It's Not Supposed To Be This Hard: Overcoming Intellectual Self-Harm & The Resistance To Receiving Support
“But I should be able to figure this out myself.”
I’ve weaponized my intelligence against myself for most of my life, and still catch myself doing it still.
I’ve always been an intellectual, whether it’s because I’m an Aquarius and constantly thinking about the systems we live in, or because I’m a 1/3 Projector in human design and have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and experiential wisdom, or because trauma has made the hunt for understanding not just a passion, but necessary to operate as a human. In a lot of ways, I pride myself on this part of myself and love that it expresses itself in the ways it does. It allows me to have nuanced perspectives, engage in deep and connecting conversations with others, and approach life with such fascination. Being a curious and critical thinker has also given me a strong foundational skillset to do the work I do as a spiritual guide, coach, and healer.
The trap of intellectualism though, is that it is often tied to unhelpful coping mechanisms like overthinking that keep us stuck in analyzing or perfectionism which hold us back from fulfilling our potential and emotionally thriving in life. It also can go beyond that and create self-harming beliefs like if we can’t solve our own problems then we’re not as smart, capable, or resilient as we thought we were. Often times, this creates its own negative feedback loop where we intellectualize our problem, overthink and get overwhelmed, are unable to make a decision or flip flop in our decisions, and it erodes self-trust overtime which then lowers our self-esteem. We stop seeing the problem as separate from us, and start attributing ourselves as the problem. It’s not just a cheeky, “you’re getting in your own way,” it’s a painful and covert psychological schema that defaults to self-blame, an over-reliance on self, and an inverse relationship with struggle and self-worth— if you’ve ever felt guilty for needing to vent to a friend about something, or felt like a burden when you ask for help in any way, then you’ve experienced this.
The thing with, “getting in your own way,” isn’t the full picture— it’s a result of intellectual self-harm.
Symptoms of Intellectual Self-Harm
1. Self-Gaslighting
You minimize your feelings, you get stuck in indecision despite having intuitive clarity, and you over-value logic while discrediting emotion. You tell yourself it’s not a big deal, that you shouldn’t be upset over something you’re clearly upset about, and you try to change your thoughts before you’ve even processed them because you can feel they’re negative and you don’t want to allow yourself to be negative. You tell yourself you need more evidence in order to believe what you intuitively know or feel. Self-gaslighting is a result of underdeveloped self trust which requires courage, an internal sense of safety, and a strong sense of self. Over intellectualizing can make you question each of those pillars and require you to prove to yourself that it’s safe to make a decision you want to make and constantly check in on whether or not something is “aligned,” so you can give yourself permission to move forward.
I experienced a heavy dose of self-gaslighting myself that has taken over a decade of intentional healing to get to a functional space. You probably didn’t just wake up one day and start gaslighting yourself, like every behavior and thought pattern we have, you likely picked up on it by seeing and hearing other people do it to themselves, or from being gaslit by others. If you experience C-PTSD caused by constant little t traumas, like having a verbally abusive parent growing up or experiencing domestic violence, then gaslighting yourself was likely part of your survival mechanism. You needed to dissociate, tell yourself it’s not as bad as it seems, and make sense of senseless violence done to you or those around you. However, that tactic doesn’t just stop, despite being decades removed from the original source of trauma. It requires a complete recalibration of truth and reorientation to reality in order to rebuild a paradigm where self-trust is even possible, then actually putting it into practice. While it sounds like a long and tiring journey, which I’m not going to sugarcoat it— it is, it’s extremely rewarding and no one should do it alone.
