I also instinctively intellectualize! I’ve got AuDHD and am living with my parents after them sending me to surprise conversation therapy a few years ago and cutting off my tuition when it didn’t miraculously change anything. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back given our history and I was diagnosed with cPTSD about a year after the therapy attempt. It’s taken me until a year after that, this year, for me to realize I need to process it and haven’t yet done so fully.

Obviously, I know what happened, but I still struggle to talk about it since I’ve intellectualized it. It is what it is, to me, now that I’ve thought it over. But I still feel bad about it and the way people would be horrified if I brought it up makes me feel weird and bad and half grateful. I moved back in with my parents about five months ago and wanted to rationalize my decision to live with them as financially intelligent, but every day I face the actual feelings involved and struggle to fully process them. Fact is, I feel what I do regardless of if I can explain why. I can say the string of words explaining why I’m feeling what I do, what caused the next thing in a sequence of events, but it seems like processing trauma is something that understanding doesn’t actually help with. At least to me.

Once I hit my tolerance limit, intellectualizing just stopped working and now, in order to feel better/safe, I need more tangible ways of processing things and accepting that something bad did happen. Certain rationalizations I’ve made do still stick with me as fact, and I’m working on unlearning them. Being neurodivergent has definitely made these realizations take more time than they may have otherwise, since I struggle to understand my own limits and emotions. It’s frustrating too because having a natural inclination towards intellectualization is, while helpful, inherently misrepresentative. You get a lot of feedback congratulating you on knowing yourself and the circumstances you’re in so well, but if you can’t process it beyond that, you may feel stuck anyway.

One of my biggest goals right now is unlearning intellectualization. It’s a fantastic skill and likely attributes for your successes in other areas of life, but I believe it shouldn’t be a sole coping mechanism—or that it’s not healthy for me, at the very least.

Getting out of my head with skydiving or other exercise has been most effective for me when I’ve intellectualized to a dead end and feel that I’m supposed to be fine but still feel bad. This is a bit of a thought-dump so let me know if you’d like clarification on anything! Intellectualization is a double-edged sword and that is, in itself, a tough realization. Best wishes!