And isn’t ironic to discuss intellectualization by, well, intellectualizing it?
Strap in, because we’re going to learn together how intellectualization is actually a protective strategy AND the difference between true, embodied self-awareness and intellectualization. A simple way to think about intellectualization is to think about going up into your thoughts. So you may focus heavily on facts, rationality, and logic in a situation, analyzing them from a detached perspective. But isn’t thinking and rationality a good thing?! Imagine that we had different doorways into our own experience as humans and each of those different doorways let us understand ourselves in a different way. Thinking is just one of those doors and, while thinking is very valuable, 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 toward thinking as a protective strategy to disconnect us from feelings, emotions, and body sensations that might feel uncomfortable or too much. By the way, let’s be clear together that intellectualization is not a bad thing or a deficit. These adaptive, protective strategies were developed as a way to make us feel safe in an environment that felt too much (or not enough). It’s not as if one day you thought “hmm, you know what would be great? If I never had to feel my feelings again.” No, this developed over time as a method of adapting - we go up into our heads because it feels like the safest place to be, where we can analyze and make sense out of the world and disconnect from feeling overwhelming feelings. But what does intellectualization look like in real life? I’m glad you asked, let me give an example to illustrate what I mean. Let’s say you’re facing a loss, such as the death of someone you loved dearly. You might feel some big emotions about this - grief, sadness, anger. At some point in your life, you learned things were just, well, easier if you didn’t have big emotions. Maybe it felt like people liked you more if you were good, quiet, calm, rational. Maybe in your family, things were really tense all the time and that felt scary, so you didn’t want to add to it by having more emotions. Maybe when you felt big emotions you were sent to your room to feel them alone or told to go think about what you’d done. Or maybe you were just alone a lot of the time as a child and the emotions you felt were too big for a child to hold alone. So, now, as an adult instead of allowing yourself to grieve and process the emotions as they come up for you, you might focus only on the practical aspects: you’re planning the funeral arrangements, researching grief ad nauseum, and engaging in philosophical discussions about the concept of death. All of these are fine and well (and some are necessary), but what happens is that your emotions don’t get to be felt and move through, instead, they are kept locked up, and you’re unable to let yourself feel. The protective strategy of intellectualization provided you with a protective strategy - you didn’t have to break down, you didn’t have to feel overwhelmed, you didn’t have to let others see you be vulnerable in your emotions - but you also are stuck with all of those emotions that are still there, just stuffed way down. So, we also don’t get to feel our emotions in connection with others, to feel supported, to feel connected, to feel loved, to feel seen. All of the things a part of us may be so desperately wanting. The irony of it is that these strategies are often developed in our younger lives as a way to keep us in connection to those around us - parents, teachers, siblings, classmates, etc. Wait. How, exactly, did intellectualization and overthinking develop to keep me in connection?! Well, oftentimes, people who are intellectualizers are people who have what is referred to as developmental trauma. It’s important to know that many people may have had these experiences who did not define their childhood as traumatic and my goal here isn’t to convince you that you had a horrible time growing up. Many of us may have had supported childhoods in many ways but in other ways, our needs may have been missed. So, as I discussed above, perhaps your family was too emotional and it felt like a lot to witness all of the energy and emotions constantly, or maybe your home didn’t feel safe to express your true feelings- perhaps along the “positive vibes only” line, and if you had anything outside of these, you were sent to your room to deal with your feelings alone. It could have also been that your parents were very controlling and tried to dictate which emotions were allowed and which weren’t. Maybe you were bullied as a child at school because you were sensitive and cried. While these experiences may seem simple - and you’re thinking what’s the big deal - as children, this often feels like too much for us to hold on our own. So, we form these very protective and adaptive strategies, like intellectualization, that support us in not feeling so overwhelmed all of the time. This means that at some point in their life, we learned that feeling our feelings (feeling emotions or sensations in their body) was too much for us, but we could just go up in their head, think about things, and obtain that sense of safety that we as humans crave. It kept us in connection with those around us and made things seem, well, just easier. Remember, most of this happens when we are children or when we were very overwhelmed experiencing some type of trauma, so we aren’t making these choices rationally from an adult brain mindset but rather subconsciously where our brain and body work together to determine what will feel the safest. As adults, intellectualization offers us a faux sense of safety. I say faux because it wasn’t a true sense of safety, but rather a strategy that gives us a sense of control that isn’t real (because, sadly, we can’t control the world around us). Becoming an intellectualizer could happen in various ways: It doesn’t make a difference as to the reason this happened, but what matters is that you cannot think your way out of these patterns- no matter how hard you might try. 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. The fact of the matter is that 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. How do I stop being an intellectualizer? Read more on tiny sparks.
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