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Safe, But Disconnected: When Thinking Replaces Feeling


Ever found yourself agonizing over how your brain just doesn’t rest? Is it constantly dissecting experiences, trying to find answers, working overtime to control the future as much as it can? Is there a hierarchical system within you where your logical brain decides what to make of your emotions, or any experiences you live through; ever-ready to pass judgements about what’s right and wrong for you, or what is healthy and unhealthy? Do you get a feeling that you live more in your head than in reality? Do you get frustrated with yourself when you can’t help but engage in patterns which don’t ‘make sense’, especially when you notice they’re driven by an emotion? Do you consider emotions as distractions?


Living in your head has a name:

Intellectualization is a defense mechanism that involves seeking an escape from feeling painful emotions by thinking hard about how the situation can be resolved or managed so that it doesn’t affect us. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a problem solving approach when it is comprehensive, but intellectualization bypasses the wisdom that emotions can provide about what we need in order to be able to move through the challenging situation. 

For instance, someone who finds it difficult to acknowledge their grief after a significant loss and jumps right away into extreme overworking or withdrawal from any people or places that may bring the grief up is intellectualizing the process of moving on from the loss. They may not even know they’re avoiding the painful emotions if this is the only ‘acceptable’ way they know.


More often than not, intellectualization is not a conscious choice because we don’t know what the alternative is. Or when it is a conscious choice, it results from the belief that this is the ‘right’ thing to do. How do we come to construct notions about what’s right and acceptable? It’s on the basis of social and cultural norms and patterns that we observe and feel obligated to fit in with. There’s a distinction between socio-cultural values and truly personal values even when they may seem the same on the surface. For instance, when respect is a cultural value, it is ‘supposed’ to be practiced in certain contexts more than others as a general rule of thumb (for instance, towards elders). Whereas, when it’s a personal value, one may actively choose to be respectful even in situations where they don’t have to. The difference between ‘supposed to’ and ‘want to’ reflects the difference between using pure logic and using both- sense and sensitivity- while making decisions. 




The purpose it intends to serve:

By virtue of being a defense mechanism, intellectualization wants to keep your sense of self and level of functioning safe from emotional experiences that may pose any risk of challenging your belief systems about yourself, others or the world; or disrupt your state of mind. It creates a bubble around you that’s made up of compulsive routines, goals, and ways of thinking that prescribe a very one-dimensional idea of how you can lead a safe and successful life. Intellectualization uses the strategy of ‘predict and prevent’, given how our mind has a natural tendency to make predictions and associations. 


Some such common predictions include associations made between 

  1. Perfectionism and success (where success is considered to be solely dependent on perfectionism and hence any errors get registered as failures), 

  2. Resting and failure

  3. People-pleasing and maintenance of relationships, 

  4. Sometimes even between avoidance of closeness in relationships and emotional stability,

  5. Taking more responsibilities and personal strength/ worth.


Examine closely and you’d be able to sense how underneath each of these associations is a fear- fear of failure or helplessness, fear of abandonment or worthlessness. Intellectualization doesn't just want you to win, it more so doesn’t want you to fail or find yourself in a vulnerable position. This is often a trauma response where vulnerability brings up feelings of shame, fear and worthlessness among other emotions which your mind remembers being overwhelmed by in the past when you may not have had the resources to process and move through these emotions. 





What we lose to intellectualization:

Given the value that’s associated with prediction, it lowers our tolerance for uncertainty, which also makes it difficult for us to take occasional emotional risks that could actually help with breaking free from the limiting assumption that only predictable outcomes are safe enough. The more prominent that intellectualization becomes, the more difficult it becomes to separate our sense of worth from following the set of norms and standards that we perceive as functional and safe. Our ideas become restricted within black and white domains, and instances where we might actually be feeling safe while experiencing a typically distressing emotion can slip our notice because of our default negative evaluation of the experience. For instance, it’s possible to feel terrible and motivated at the same time after making a mistake in a particular work-task if we are able to see the learning that’s come from the mistake. But at such times if a perfectionist voice in our head takes over and classifies the experience as a failure based on a blanket evaluation, we wouldn’t have the capacity to feel both disappointment and motivation, and it’d only be the former. 


And contrary to the purpose it intends to serve, intellectualizing makes it seem like you can always do something to solve the problem, because it can be so bent on creating a defense against emotions of grief, hurt and helplessness that we may not realize when our own high standards from ourselves start being the cause for despair, given how detached we become from the status of our emotional state. Sometimes, we need to feel these emotions in order to feel seen and understood by ourselves, and also so that we can see how our pain is not just a result of our choices but also the broader systems within which we live. For instance, in a patriarchal and misogynistic system, if women keep stretching themselves to fulfill norms and standards that have been set for them, keep believing that they can do better, and don’t acknowledge the adverse impact this has on their mental and physical health, change on a systemic level would not be considered necessary. 


The bottom line here is that intellectualization takes problem-solving only through thinking to an extreme, blinding us to the wisdom of emotions. Each one of our emotions tells us what exactly about the situation affected us and how. Each one of them has unique underlying needs that get triggered in various situations, telling us about what we can do in terms of soothing ourselves, taking action and choosing our perspective on the situation. For instance, anxiety tells us that the uncertainty in a particular situation feels threatening. If this threat is valid and could really affect us adversely, we can jump into action mode and try to reduce the threat or equip ourselves to face the threat. If the threat isn’t real, we can soothe the anxiety through some regulation strategies. If the threat is always going to be present more or less, accepting its presence and learning to work around it is a mental shift that can be facilitated. All of this gradually creates the capacity to feel emotions without getting overwhelmed by them. Breaking through a defense like intellectualization that has been constructed in the light of traumatic experiences is a sensitive process that’s best undertaken with the help of a trauma-informed therapist who can help you pace out the work safely and reliably guide you through. 



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Disclaimer: This blog post is meant for awareness/entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice and one must refrain from self-diagnosing. It is in no way a substitute for therapy with a mental health professional and it is not meant to be clinical. To consult with a psychotherapist on our team, you can contact us on fettle.counselling@gmail.com. 


 
 
 

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