2. Analysis Paralysis
Analysis paralysis is a modern-day freeze response of the nervous system. Your nervous system has two modes: safe or unsafe— when it’s safe, you’re able to be present, confident, and move forward in your life. However, when it’s triggered and feels unsafe, you’re going to go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Back in the day, you might freeze when you’re on a night time walk and see a tiger. In fear, your body shuts down and you hope the tiger doesn’t see you. But in modern times, we get triggered into the freeze response by a variety of things like: the pressure to succeed, work-place expectations, and an overwhelming amount of information we have on everything. Suddenly, making a mistake feels unacceptable. After all, you should know better. So, you weaponize your brain and go to work to analyze everything not because it will actually help you make a decision, but because this coping mechanism allows you to not make a decision, aka freeze, while keeping the illusion that you’re being productive.
The idea that certainty comes from knowing enough, rather than an internal decision to trust, keeps you in the pain of constantly, “figuring it out.” Because there has to be a right and a wrong, a better and a worse way, or a more or less optimal path, you get caught in thinking over doing. Instead of moving from hypothesis to experiment, you can’t seem to even decide on the question you’re trying to answer because the question itself feels so important. I’ve worked with plenty of people who sit down with me not knowing what to ask, but knowing they need support. Simply asking the question, “what questions do I need to be asking myself to move forward?” is a beautiful starting point that I wish more people could keep in mind.
The harm in analysis paralysis is undervaluing the information that will come from moving forward with any decision, and over-exaggerating the risk or potential negative outcome of every decision. This will keep you from living your life and cheat you out of real experiential wisdom, as well as the higher self-confidence that comes from things going wrong and being able to see your own ability to handle it, in order to keep the illusion that enough knowledge can give you wisdom. The truth is, knowledge without implementation is like money sitting in a checking account— until you give it a job and move it to investments or to paying for something, it’s not doing anything for you.
3. Over-Empathizing
Similar to minimizing your problems, over-empathizing leads you to minimize the emotional impact others have on you. It’s especially common amongst therapists, healers, and empaths who have the emotional awareness and intelligence to see the situation from the other person’s side, despite their behavior and consequences of their behavior. This can look like constantly doing the emotional labor in a relationship with someone who is avoidant, anxious, or even narcissistic and going the extra mile to communicate, make them feel safe, or forgive their behavior because you understand the psychological underpinnings of what made them the way they are. Your brain works to connect their emotional reactivity, their lack of communication, and their charismatic yet off-putting self-narrative to potential past traumas. You can see the good in everyone and you want to believe in the potential of everyone, but that often comes at the sacrifice of your own energy. You may even pride yourself on your non-judgmental attitude, your ability to love and care despite it being hard on you, and your willingness to martyr yourself as a testament to your emotional capacity rather than seeing the truth of the situation.
You’re having a hard time not because you’re not accepting enough, communicating enough, or trying hard enough— you’re having a hard time because the other person in your life is making it hard. You’re having a hard time because you’re sacrificing yourself, your peace, and your future in order to uphold distorted beliefs of what it means to be a “good” person. You’re having a hard time because your feelings are trying to tell you you’re hurt, but you keep gaslighting yourself into thinking you shouldn’t be. You’re having a hard time because you think you can think your way into feeling differently, or shift your perspective enough for your current reality to change into the reality you want. Remember, healthy empathy doesn’t require you to overstep your own boundaries nor to change your standards.
4. Intolerance to Cognitive Dissonance
I’ve often cited the importance of cognitive dissonance in the change making process. Cognitive dissonance is the gap in between what you say you believe, and what you do. For example, when someone says that they love animals, but just had a bacon cheeseburger with fried egg on top for lunch, a vegan might point that out as a huge gap in their belief and their actions. When I was a personal trainer, the cognitive dissonance was always so apparent. People saying they wanted to be healthy, but saw working out as enough and didn’t take their sleep or stress seriously. At a certain point, the cognitive dissonance that’s keeping you in your undesirable habit is going to take a greater toll on you than changing. Think, the smoker that goes cold turkey one day and never goes back.
