I read this thread and thought a lot about it, but didn't have the luxury of much time to reply. However, I just wanted to say I totally understand the concept of intellectualizing feelings. T1 told me I did this ALL the time; she seemed to hate it and thought it was not a good thing and tried very much to get me to just say 'I feel, I am feeling......'. She'd say to me, you keep saying, 'I think ..... I think I felt this ....' Like I would use all sorts of adjectives and descriptors and analogies and metaphors, as if I were telling a story, not from first person, but from third person .... creating an intellectual distance to make the emotions safe to see, to deal with, because I could almost pretend it was some other part of me, not really ME, that had them. I felt better analyzing my feelings than I did feeling them .... well, I still do, really. My feelings are sometimes more intense/deep than I feel safe approaching without a life-jacket (the intellectualizing, analyzing); I get panicked like I might drown in them. And I hate that drowning feeling! But I am learning, I think, to swim in deeper emotional waters and keep myself from that panic/dread of drowning .... to allow myself moments where I just notice the feeling, try to see where it is my body and do something that acknowledges and soothes the feeling, rather than fighting it or falling into it ..... kind of like a drowning person is easy to rescue when they don't fight the rescuer ..... I can rescue myself in the depth of my emotions if I don't fight them/myself....