Emotions Just Are: The Most Important Lesson I Learned as a Beginning Psychotherapist.

Imagine a child who does not understand the chaotic world she is growing up in. There are surges of searing red, heavy blue, and repulsive green that make her feel like a small boat braving an ocean. The only safe way for her to move past the surge is to explain it away in her head. Her mind analyses patterns and becomes proficient at explaining the emotions of the adults around her, and her own emotions as well.

Now, imagine this child as the part of you that dissects the reason behind every emotional surge within you or your loved ones. Every slight, glance, scoff and expression on your partner’s face is a trigger for her to try and understand what they are feeling. Every swell of jealousy, anger or guilt within becomes a spiral of judgment. She asks over and over again: Should I be feeling this way? Say hello to the intellectualizing part that lives within most of us: the Intellectualizer.

Intellectualization and Self-Awareness

From an increase of therapy-speak discourse on the internet has arisen a self-awareness epidemic among the chronically online. It can help you get a completely accurate read on the reasons why you repeat the same old patterns, and give in to the same cycle, without really teaching you anything about what lies underneath. The bubbling undercurrent of rejection, failure and abandonment remains unaddressed while the urge to dissect the “why?” becomes stronger, and eventually, reflexive.

At the risk of sounding like Sincere from Love Island, I give you this analogy:

Think of a large storeroom. There are boxes labeled “fear of rejection,” “anxious attachment style,” and, "embarrassment about my accent.” A neatly catalogued room full of decades of baggage, unopened and untouched, but the manager knows where everything is, who sent it in, and when.

This is where self-awareness is often conflated with the intellectualizer part. This is where the vacuum of space between thinking and feeling lives. When I started my first semester of training as a psychotherapist, I struggled to take my mock client deeper into her emotional experience. The stories and justifications formed a solid shell over my client’s tender beating heart. In the library, I read the textbooks, found the language, but still felt detached from the experience of true connection. This was when I first met my intellectualizer. The part of me who helped me understand every social interaction, every surge of joy or sadness, and helped me navigate the world when I was afraid, also formed a solid shell around my tender beating heart. I had learned to leave my fear untouched, as long as I could think of the reason why it existed.

The Role of Safety in Feeling Your Feelings

In “It’s not Always Depression,” Hilary Jacobs Hendel talks about the foundational role that core emotions play in our daily lives. She illustrates the revolutionary changes that take place within us when we feel safe enough to experience the physical and emotional sensations that ebb and flow within the body. However, when a defensive part like the intellectualizer learns to keep us safe from the unpredictability and discomfort caused by emotions (often, but not always, at the hands of our caregivers), it takes us away from the body and we start to live in our heads.

As I read the book, I could almost see the author hold my intellectualizer’s hand and gently challenge it to see what happens when she lets go a little. When the waves of fear or grief hit, I worked on increasing my capacity to tolerate the discomfort, anchoring myself in the safety of my body and the ground beneath me. There was buzzing, tingling, tension and anxiety at first, but with every breath came clarity. And eventually, the wave receded, and an empty box was removed from the store room. The more I practiced this skill in therapy and in the real world, the more I was able to withstand without reaching for my intellectualizer.

This is all easier said than done. The intellectualizer parts form from years of unpredictability and chaos, and can only calm down when they feel safe. I wish I could tell you that a quantum leap could bring you to a grounded nervous system, but I would be lying. At my most afraid and dysregulated in my first semester, I sought my own therapy and discovered that the path to safety is long and takes a lot of courage and practice.

My hope for you, as a therapist, is to see your tolerance expand and transform, until your intellectualizer can finally feel safety and trust. Today I invite you to take a few deep breaths and read this poem I wrote, and notice what comes up as you imagine the first person who felt;

The First Person Who Felt

I imagine it being a little girl with a peculiar mutation.

It doesn’t show on the surface, but it makes her different; smarter, kinder, more human.

An ocean foaming and bubbling over the walls of her tiny, mad heart.

I imagine it being anger.

She must’ve felt so angry at first. Why wouldn’t anyone put a hand on her heart and tell her they felt the waves of anguish too?

A bunch of idiots.

I would’ve been so angry.

I think of this girl running through a field, unable to put the ache in her chest into words.

I imagine her being sad, truly alone, shedding the first ever heartbroken tear in the name of being aberrant.

Why couldn’t anyone tell her that her insurmountable grief didn’t make her abnormal, just different?

I imagine her walking all the way to a cliffside every day, staring into a void that miraculously echoed how she felt.

I see her being scared of her heart.

Oh, how she would’ve screamed into the expansive nothingness.

Help! Help! Help!

I’m broken.

The waves must’ve tried hard to knock her out.

Did she make it?

Did she put her hand on her own heart and take solace in the familiar rhythm?

Maybe against all these odds, against anxiety, fear, sadness, anger, against society, biology, and an inborn tendency to assume the worst.

Maybe she felt happiness first.

Maybe hers was the first-ever smile.

I imagine her sitting near a honeysuckle plant,saving a tiny life,sharing her full heart.

Maybe she had hope.

Maybe she held the hand of anotherand made them feel seen,understood,celebrated.

Maybe her life’s blood flows into your heart and mine.

I imagine the little girl feeling sadness, fear, anger, and also happiness.

I imagine her loving the winter sunshine, inhaling the sweet honeysuckle, and smiling to herself.

She isn’t an aberration on the infinite canvas of life.

She is the colour on it.