Avoidant Attachment: Signs You’re ‘Intellectually Bypassing’ Your Emotions (And How To Stop)

Name: Avoidant Attachment: Signs You’re ‘Intellectually Bypassing’ Your Emotions (And How To Stop)
Uploaded: 2023-05-26T14:00:12.000Z
Duration: 52 min 5 s

Intellectual Bypassing and Avoidant Attachment Styles

In this video, Heidi Priebe discusses intellectual bypassing and how it relates to avoidant attachment styles. She explains that using your cognitive mind to name your emotions in such a way that you don't have to really get inside and feel them is a common defense mechanism for those with avoidant attachment styles.

What is Intellectual Bypassing?

Intellectual bypassing is using your cognitive mind to name your emotions in such a way that you don't have to really get inside and feel them.

Those with avoidant leaning attachment styles tend to use intellectual bypassing as a prominent defense mechanism when they feel threatened in their attachment system.

Naming your feelings or past traumas is not the same as processing feeling into them and actually moving through them.

Signs of Intellectual Bypassing

Struggling to feel direct and embodied anger towards either parents or partners because you understand where they are coming from.

Exonerating early caregivers psychologically by absolving them of fault for some sort of wrongdoing.

Not allowing yourself to feel the actual felt experience of what it was like for you to be a child in the environment that you grew up in or maybe the things that you didn't allow yourself to feel that your system automatically numbed out for you because it would have been psychologically unbearable to face it at the time.

Believing that understanding what happened protects your inner child from pain, but accepting all past feelings as valid even if you believe you shouldn't have those feelings is necessary to gain a secure attachment style.

How to Heal from Intellectual Bypassing

Accept that your past experiences still hurt even if you understand why they happened.

Allow yourself to feel the pain and discomfort of your emotions, even if it's difficult.

Practice mindfulness and self-awareness to become more in tune with your emotions.

Seek therapy or support groups to help process and heal from past traumas.

Understanding Avoidant Attachment Styles

This section explains how those with avoidant attachment styles tend to be stoic and calm in emotionally intense situations, which perpetuates the anxious-avoidant downward spiral. It also discusses how this tendency develops from growing up in predictably hostile caregiving environments.

Stoicism in Emotionally Intense Situations

Those with avoidant attachment styles pride themselves on being stoic and calm in emotionally intense situations.

They have learned to cut off awareness of emotions from a young age, making it their natural response as adults.

This response helps them survive high-pressure situations by detaching themselves and not reacting emotionally.

However, this response perpetuates the anxious-avoidant downward spiral when paired with an anxious attachment style.

Development of Avoidant Attachment Styles

Avoidant attachment styles tend to develop in predictably hostile caregiving environments.

An intermittently hostile environment can lead to an anxious attachment strategy, while a consistently hostile environment leads to an avoidant attachment strategy.

Hostile doesn't necessarily mean neglectful or abusive; it could mean that caregivers had avoidant attachment systems and couldn't offer emotional intimacy or warmth.

In these environments, displaying strong emotions wasn't helpful for getting what you wanted. Instead, learning patterns of behavior that kept you safe was more effective.

Importance of Emotional State Awareness

Dissociating from your emotional state during high-pressure situations is not helpful for making wise interpersonal decisions.

Emotional state awareness is important for understanding how to prevent similar situations from happening again.

Developing present moment awareness of your emotional experience takes time and deliberate practice.

Somatic awareness practices, therapy with a somatically informed therapist, radical honesty, and authentic relating can help develop this awareness.

Getting in Touch with Your Emotions

In this section, the speaker discusses how becoming aware of your true emotional experience can be overwhelming and may require significant changes in your life. They also explain that staying present in situations where you feel emotionally overwhelmed can help you make healthier choices about your life and relationships.

Signs of Intellectual and Psychological Bypassing

Believing that naming a feeling or trauma is enough to process it.

Naming past traumas without actually moving through them emotionally.

Veering avoidant and not allowing yourself to embody intense emotions.

