but rather they have to feel safe first. I find that other therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, expressive arts, and narrative therapy can also be valuable tools in bridging the gap between intellect and emotion - they can be so helpful in supporting individuals in integrating their cognitive insights (thoughts) with their affective experiences (emotions) and interoceptive experiences (body sensations). In therapy, you will likely explore that interoceptive system, which lets us track and feel things in our body. Imagine a volume button, and this is turned way down for intellectualizers; doing somatic or body-oriented work can work really well for some - for others, it’s far too challenging to begin with the body. For that reason, I sometimes find it may be helpful to start with cognitive work (outthink the thinker - ha!). I love to slow things down during a story to get underneath the meaning (like an archeological dig using a paintbrush to scrape away layers of dust and dirt to get to the dinosaur bones underneath): allowing them to connect to their agency and what they want for themselves and, tiny bits at a time, reconnect to their emotions. We can pause and explore with neutrality the thinking and behavioral patterns that are part of our adult consciousness (prefrontal cortex adult self who knows that they have agency, choice, and decision-making power), and our child consciousness (who holds these patterns we have learned as children (like the intellectualization). Often, it’s easier for people to notice these child consciousness patterns when they’re more overt (like people-pleasers who might recognize their tendencies as a problem) vs. intellectualization where intellectualizers very often may not see it as a problem because it serves them to be logical, rational, and intelligent (and we also may get positive feedback from those around us for being “calm” and “rational”). Because the intellectualization can feel sooooo rational, you may think this is their adult consciousness voice. So in therapy, we are slowing things down to examine this rational voice. Perhaps this rational voice is just three child consciousnesses stacked in a trench coat who learned to put away their emotions? One of the curiosities of therapy is to bring more awareness and bring in the observer (the adult self) who can see the patterns and recognize what is happening and then can consider being more in connection with their body and emotions. Read the rest on tiny sparks.
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