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This is to the intellectualizers. You realize who you might be.
It is okay. I am one, too. We are the overthinkers, the naval gazers, the extreme self-reflecters. Ever since I can bear in mind, I’ve lived with the exhausting impulse to overanalyze issues. Particularly in instances of stress, wrestle, and grief. The extra potential ache, the tougher I scrutinize.
“What does it imply? How can I perceive it? What can I do with it? What can I study from it?”
I’ve to be sincere; generally I want my internal monologue would simply shut. it.
What’s Intellectualization?
In psychology, intellectualization is taken into account a “protection mechanism.” Maybe you have heard of different extra generally mentioned protection mechanisms, akin to denial, repression, or projection. Or possibly you are listening to all these phrases for the primary time.
Some time again, we wrote a common article about protection mechanisms and described them within the following method:
“Protection mechanisms check with behaviors used to guard oneself from disagreeable ideas and feelings like guilt, anger, disgrace, and jealousy. Some individuals discover these yucky feelings so unacceptable that they may unconsciously make use of protection mechanisms to stop themselves from ever having to acknowledge or expertise them.”
We even touched briefly on intellectualization in that article:
“When an individual is confronted with painful or scary feelings, they could attempt to intellectualize them, quite than really expertise them. On this method, they keep away from making contact with their emotions by analyzing them from an arm’s size away.“
Extra particularly, intellectualization, as a protection mechanism, describes how an individual may reply to distressing and uncomfortable conditions and feelings by excessively interested by and analyzing circumstances in order that they will expertise them via a “considering” lens.
By stepping again from emotion in an analytical method, you try to hold it at arm’s size. Like a scientist learning a harmful animal in a cage, you stand on the opposite aspect of a barrier and observe quite than work together.
What’s the downside with intellectualization?
Being a thinker does not inherently preclude feeling. Actually, deep down, one seldom exists with out the opposite—our ideas make us really feel issues, and our emotions make us assume issues. The issue with intellectualization is that when individuals use it as a protection mechanism, they do not permit either side to exist; as an alternative, they use considering to distance themselves from emotion.
With out realizing it, thinkers can gravitate towards their cognitive consolation zone and immerse themselves of their quest to research and perceive. So, if you are liable to intellectualization, it could be useful to notice the way you’re experiencing and processing issues within the second. Some may discover that they’ve shifted from being a personality of their story who feels issues and engages with the world to extra of a narrator who describes the occasions unfolding from a eliminated distance.
Is Intellectualization All the time Unhealthy?
We right here at WYG are textbook intellectualizers, so we would by no means say it is all unhealthy. Particularly not in terms of grief, after we know that many grievers gravitate in the direction of considering, doing, and rationality of their grief coping. If this sounds such as you, we suggest you learn our article on intuitive vs. instrumental grievers.
Some individuals really feel that intellectualizing offers them a larger sense of understanding, which, in flip, helps them really feel extra in management. After experiencing loss, a lot can really feel modified, destroyed, and off stability, so having this elevated sense of mastery may be useful.
Intellectualization additionally helps you study new issues. After all, this could help with dealing with sensible issues and problem-solving. However extra importantly, it could make it easier to achieve new insights into your self and others. Understanding emotional responses, grief ideas, human conduct, and plenty of different associated issues may help you’ve extra compassion for your self and others and uncover new pathways and methods of responding to the issues that occur in your life.
Lastly, a dose of intellectualization may help individuals course of their feelings in a manageable and considerate method. Feeling your emotions is nice, however it’s even higher if you stability them out with ideas and purpose. As dialectical behavioral therapists will inform you, generally, after we are too caught up in emotion, it is good to attempt to join with what they name “Smart Thoughts.” Smart thoughts describes that candy spot the place our actions, judgments, and choices are guided by each our emotional and rational minds, quite than one or different.
A final phrase…
Avoiding your emotions not solely does not work, however it additionally disconnects you from the whole reality of your expertise—a reality that will not disappear merely since you select to not acknowledge it.
Intellectualizers are sometimes individuals who search perception, that means, and understanding. These are all good issues to seek out in grief, however many individuals will inform you you may’t skip proper to them. They often take time to find, and it is usually solely via one’s wrestle with painful feelings and experiences that they will discover the deepest and most significant truths.
If you wish to get extra in contact along with your feelings, strive our article: 4 Methods to Get in Contact with Your Grief
If you wish to study extra about avoidance, head right here: What’s Avoidance Habits? An Explainer
To learn extra about feelings, try: Feelings Aren’t Good or Unhealthy. They Simply Are.
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