Quote:
Originally Posted by PeeJay
Interesting post, Growli. I thought about this for a while before responding.
"Why" questions are cognitive and keep people in their heads, examining.
And a lot of times, people DO KNOW why they are sad, for instance, but it doesn't help them feel less sad.
So, "why" might satisfy an intellectual curiosity, but it doesn't help change the emotion.
Helping clients to feel emotions is all the rage in therapy circles these days. So, they want you to feel the emotion, locate it in your body, and express it in therapy, to better know yourself.
And "why" potentially keeps you above the problem, and can be a way to avoid getting down into the messiness of your experience.
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I do have a habit of being over intellectualizing. Well, my initial reaction to things is emotional but then I shut it off by intellectualizing everything so much that my life turns into a dull, passionless history book. Don't get me wrong, I like history and I really love good history textbooks because history is fun and interesting and textbooks are big books that smell awesome (but admittedly cost way too much)... but a super dry history book...? Yuck.
Asking me "why" could easily cause me to do that which is counterproductive. If I was asked why and then a question about how that affects me emotionally, it might have the effect of making me analyze the situation without throwing away my emotions