Overcome Intellectualism With Internal Family Systems and Somatic Therapy
I Think, Therefore I Am… Disconnected?
So far in our journey of the psyche, we’ve met the following protectors: the pressure cooker, the monster under the bed, the underinvestor, and the moving target. They all formed during hard times to keep us safe. We are stifled if they became habitual or automatic and take over as our default identity. When this happens they cut us off from our source energy, healing, wholeness, and new possibilities.
Today, we meet the Intellectualizer, a grandiloquent gentleperson and a most rare and fine specimen. Its central problem is that in creating mental maps of intricate complexity, it inevitably loses touch with felt experience. Like Descartes, it identifies with thinking as the source of identity rather than experience or feeling. Since the role of experiencing is to update thinking, the intellectualizer tends to become out of date with themselves and the environment.
The intellectualizer is quick to bypass or curtail the feeling of emotion in order to get to what it enjoys most, making meaning and updating its valuable mental maps. For reasons unbeknownst to it, it often struggles to prioritize tasks or to develop its life’s passion. This is because it operates disconnected from its guidance system, the emotions. Coming from the Latin emovere meaning “to move,” emotions provide us with salient information to guide our next action. Thinking does not guide itself toward action. It can endlessly elaborate without concluding. Thinking will seldom tell us that it is now time to stop thinking! Tragically, literal forests have been destroyed by intellectualizers trying to think through problems that require feeling, intuition, and right-brain creativity in order to flesh out and resolve.
The intellectualizer gets told that it is dry, dull or robotic. It can fail to inspire or motivate others, who need to feel passion in their leader.
It should be noted that this protector has a LOT of adaptive value. At some point in the past, it was necessary for the intellectualizer to cut off feeling and to rely on thinking to survive and to get to a better place. However the intellectualizer misses out on a lot, as feelings that hold valuable information are feared and avoided at all cost.
In the healing process:
The intellectualizer is often confused about what the task of healing entails. It may think it knows precisely what is to be done, but somehow it is always mysteriously thwarted. The intellectualizer endlessly circles the act of healing while remaining on the outside of it. There is a lot of what Fritz Perls called aboutism, or talking about something from a disembodied perspective. The intellectualizer demands increasingly elaborate maps to describe what is to be done and why. Then, when the session has been used up in intense cartography, it complains that nothing good has happened and that it does not feel any different!
Most therapists will attest that it is hard going helping a thinking-identified person to feel. There are few reference points and it can feel like describing an imaginary universe that exists outside of space and time. Any question directed at feeling returns “nothing” or “neutral.” Amazingly, the intellectualizer has completely forgotten how to feel. Imagine describing walking with bare feet over soft, wet moss to someone trudging along in boots that have not come off in years, while their head is buried in a map.
That said, it very much can be done, and many thinking types go on to develop deep emotional intelligence. IFS and Somatic therapy take direct aim at intellectualism.
How to work with the intellectualizer:
The intellectualizer is a protector that needs to be convinced by reason, it’s own language, that it needs to relax in order to allow embodiment and healing to occur. A great deal of explaining will likely be necessary before healing begins.
Focus on somatic therapies and embodied awareness practices rather than pure talk therapies.
Identify when the intellectual thinking part is operative and practice having it step back in order to allow deeper feeling states to emerge. This may feel like watching grass grow. As awareness deepens, subtle shifts in the nervous system will become apparent. Over time these shifts will become more dramatic until they are undeniable. Meaning making and thinking can then follow experience to integrate what has happened. In this context, thinking connected to embodiment becomes wisdom. Intellectualism, on the other had, is when thinking always leads or takes the place of experience. Over long periods of time, wisdom beats intellectualism as it includes more information.
Resources:
In an unspoken voice - by Peter Levine
