Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

With a little more research into the concept of intellectualization, I learned why therapists consider it a bad practice at times. While I use it to balance my emotional responses, many people try to intellectualize away all emotion. This is just as unhealthy as letting emotion rule every aspect of your life. A full range of emotions is a part of the kit God gave us to enable us to live healthy, productive lives, but they do take management just like every other aspect of being human.

Emotions will not go away no matter what you do to try to ignore them, drown them, suppress them, or intellectualize them. A feeling has to be felt. You have choices in how you react to a feeling or how you express it, but you cannot go around it, you have to go through it. Here is an example: I have been trying to hold down or go around my grief over losing my dog in July. I have been telling myself The Downside of S.I.T.

things like “she was a dog, not a human,” “dogs only live for so long so you knew this was coming,” and “she’s out of her suffering now.” While those things are all true, they do nothing to make the grief go away. All it seems to be doing is compressing the grief into a high-pressure substance that comes rushing out whenever there is a little gap in my self-control and often at really inconvenient times. I am normally not a person who cries, but I have cried more since July than I have in possibly my entire adult life.

What is the solution? I think it is to find a safe and constructive way to channel the grief while feeling the feeling. In my case, I have two other dogs and some really great humans in my life. Here at home, letting the tears flow, hugging a human, and loving on the dogs seems like the best thing to do. Letting the grief remind me that friends, family, and time are precious seems like a constructive channel. Working toward understanding it is way better than working toward blocking the unblockable.

Like just about everything else in this life, balance is the key to a healthy mental and emotional state. Unfortunately, I think we humans are prone to entropy, which means things will naturally fall into disorder if not actively managed. Letting raw, unchecked emotions rule our thoughts and actions is usually really destructive to us and those around us, but trying to completely suppress emotions can be equally as destructive. Using your intellect to balance between the two works really well. Liberally applied prayer works especially well for me, too.