11 Clear Signs You're Dealing With An 'Intellectualizer' Who Uses Logic To Avoid Their Emotions
GaudiLab | ShutterstockThere's a difference between being intellectual and being an intellectualizer. Intellectualizing is a defense mechanism designed to help people avoid feeling painful emotions. You'll know you're dealing with an intellectualizer when logic matters more than reality when it comes to feelings.
One big challenge with intellectualizers is their need to have control, especially when it comes to emotional situations. They'll worry and plan, but they won't fully surrender. Here are a few ways that tends to look in real life.
11 clear signs you're dealing with an 'intellectualizer' who uses logic to avoid their emotions
1. They give logical answers to emotional questions
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If you've ever met someone who gives a very logical answer to an emotional question, they're probably an intellectualizer. For example, if you ask how they're doing after a loved one passes, they may go into the different ways people grieve across cultures and the role of these rituals.
While using this kind of overthinking as a defensive mechanism can be helpful for navigating grief or strong emotions at times, when it's relied upon constantly it can turn into a bad habit. It may seem strong or charming at first, but it can keep people away from truly processing their emotions.
The majority of our emotions can't be explained away, as they're inherently complicated and complex internal responses rooted in our biology.
Using logic to explain how you feel can leave people feeling unfulfilled in important conversations. We're all yearning to connect with others, but when we suppress our vulnerability with logic, that only becomes harder and harder to do.
2. They think they can be their own therapists
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Being forced to constantly explain or even hide emotions as a child can spark intellectualizer behavior in adults. This is especially true for those that consistently didn't get their needs met growing up or who were parentified.
Forced to support their own discomfort with intense emotions, intellectualizers often retreat from bodily sensations and instead explain things away in their heads. According to a report published by the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, this over-analysis of emotion can inhibit self-expression, as genuine emotional expression is forced to be dealt with in another manner.
For intellectualizers who go to therapy, this tendency can make the practice feel repetitive and sometimes even shallow, as they often enter the space believing they already have all the answers to why they feel the way they do. They already know how they're getting in their own way or the patterns informing toxic behavior, but they can't make a change.
3. They think all problems can be solved if they think hard enough
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Instead of being present with emotional responses in their bodies, intellectualizers tend to retreat to their mind to label their internal conflicts.
Considering that intellectualizers are often very intelligent, they can get stuck using patterns or information to protect themselves. This helps them craft a faux sense of safety and control.
Of course, you can't think your way through all your problems, which is why intellectualizers might feel stuck in suffering or stagnant state. This is the opposite of what they were going for, as logic just cannot effectively help people avoid their emotions.
4. They try to plan their way out of anxiety
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Many intellectualizers try to plan through their anxieties, thinking they can outsmart any sort of fear or stress.
By eliminating any "what-ifs" in their lives, they think they can cope with potential uncomfortable emotions and feelings. Sadly, that's not how anxiety works. Worrying has been shown to help people not experience a sharp, sudden increase in emotional pain, but it doesn't actually reduce or help the avoid pain overall.
They also may fantasize about every bad thing that can happen to them in a way that non-intellectualizers find morbid or even grotesque. By pre-processing the trauma they imagine could happen, they believe they've crafted a sense of control over their lives. Sadly, they're only adding to the emotional distress and anxiety they experience in their day-to-day life.
Instead of addressing and experiencing emotions as they come, intellectualizers try to justify their anxiety ahead of time. When it goes right, it affirms they did the right thing. When it goes wrong, they believe they just needed to get ahead of it better the next time. That's the self-fulfilling prophecy of intellectualizing emotions.
5. They get stuck imagining the future
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While intellectualizers often view themselves as incredibly self-aware and in control, the truth is, the ways their intellectualizing "protects" them often keeps them from being truly happy. Instead of acknowledging and expressing what they need and what they want from others, they operate from a place of toxic self-preservation.
