Intellectualising Your Feelings
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Just because you’re aware of your patterns, doesn’t mean you can defeat them.
This is one of those posts where I have multiple different points I want to cover, but not quite sure how to structure it, so let’s try a numbered list.
5 ways you’re not as self aware as you think, number 4 will shock you!
1. Knowing your patterns is the first step
This is a huge step, don’t get me wrong. It involves looking back critically but constructively over your work, relationships, thought patterns, self talk, etc.
There’s an interesting part of the process of being self-aware, where you can see yourself doing your patterns. It’s almost like you’re walking alongside yourself. You might not be able to stop those patterns, but you know what you’re doing. You might even know why. But you can’t seem to break that pattern.
This is what I mean when I say knowing is the first step. It’s really important, but knowledge by itself can’t necessarily provoke change.
2. Narration does not equal facing yourself
One of the things I’ve learned in therapy training is to follow the feelings. Ask clients about feelings - ‘you mentioned feeling angry, tell me more’, - rather than events. People will want to narrate the events of what happened, rather than talk about how what happened affected their feelings. They’ll tell you how disruptive something was but will bounce off talking about feeling frustrated or disrespected unless you ask.
Being able to talk about difficult events is a huge step in healing from them, but being able to narrate the events in front of someone else is focusing on the things that happened, rather than the knotty and subjective subject of how it made you feel.
Hiding behind logic and reason instead of facing your feelings is called intellectualising them.
This is why I talk about not spending time wondering if your feelings are valid, because that can be used as a reason not to feel them and push them away, which never works.
3. Learning to sit with yourself is a key point
A lot of self aware people find themselves stuck. They know their own patterns, they know why they do them, they might even know what they want to do instead. They might be frustrated that they still can’t put these changes in place.
The issue is sitting with yourself. As above, a lot of self aware people intellectualise their patterns, narrating events rather than talking about the effect this pattern has on their feelings, and sitting in them.
Once you start being with yourself, you can start to face the deep seated feelings attached to your patterns, and the reasons they exist. In learning to sit with them, letting them flow through you and pass, you can start to change your patterns in a way that is grounded and true to yourself.
One day, someone will invent a way out that doesn’t involve going through, but until then, sitting in your feelings is the only way to get through.
4. The process takes you to weird places
If you speak to people who grew up with trauma, you might hear people talking about being 6 trauma responses in a tranch coat: https://buttondown.com/SelfCareBackpack/archive/on-trauma-responses-and-healing/, and that’s what it can feel like.
I’m tetchy about being late because my stepfather made us late as a way to control us.
I’m independent and pride myself on being competent partly because I was made to feel like a burden unless I didn’t ask for help or get anything wrong.
There’s more I can talk about, but the examples are there. Your personality, your relationships, your thought patterns all started taking shape during childhood, and continue to form and develop all the time. Really sitting down and figuring out where you patterns come from will take you to surprising places, and then you can decide how to work on them. For me it’s taking some and making them more healthy, and for others pushing back against my patterns and learning new ones.
See my post on my relationship to walking to see how these patterns can change for the better: https://buttondown.com/SelfCareBackpack/archive/on-walking-and-the-changing-nature-of-self-care/
5. Sitting, not acting, is difficult
This won’t apply to everyone, but generally, we’re not used to sitting with our feelings. We’re used to following them, doing something about them, using them as motivation. All these things are valid, and sometimes needed. Sometimes though the most productive thing we can do is sit with them until they pass.
This is especially difficult with feelings that are scary or uncomfortable. We want to push them away, do something to resolve them. However, learning to sit with them is important.
It teaches us that we can withstand our own emotions, even the scary ones. It teaches us how we feel physically and mentally when we have emotions, which is useful information for being able to see how our emotions affect our day to day.
It also lets us see what our thought patterns are when we’re having these emotions.
Often our self-talk at these times are a reflection of our patterns, and the words might not even be ours. It’s then we can start to learn how our patterns feel, what they’re serving in us, and how we can affect true change.
In conclusion
Intellectualising your feelings is something I think we all do, and it’s a tricky thing to realise you’re doing. It’s also really difficult to see how it can be detrimental to yourself, especially as feeling your feelings often feels like a step back if you’ve got to the point where you can recount your patterns.
Change is messy, changing your own patterns is even more so.