Signs You Are Using Thinking as a Protector Against Feeling
Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash
Intellectualization is a subtle protective part of us that can arise inside and outside the therapy room. It can feel extremely illuminating and empowering to gain an intellectual understanding of our inner world. With so much more emphasis on self-help and therapy in the greater discourse, it’s become easy to believe we are “doing the work” by thinking, learning, and understanding. There is a crucial caveat: in pursuing intellectual insight, we may unknowingly distance ourselves from emotion.
One signal that you might have an active intellectualizing part is when your therapist (or anyone else) asks how you feel, you answer with a thought. This might sound like:
“I feel like it isn’t fair.”
“I think it’s just hard.”
“I don’t know.”
“I feel interesting.”
“It doesn’t make sense that I would feel sad.”
These are extremely common responses, indicating that we might equate feeling and thinking. Instead of noticing what emotion is present in the body, we seek answers exclusively from the neck-up.
Problem-Solving
If you immediately jump to problem-solving when faced with an emotional trigger, you might find that the problem to be solved is simply an emotion waiting to be felt. For example, someone who is experiencing intense work-related overwhelm and fear of being fired from their job might do all they can to “work harder” and find logical solutions to be more productive instead of confronting how they feel about work and what it might be triggering them on an emotional level. While logical solutions are helpful, we can miss messages from our feeling world that are crucial for us to listen to.
Analysis as a way to excuse mistreatment
For many of us, especially those of us who consume a lot of psychological or self-help content, our knee-jerk response to difficult emotions (such as anger), is to attempt to understand the behavior of the person who elicited it within us. If our partner lashes out at us, for example, we might rationalize this behavior by telling ourselves something like “they had a hard day at work” or “they were never taught how to communicate effectively growing up,” thereby dismissing both the impact of their behavior and what it brings up for us emotionally. This is a prevalent and dangerous trap.
Self-pathologizing
If you find yourself smacking labels onto yourself, such as “That’s just my anxious attachment” or “I’m a self-sabotager,” unaccompanied by any feeling, this can signal that we are circumventing emotion. We can fall into the trap of pathologizing ourselves rather than genuinely confronting the complexity of what might lie beneath these labels. We believe that by naming it, it has been dealt with. Labeling can be an amazing first step to clarifying what we must work through. However, we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a smoke screen, distracting us from what really needs attention.
Once we identify that we have an intellectualizing part that is protecting us from feeling, we can begin to get curious about the fears of this part. There is likely a good reason for this part protecting us. Once we find this out, we can provide this part with the reassurance it needs to step back and allow our more vulnerable emotions in.