Intellectualizing Emotions

What the pattern can look like

These are ordinary moments. None of them means much on its own. People with this pattern often describe moments like these:

• Trying to understand why something upset them before they let themselves feel it.
• Being better at giving advice about emotions than sitting with their own.
• Working out why something hurt, and finding the feeling has passed by the time the answer is ready.
• Knowing the names of their own patterns, and the research behind them.
• Treating what they read about feelings as a map to study, not a place to walk through.
• Being the person others come to for perspective, while finding it hard to let their own feelings be messy or unexplained.

Thinking clearly, or intellectualizing?

Thinking clearly about a feeling is not the pattern. Understanding helps. People with this pattern can describe their inner life with real precision.

One difference is order. For people with this pattern, the explanation comes first, and the feeling waits.

Another difference is what the explanation does. When the feeling has gone before it was felt, understanding has done the work of avoiding it.

Why it is hard to see in yourself

For people with this pattern, the understanding is real. The advice they give is often good. That makes the pattern easy to miss. It can feel like simply being thoughtful.

Where it comes from

This page does not say where the pattern comes from. A list of signs cannot tell you that. Neither can a short test.

What the Blind Spot Test can show

The Blind Spot Test is ten short statements. You rate each one from “Not me” to “That’s me.” It takes about a minute.

Your answers are scored across five patterns, and the Intellectualizer is one of them. The others are the Deflector, the Overachiever, the People Pleaser and the Controller. Two of the ten statements are about intellectualizing.

The result shows which pattern your answers lean toward most. It also says how clear that lean is. It may be clearly ahead of the others, or close with one other pattern. If two come out even, it says your answers did not point at one pattern.

What it cannot show

It cannot tell you that you are an intellectualizer. Ten statements cannot measure a whole person, and two statements cannot measure one habit. It is not a diagnosis. It cannot tell you where a pattern came from. It only reads what you answer on the day you take it.

It gives you a starting point. You can check what it names against your own life.

What Marcus Aurelius said about sensations

Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD. He kept a private notebook of thoughts to himself. It survives as the Meditations. In the fifth book he wrote about sensations in the body, pleasure and pain. When they reach the mind, he said:

“…thou must not strive to resist the sensation, for it is natural: but let not the ruling part of itself add to the sensation the opinion that it is either good or bad.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.26, translated by George Long (1862)

His advice had two parts. Do not fight the sensation, because it is natural. Do not rush to add a judgment about it either.

He was writing about the body, not about emotions. Read as an analogy for this pattern, the point is the order. The feeling is allowed to be there first. What the mind adds can wait.

One thing to try this week

Notice the moment you shift from feeling something to explaining it. You do not have to stop explaining. Only stay with the feeling thirty seconds longer first.

Sources

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 5, section 26, translated by George Long (1862), Project Gutenberg #15877.
• Biographical notes on Marcus Aurelius: George Long’s introduction to the same edition.
• The pattern description and test statements: the Blind Spot Test, Know Your Ethos.