Feeling Stuck in Your Head? Signs You’re Intellectualizing Your Emotions

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “feel your feelings” and felt confused, you are not alone. Maybe you can name the feeling, but don’t know what’s next. Maybe you’re trying to make sense of it. It’s possible the feeling doesn’t seem “logical” so you try to figure out a way around it. These could be signs you are intellectualizing your feelings.

Feelings are felt in your body. When we intellectualize, we aren’t allowing ourselves to feel what the emotion is like throughout our bodies. We are sort of keeping them in our head. It can lead to dismissing, minimizing, or suppressing. 

Signs you are intellectualizing your feelings:

• You feel reluctant to go to therapy when things are emotionally distressing (“I’m having a hard day, I’m not up to it”). Therapy is actually a great place to be when you aren’t at your best. Therapy is not a space where you should feel you need to perform or express things perfectly. This can be a sign that you are too focused on the content of a therapy session, rather than the process of therapy.

• Frustration when having to slow down. Feelings are felt when we go slow. If you are used to moving at a fast pace, you might be focused on efficiency. Feelings are not efficient. We can’t schedule them or make them fit into our schedule.

• Difficulty identifying emotions and body sensations (even for pleasant emotions). This can be really challenging if you have focused on the reasoning behind your emotions and not what they feel like.

• Focusing on others rather than your own process. This can come up in therapy or in relationships. If your emotions are uncomfortable you may want to focus on fixing them as if they are a problem to be solved.

• Minimal emotional vocabulary (always “angry” “bad” “sad” “fine”). As neurobiologist, Dan Siegel, says – you have to “name it to tame it”. The broader your emotional vocabulary, the better your understanding of yourself and your emotions are. If you are using the same few words to identify emotions, odds are you are lumping emotions in together.

Intellectualizing isn’t all bad though. It can also be a great first step in self-exploration. It is also a common defense mechanism if it hasn’t felt safe to feel your feelings. Maybe in your childhood you were made to feel that some emotions were pointless or you needed a really good reason to feel the way you did. 

Here are some ways to expand your emotional experiencing:

• Go slow: Emotions can be felt best when we move slowly. Doing any task at half speed allows us to catch up to our emotions.

• Sit with it without solving it: Sometimes if we lean into “fixing” we aren’t honoring the feeling. We can just sit in the discomfort (or comfort) of the emotion without doing anything about it. Notice what that is like. 

• Be curious: Curiosity, not judgement, helps us to process feelings. We can wonder where the feeling comes from, how long it has lived with us, where we hold it in our bodies. Gentle curiousness lends itself to compassion.

• Get validation: If you are used to your emotions being invalidated (from yourself or people around you), you might need support from others. Finding a trusted friend or family member to talk about your feelings with could be a source of exploration. Therapy is a great place for this as well.

If you find yourself overanalyzing your emotions instead of truly feeling them, you’re not alone—and you don’t have to navigate it on your own. Therapy can provide a safe, supportive space to explore your emotions, build self-awareness, and develop healthier ways to process what you’re feeling. I’d love to help you reconnect with yourself and create a more balanced emotional experience. Schedule a session with me today to start your journey toward deeper healing and self-understanding.

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