Of course, healthy practices like mindfulness and setting boundaries can be incredibly impactful for maintaining great relationships, like clinical psychologist Monica Johnson suggests. But when they're weaponized under faux guises of control, they can sabotage intellectualizer's ability to connect and be present.
This becomes a cycle of trying to escape discomfort while creating more of it for themselves down the line.
6. They're disconnected from their bodies
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According to the book Neuroscience it's not just the brain that responds to complex emotions, our bodies also experience changes that reflect anxiety or fear. This can be gastrointestinal and even cardiovascular, like increased heart rate and even fatigue.
How we physically feel can tell us a lot about our emotions and what we need to deal with them, but when you're dealing with an intellectualizer who uses logic to avoid emotions, that tool is lost. They miss and dismiss those physical cues, as they immediately resort to overthinking in response to uncomfortable emotions.
7. They overthink and ruminate
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According to a study published in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, rumination is a defensive coping mechanism to experiencing difficult emotions. Instead of letting themselves deal with anxiety as it comes, intellectualizers take on the burden of categorizing and compartmentalizing their grief before it even happens.
Not only does this prevent them from living in the moment, it can spark a cycle of isolation that can be detrimental to their health, both physical and emotional. They're less likely to healthily cope with true anxiety when it comes, and, worse, they spend more time avoiding their thoughts than they would have, had they just felt and processed them.
8. They outright refuse to feel 'illogical' emotions
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Not all intellectualizing is bad. In fact, it can be useful when someone feels overwhelmed or flooded with feelings at an inopportune time or when the feelings are becoming overwhelming.
For example, using rational thought to cope with a breakup might give you a chance to consider other people's perspectives or think about your future self. You can zoom out and get some more space from the pain, which can provide some relief.
But when people rely on it to overthink basic day-to-day stress and future situations that haven't happened yet, it's just another way to isolate from the present moment.
If someone's first thought when they experience any kind of anxiety or hurtful behavior is to rationalize it, that's one of the signs they're using logic to avoid emotions. Sadly, it cannot work in the long-term, as even our silliest and most illogical emotions need to be processed and dealt with. Even when it's painful.
9. They use humor to deflect from uncomfortable emotions
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Finding the humor in dark situations can help us to navigate grief and other difficult situations in a healthy way, according to the National Alliance of Mental Illness. But using it to consistently suppress emotions or avoid uncomfortable conflict in your relationships can be a toxic coping mechanism that backfires on intellectualizers in the end.
It's not always a conscious choice they're making to deflect, though some intellectualizers can acknowledge that toxic pattern. It's more likely a response to never learning how to healthily cope and process emotions. That's just another example of how a childhood without emotional guidance and support can lead to an emotionally repressed adulthood.
10. They struggle to connect with people who think differently
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By overthinking and rationalizing everything they come into contact with, intellectualizers cultivate a false sense of confidence and security in their perspectives. Oftentimes, that self-assuredness makes it difficult to understand folks who think differently or have different opinions.
They may even be overly critical of people who express their emotions, labeling them overly sensitive or irrational. That may be because they cannot imagine how someone can feel big feelings and be smart at the same time.
But this dislike of emotional people may also be because they prioritize the vulnerability that intellectualizers desperately try to avoid out of fear.
11. They eventually snap over things that seem silly
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Intellectualizers often think of themselves as stronger and more reliable than other, more emotional, people. This is true most of the time, but when things go wrong, they often go very, very wrong.
Emotions serve a purpose, after all. And pushing them away in favor of something that seems more logical is still emotional repression. Sadly, they don't just go away and will eventually bubble up.
Accepting emotions and allowing yourself to feel them may seem irrational to intellectualizers. In reality, accepting difficult emotions can actually improve your health. As psychologist Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, writes, "Accepting your emotions doesn't mean you are resigning yourself to feeling bad all the time or dwelling in pain. It also doesn't involve holding on to painful emotions or forcing yourself to experience distress."
Instead, it allows you to move through them, so they can exist peacefully in the past.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a staff writer with a bachelor's degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
