TRANSCRIPT
A few people have asked that I make a video on the subject of intellectualization. So here goes.
Intellectualization, what is it? It’s when people use their intellect, their logic, their abstract reasoning to avoid having to deal with their feelings. I see this a lot in academics. I think about my time in college. Oh my God, so many of my professors talking and talking and talking, and spinning out ideas and fancy words and thoughts and so many complex ideas. I’d have to, like, literally just to be able to follow what they were saying, I would have to dissociate from my feelings to be able to make sense of it and, you know, follow the map of what they were creating.
And when I think about it now, I realize actually they were dissociated. If they weren’t dissociated, they couldn’t have done this. And actually, all of this academic spinning and fancy talk and complex abstract ideas was a big defense against feeling anything. And I think it actually tells a lot about their childhood, their history, that they weren’t allowed to feel. They were blocked from their feelings.
This is what I’ve observed in people now in recent years who are very intellectualized, that they are quite split off from a deeper connection emotionally with themselves. And there was trauma in their lives. Every single person I’ve seen who is like this has a history of painful trauma, rejection, violation, neglect—a world that didn’t allow them to emotionally be a full human being. But they were allowed to use their brains. They were allowed to be intellectual. They were allowed to have abstract reasoning and vocabulary and thought. This was something that was okay. The feelings, at some level, the connectedness with the truth of themselves, was not.
They weren’t allowed to grieve. They weren’t allowed to cry. They weren’t allowed to be confrontational against the people who were blocking them. Often, they were in worlds with parents who were also intellectualized, so that was allowed. The other parts were not. So a split happened, and they are reflecting that split.
And often what I’ve seen with very intellectualized people is they can become very uncomfortable when people are cutting through the intellectualization and are just speaking truth, speaking emotional truth. Having feelings can be very threatening to intellectualized people. It can actually make them become even more intellectualized in that way, more defended.
I’ve also seen quite a lot of intellectualized people who can become very arrogant and snotty against people who also are not intellectualized. Oh, they can put them down as being less intelligent or lesser or just not worthy of even being considered. Oh, your vocabulary is not enough. You can’t think abstractly enough. You cannot philosophize along with me, so I will not listen to you.
Now, I had to survive in that academic world to get my fancy college degree, to get where I got. I needed to survive in that world. And what I found later on is when I became much more connected with myself and didn’t want to be intellectualized like that, but knew that I was still smart and intelligent, that the intellectualized people were especially threatened by me because they couldn’t put me down as being, “Oh, you’re dumb. You’re not to be considered,” because I was smart enough. But I became more connected because I had healed so many of my traumas and had become more connected with my inner self that suddenly it was like, oh, they couldn’t just discount me so easily and discount my emotional reactions.
But they did anyway. They still were able to say, “Oh no, their defenses kept me away.” Yeah, but I also realized something else interesting about people who use intellectualization as a defense—that sometimes they’re actually not intellectual. I’ve met some people who actually aren’t all that smart but don’t know it in a way because their intellectualization keeps them so dissociated that they actually think they’re quite intellectual. But sometimes, you know, even their abstract logic really doesn’t make very much sense. But it still serves the purpose for them internally to keep distance from that pain.
I’ve also seen some people along the way, and I’m not talking about therapy clients or back when I was a therapist. I’m just talking about people I knew in the world—sometimes even friends who were very, very intellectualized. But something happened that caused them to need to drop that defense, and underneath it was someone who was not intellectualized, maybe not even intellectual at all, but just this painful, seething, wounded child who was sobbing and crying and using very simple vocabulary in simple sentences and not using any abstract reasoning and just saying how much pain they were in, talking about their torment. And it was like, whoa, it was like listening to a completely different person.
And then, well, some of the time with these folks, when that pain went away or they were able to plug it up and put a lid on it and get some distance from it, boom, they bounced right back into intellectualization, into academic speak, into academic jargon—sometimes so much jargon that was purposefully put there so that nobody else could even know what they were talking about. And I think sometimes that’s the point. Sometimes when people spend more and more and more abstract intellectual ideas, the deep emotional goal that the person has in doing this is to distract people, to make others not even know what they’re talking about so that if others dissociate, they will not challenge them.
They will not challenge the person to just stop doing this, to get centered, to connect with their feelings. Because feelings, healing, grieving, knowing what happened to us can be terrifying. It’s terrifying. It’s reliving the horror. It’s facing this ugly, painful, terrible, not intellectual stuff on the inside—just the bare bones of a very painful and ugly history that intellectualization, even the intellect, doesn’t really do much to help. Instead, it’s like finding the safety to be able to sit with that, to be still, to be quiet, not to talk sometimes, not to have talkitis or talkosis, even all that blah blah, not spinning all this, but instead coming within, remembering, remembering in the body, feeling, grieving.