The thing is, some cognitive dissonance makes life easier to handle, but too much cognitive dissonance is not good for us—it makes living in alignment with your virtues and your values very difficult because there is too much flexibility. When people think being too compassionate with yourself is a problem because it lets you off the hook when you don’t accomplish your goals, the problem is misattributed to self-compassion, when in reality the actual problem is too much tolerance to cognitive dissonance. Personally, I can’t say that I love animals and still eat them, but I do kill insects. There is some dissonance in the belief that all lives are valuable and killing animals is okay. Where intellectualism creates an issue, is when you’re trying to create moral perfection by eliminating all cognitive dissonance from your life, or not being able to be present in your life because you’re too busy trying to make sense of the contradictions of this reality. Yes, terrible things happen in the world and beautiful things happen in the world— pain doesn’t have to take away joy, and joy doesn’t dismiss pain. Yes, your priority can be growing your business, and that doesn’t mean you’re working on it 24/7. Yes, you can love your partner of 10 years, and not want to be in partnership with them anymore. While it can feel really uncomfortable to hold two conflicting beliefs, that tolerance to paradox and disillusionment to our own hypocrisy are key ingredients to self-acceptance and living life without being constantly held back by our own moral friction.
5. Depressive Nihilism
Ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power, but neither show you the truth. The thing with truth is that it hits you at your core— the resonance is undeniable— it’s much more substantial than belief and it doesn’t require external credibility. It’s an incredibly raw feeling that creates the foundations for your existence. Truth is something you encounter, like how religion would say that you encounter God or how those with near death experiences encounter the other side. Once you feel the truth, there is no unknowing and no denying it. It completely alters your life.
The thing with intellectualism, is you get to this point that I call, “the end of all thinking” where essentially, you don’t have the shield of ignorance and you realize there is always more you don’t know. You may feel powerless to really affect change, and you also start to see how meaningless life is. You encroach on nihilism and the problem with nihilism isn’t that it is inherently wrong, nor depressing, it’s that it’s true and gut-wrenching to human nature that is designed to make meaning. When you get smart people who are experiencing depression, not because of trauma or low self-worth, but because their fundamental life outlook on life is nihilistic, depression is now not a mental illness created by cognitive distortions and past trauma, but rather a reasonable response to seeing the truth of being alive. Life then becomes something to cope with, and requires a philosophical and experiential approach— not just a therapeutic or mental approach.
I lived this way for over half my life, and while I had some experiences that really awakened my spirituality and put my on the path I’m currently on, the root of my beliefs still stem from existentialism, a branch of nihilism that believes life is inherently meaningless so we can assign our own meaning to things to create a life of purpose. Trust me, I know what it feels like to see through all the B.S., be completely enveloped by the void, and somehow make the absurd decision to believe in something anyways.
How Trauma Wires You To Resist & Reject Support
If you read through those five symptoms (mind you, they’re not all encompassing) and you were like, “that’s me! that’s also me! holy shit! all of this is meeee!!!” then I’m certain you’ve also struggled with receiving support to deal with all of this. Intellectual self-harm doesn’t just drive you to weaponize your mind, it also drives you to resist support, even though you know everyone needs it.
The irony is that you think it’s fine and good for everyone else to get support when they’re struggling, but the thought of getting support yourself involuntarily elicits shame or resistance. I know this response well— recognizing you’re struggling is a punch to the ego already, but succumbing to the reality that you might not actually know everything and that trying harder doesn’t actually work? Major ego death. If a friend was struggling though and went to therapy, hired a coach, or went to a shaman to heal? I’d be cheering them on and would be so proud of them. So, why the dissonance?
When you experience trauma, it shifts your 3 core beliefs:
“I am whole” → “I am broken”
“Others can be trusted” → “Others cannot be trusted”
“The world is a safe place” → “The world is not safe”
Now, when you make a mistake it’s no longer coming from the foundation of, “I’m a whole person that is good and lovable” it’s reinforcing the narrative that, “There is something wrong with me, I’m a bad person, I don’t deserve love.”
