Gemma Spake

Another example is like

if you're somebody who's been hurt deeply by like your parents past behavior and their unkindness and their cruelty, using language that describes their behavior and the psychological family models that they're operating in and, you know, all the different science, but

never actually using any language to describe how you feel or how you felt.

That is intellectualizing.

You know, if you're going through grief, you could tell me the five stages of grief.

You could tell me the biology of grief, the psychology of loss, but that's not the same as feeling what you are actually going through.

The thing is,

that knowing and having the words for it sounds a lot like processing.

But it's at this emotionally distant level where we are adding a layer and layer of rational explanation onto an emotional wound.

We're wrapping it up in this cellophane or in this bubble wrap so that we don't actually have to feel the raw feeling.

The other thing about this is it just doesn't work.

We have evidence to show that intellectualizing in the long term doesn't work.

Specifically, some studies in the early 2000s that looked at hundreds of participants and essentially found that people who...

Like, have the academic or intellectual words for how they feel may not necessarily adjust better than people who don't.

Because the people who don't often just have to sit with the feeling.

They can't explain it away.

This is something I've heard.

I've actually spoken to a lot of my friends who are psychologists about this.

And they struggle with this with their patients, right?

Like they have a patient come in who is probably a lot like you, very, very smart, very curious.