[aftoprokrustes]

I would advise against this kind of "intellectualizing" of emotions, particularly if you are a "brainy" person. Decoding the emotion as an intellectual puzzle can feel comforting, because juggling with concepts and theoretical models is what a brainy person does, but it will necessarily obscure a lot. But an emotion is not a concept, it is physical. You should listen to it, but not in the head: just allow yourself to feel it, to permeate your body, to evoque images... And often an intuitive call to action will emerge. It might just be internal action, or it might be a growing desire to quit your job to go work in another field or do social service or whatever. The thing is that the conviction that comes out of repeteadly listening to the emotions in the body is much stronger than the one that comes from rational thinking alone. And it can often be something you would never have thought about just by pondering.

Take the example of grief. What is the rational interpretation? "My mother was there, and now she is not". Or worse, "it shows how much time I lost when she was alive, and now it is gone". Absolutely useless insight, probably just makes the pain worsen. Maybe it makes you feel guilty and intellectually decide to "engage deeper in my relationships with the living", but in the few cases of this decision I witnessed it did not really work, because this was just abstract and filled with guilt and shame.

But allowing yourself to feel the grief and be sad can open a sense of devotion and respect to the dead. This intense pain can feel like the universe paying respect to the person that is now gone. And out of it can come a new way of interacting with the world and others, and maybe a newfound perspective on life. But the important part is that this kind of happens by itself, as currents and sensations in the body, over time, bottom-up, rather than as the result of solving an intellectual puzzle and coming eith a top down solution a out how you ought to live your life and feel from now on.

Obviously, this is just my own conclusion out of my own journey, and YMMV and all that sort of things.

[falcor84]

I agree in principal, but in my experience, a different way of looking at an emotion can sometimes really be eye opening and even poignant.

In particular for grief, I remember I was very moved by that quote from the show WandaVision: “But what is grief if not love persevering?”. I believe it helped me cope, even if just a bit.

[Sakos]

Meh. "Intellectualizing" is just another form of what Buddhism or Stoicism have been doing for thousands of years. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it can be extremely helpful to take a closer look at your emotions, why they are, where they come from, how they're affected by factors inside and/or outside of you, etc. A lot of emotions we have are destructive and have a tenuous tie to reality, and have more to do with our internal representations and interpretations of reality than anything else. If you aren't able to "intellectualize" your emotions, you'll never be able to really step back from them and evaluate them on a more meta level that something like Buddhism or cognitive behavioral therapy or rational emotive behavior therapy require.

[aftoprokrustes]

There is a lot in your comment that resonnates with my way of practicing, and I will not be able to answer everything, but I feel like I need to try.

What the article gives is a very formulaic correspondance table between emotions and "messages": anger means this, fear means that. This reminds me a lot of "dream dictionaries": things of the kind "if you dreamt of a tree, it means that you want to sleep with your mother", and "if you dreamt of a dog, it means that you have repressed memories of abuse by your father". This, in my experience, is not helpful. Even adopting a more nuanced approach to dream interpretation, purely intellectual analysis of dreams tends to fall flat: you can build a very plausible interpretation of a dream, but (a) it does not mean that it is "true", and (b) it is often quite hard to know where to move from there. What is helpful is to try to reenact the dream in imagination, be attentive to resonances in the body, and see how things evolve.

Now to Buddhism: I am quite familiar with several Buddhist traditions and studied quite a large portion of the Pali canon, and I am not aware of any advice of intellectualization. Note that there is not even a word for "mind" in Pali: the closest is "cita", which is often translated as "heart-mind" - it is the rational and the emotive/feeling together. The Tibetan tradition also places the center of the mind in the heart, which is where you _feel_ things. So if you have some references to explain what you mean, I would be interested. There are broadly two main ways I learned from Buddhist (or Buddhist-inspired) teachers to work with emotions, and they are the following: - classical Vipassana insight meditation: feel the emotion, and decompose it in smaller components. Look at how impermanent it is. See how the various elements (the resulting papancca ("mental proliferation"), the feeling in the belly, the agitation, etc) really are not bad in themselves, see how there is no such thing as "the emotion", just an ever changing flow of sensations and thoughts. See how the emotion and sensations change when you stop resisting them: in big part, they are fabricated through your aversion, greed and ignorance (the "three poisons"). If you do this long enough, you realize that the emotion is "empty": it has no independent existence. - Rob Burbea's version of insight meditation, based on "ways of looking": based on the insight that emotions (and all phenomena) are empty, actively look at the emotion through a variety of lenses: see the emotion as a message from the divine. See the emotion as a biochemical process. See the emotion as a aggregate of impermanent sensations. when you do this over and over, you again deepen your insight into emptiness.

The core of those approaches is to _feel_ the emotion in all its complexity, not just the intellectual interpretation of it. Of course, there is a skillful use of concepts involved: "looking at the emotion as impermanent" is a concept. But what you do NOT do is to solve the emotion like a puzzle, a stay content when you realized that it is due to your father abusing you as a kid.

Note that I also did CBT with a trained therapist for a while, and it did not work at all for me: I am already a lot "up there in my head", and only when I dropped it and switched to approaches that focus on the body did things start to unwind.

[arvinsim]

I read a book, Calming the Emotional Storm, that calls for this approach of feeling emotions, not intellectualizing them.

[lovelyviking]

In my experience usually such advices like feeling emotions rather then intellectualising them come from people who simply incapable of intellectualising them.

[aftoprokrustes]

As I mentionned in another comment here, in my case, I used to intellectualize too much. Actually, intellectuallizing is the only way to do anything I knew for a long time: even when starting a new sport, I would start with a book or a series of videos about the theory and biomechanics of the sport.

For me, actually allowing me to feel without necessarily having a fixed interpretation, allowing a multiplicity of meanings, is what really unstuck things. Which does not mean that I do not interpret or use concepts, just that I do not reify them anymore.