Intellectualizing: the ultimate pitfall
Do the work!!
Expressed via the Notes app on my iPhone while flying from Bozeman to NYC (yesterday), I present: some intellectualizing. About intellectualizing.
Talk therapy is good for many things, but perhaps the best one is the simple effect of having a mirror held up to your patterns. I have been engaged it in consistently for over 8 years, the second half of that with one therapist. I like him! He listens, but isn’t passive. He suggests concrete tactics to work through my issues, but doesn’t pretend they’re a panacea. The fact that we’ve been working together on that foundation for quite some time is very helpful, because at this point it’s easy for us to spot deeply ingrained habits of mine lurking under whatever surface-level gripes I bring to a given session.
For example: intellectualizing as a crutch. I do it often. I get stressed about something at work or confused about an interpersonal situation, I bring it in for discussion, and I spend 40 minutes of a 45-minute session pontificating around it. Why is the situation happening? What is my role in it? How could I behave differently? WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? I try so hard! Surely that general effort should be enough not to find myself in the situation to begin with?
A few minutes before we close the session, my therapist and I agree: I very well understand what is going on—not in the situation, that’s just a symptom of the real thing—I am playing out a pattern of mine, I even know I am doing it, and I need to pull back for the real work of engaging directly with something I may be avoidant about because it’s opaque or difficult or both. I understand something out myself intellectually, but am struggling to connect with it emotionally. I am talking a lot about something unpleasant without really, seriously doing anything about it. I’m using my skills to spin narrative because it’s easier than building a better habit.
I don’t always see this, and there’s definitely irony in writing about it on my blog. But you know what? Sometimes sipping a ginger ale while squeezed into an economy seat on a cross-country flight will make you intellectualize in your Notes app, because you’re out of things to do and it’s still an hour until the plane lands. And if it makes even one other person resist their own urge to intellectualize at the expense of actually improving themselves, then that’s worth the extra minute of procrastination on my end.
Cool? Cool. Good luck to us both.