Do you overthink emotions until you feel “normal?” When something painful happens, do you think or talk about it almost clinically to discuss it or analyze the problem? Do you have a hard time even noticing what you’re feeling, let alone identifying specific emotions? If so, you might be someone who uses intellectualization as a coping skill.
There’s nothing inherently “wrong” about coping skills. Coping skills, and ones that are defense mechanisms like intellectualizing, serve a purpose: they protect us and help us continue functioning when faced with stress and hurt. We often learn them early on in life, and they may have helped us survive through tough situations.
The problem is the coping skills and defense mechanisms we learned when younger can stop serving us as we get older. The situations we are in change and we develop and grow as people, and the defense mechanisms that used to help us start holding us back instead.
Being able to think through challenges and figure out a way to solve problems is invaluable. The problem is that when we intellectualize, we’re no longer allowing ourselves to actually feel and process our emotions, and instead we’re just stuffing them down which can result in all kinds of problems; examples can be overthinking and ruminating thoughts, being more reactive to stressful situations, and even building resentment in a relationship when the other person causes hurt that goes unprocessed and unspoken.
If intellectualizing goes on long enough, we might even find ourselves cut out from our emotions and have trouble identifying and naming them, and maybe don’t even notice we’re feeling them at all.
I was a big time “intellectualizer”, and am still pretty good at it if I let myself fall into the overthinking trap. In therapy, I would spend nearly the entire session talking about what was going on in my life and my feelings without ever actually feeling them. While therapy was still beneficial to me even with my intellectualizing, it wasn’t until I started doing parts work that I was able to get past it.
Parts work (in my case Internal Family Systems, but there are many different kinds) views the self as a collection of many different parts. If you’ve heard of or done any inner child work, that inner child can be viewed as one of your parts. We can also view defense mechanisms as parts that are working to protect us, such as the part of us that’s intellectualizing. With that in mind, we can then start working with that part to find out why that part of our mind started protecting us, what it’s afraid of if it didn’t do that job, and more to help us be able to start processing the emotions and experiences that have been pushed aside. Parts work can also be very somatic in nature, which if you’re someone who’s been disconnected from their emotions and internal experiences can be very beneficial, even if it’s challenging.
There will still be times in life where intellectualizing feelings can be an effective and necessary coping mechanism and you don’t have to get rid of it, but learning to balance it out and emotionally attuning to yourself and working with your internal parts can help regulate your nervous system and finally process all those emotions that have been pushed away and are still affecting you from being bottled up.
Meet the Author: Mark Reagan
, Masters’ Intern
I use a combination of person-centered therapy, Internal Family Systems, and solution-focused and mindfulness based practices to help you regulate your nervous system, take action toward creating a more fulfilling life, and shine a light on the patterns holding you back.