If you have that narrative, then you’re operating system is geared toward proving your wholeness, but sabotaged by your humanity which gets perceived as brokenness. You could be highly functional, working hard in your career, being disciplined in the gym, and making connections via great conversational skills. But underneath the surface, there’s a terrifying voice that tells you if you fall behind, if you slip up, if you’re not on someone’s good side, then everything is going to fall apart. To the person who is highly function, getting support elicits deep shame because it requires facing the truth of your humanity and you’re terrified of the pain associated with it, terrified of not having control over everything, and terrified of how things could change. If you’re under-functioning? Then getting support can feel like it’s reinforcing the belief that you’re not good enough, you’re undeserving of support, and that you need to prove your worthiness or lovability before believing your problems are even worth getting help for and that you’re worth someone’s effort.
When you don’t trust others, it’s very clear to see why you’d resist getting help. Those who carry interpersonal trauma and struggle in their relationships have this aura of fear and self-protection. While feeling broken can lead to people pleasing and codependency, not trusting others leads to hyper-independence and avoidance. When you meet others, you’re suspicious, your guard is up, and if someone is lucky, then you give them the opportunity to break down your walls, but even then you don’t know how to let them truly see you. You may be worried about others hurting you, weaponizing your vulnerability against you, or the pain of finally being seen just to unwanted, judged as not enough, or abandoned. Opening up to someone and letting them heal you becomes a layered challenge because it requires you to find the courage to trust someone, but it also requires time to build rapport and safety in the relationship so you can actually release your resistance and receive the healing and support that you actually do want more than you want to resist.
And finally, when you move in the world with the belief that it is inherently unsafe, you’re going to hold yourself back from having everything you genuinely desire, because the desire for safety trumps all. It doesn’t matter that you’re feeling lonely and want a loving partner, your fear of men as a whole is going to stop you from owning the desire for a partner. It doesn’t matter that you’re incredibly talented and want to make the world a better place, the thought of someone judging you for putting yourself out there makes you recoil and reject the dream of having your own business. It doesn’t matter that you know you have the money, time, and intention to invest in yourself, the world just seems so unstable and unsafe that you choose scarcity as the truth and hold onto your resources despite wanting more out of life. Until you realize your decisions aren’t coming from a place of preserving safety, but rather avoiding risk, you’re going to be constantly driven by fear, not desire.
The Case For Receiving Support
To rebuild your sense of wholeness, trust, and safety, you need a team. Why? Because it wasn’t broken by you, and can’t be put together by yourself either.
We don’t live in a vacuum and no one can survive as an island. Your problems don’t just belong to you, they belong to your community. Your blocks don’t just hold you back, it keeps everyone who are meant to find you from finding you. Your joy isn’t just felt by you, it amplifies the light of everyone else around you.
Self-care is community care.
You are the one person who you can change. The one person you can guarantee integrity from. The one person who you can actually know what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling and do something about.
If everyone else in the world is worth helping, then why not you?
One of my favorite quotes is by Marianne Williams who says, “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Don’t worry, helping yourself doesn’t require you to deconstruct your whole life, blow up your career, and risk your life savings in a new project in the name of healing and growth. It starts with one small act of kindness towards yourself, one inch of openness towards others, and one tiny celebration at a time.
When you let others in on that journey, it amplifies your light and your truth. When you feel seen by someone, heard by something, and held by someone, you heal. The problem suddenly fades and you tap into something deeper. You tap into the safety of love and in that safety you heal, you find courage, and you move with confidence. Clarity becomes you and everything that needs to get done gets done. The world inside your head fades away and you open your eyes to see the world in front of you.
Healing rarely starts with a practitioner, it starts when you decide you’re worth it, you’re ready, and you’re going to keep going no matter what. But your journey will lead you to people who want to support you, see you, and celebrate you.
I hope you let them.
P.S. If you know you know your healing and growing efforts would be more effective with support, then you may be a great fit for my 3 month Heal & Grow private healing and spiritual mentorship program. Learn more about it here.