Processing Emotions

Processing emotions means making yourself aware of where past feelings or unresolved traumas are showing up for you in real-life situations.

Dealing with reactions that come up in the moment by feeling those feelings instead of just thinking about the past.

Learning self-responsible emotional expression by being conscious and intentional about how you respond to your emotions.

Tuning into Your Body's Responses

In this section, the speaker talks about their experience with circling, a form of interpersonal meditation. They discuss how they learned to tune into their body's responses and allow themselves to embody intense emotions.

Allowing Yourself to Feel Intense Emotions

Noticing waves of energy coming up from your stomach into your chest when experiencing intense emotions.

Consciously bringing up intense feelings and allowing yourself to embody them fully.

Encouraging yourself to stay present with your emotions, even if it feels overwhelming at first.

Processing Emotions

Recognizing the moments in which the past is present for you and feeling those feelings in the moment.

Practicing emotional processing with a therapist or in a group therapy situation.

Signs of Intellectual or Psychological Bypassing

In this section, the speaker discusses five signs that indicate a person may be intellectually or psychologically bypassing their feelings.

Feeling Your Feelings

Feeling your feelings means being present with them.

It takes conscious work to feel your emotions if your body naturally down-regulates away from highly intense emotions.

Sign #4 that you might be intellectually or psychologically bypassing your feelings is if you feel something but can't figure out what caused it or why you feel it.

Trusting Theories Over Experience

If you're more avoidant, you tend to trust theories about your own emotions much more than the actual experience of them.

This can also work in reverse order where you might not feel something in a situation where you think it would make sense for you to feel a different thing and then try to convince yourself that you do feel the thing that you actually don't.

Radical Acceptance

To work with this sign, we just have to learn radical acceptance of whatever we are feeling.

You have to sit with the question long enough for the true answer to appear but cannot get there by intellectualizing about it.

Soothing Mechanisms

One of the things that soothes people when they're upset is reading about psychology behind what happened and finding a way to name and categorize all of their experiences.

For those with avoidance systems, it might actually work to calm their emotional states down and down-regulate them away from emotionally intense situations because safety is understanding.

Emotional Arousal

For those with anxious attachment strategies, reading about psychology might actually be very activating for them because as they're reading, they're pulling their memories back into their body and getting activated all over again.

It was often a moment in the interview when they became a little bit emotionally aroused that tended to flip that person into that exonerating speech pattern.

Avoidant Attachment and Emotional Bypassing

In this section, the speaker discusses how avoidant attachment can lead to emotional bypassing, which is a means of putting a lid on one's emotional state. However, this approach does not allow for the full range of emotions necessary for developing emotional discernment in life.

Emotional Bypassing and Avoidant Attachment

Avoidant attachment can lead to emotional bypassing as a means of putting a lid on one's emotional state.

Contrary to what one's conscious mind may believe, avoiding pain or vulnerability by not feeling it only makes it harder to access those emotions later on.

Emotional experiences are important for developing emotional discernment in life, but they become harder to access when they are packed away tightly due to avoidance.

The worldview that needs to be reversed is the belief that one will always be safe as long as they understand and adapt themselves and their emotions to their environment. This belief forces individuals to stuff down their emotions and not live in an authentic embodied way.

Importance of Emotions in Attachment Healing

Accessing the full range of emotions is important for forming and maintaining close connections with other people.

Emotions such as anger help individuals learn where to set boundaries while grief and sadness help form intimate connections with others.

Intellectualizing everything based on trauma stories will not take individuals all the way through their attachment healing process. They must learn to get in touch with their feelings and use them as information about choices regarding their life and attachment relationships.

Conclusion

Being able to fully feel and swim in the waters of one's own emotional experience in a safe and contained way is what earning secure attachment for those who Veer avoidant is all about.

Individuals should stop intellectually bypassing their emotions, allow them to exist in their body, stay present and trusting of them, and use those feeling states as information about choices regarding their life and attachment relationships.