July 08, 2025

How do I stop intellectualizing my feelings - and FEEL THEM?

1 hour 1 minute

This week on Ask Kati Anything (ep. 225) licensed therapist Kati Morton explains how to stop intellectualizing and actually feel our feelings, and she digs into grief and how we can process it. Then she talks about why we can feel like our mental illnesses are made up or exaggerated because we haven’t had a trauma or big event, ways we can healthily express our anger, and how she defines an eating disorder relapse. Finally, she walks us through the ways she decides what’s the human condition and what’s a symptom of a mental illness.

1. How do I stop intellectualizing my feelings and feel them? 01:23

2. Hey Kati! I was curious if you could talk about grief as an emotion, and how to cope with it and ways to help process it. Before therapy, I could not name any emotions, and I’ve gotten so much better at it. In fact, unbeknownst to me, I’ve actually always been quite the adept feeler of emotions— in the sense that I can find them in my body, I can talk about how they feel and the directions they move within me and through me... 08:27

3. Hello Kati, I often feel my MDD and GAD diagnosis is not warranted and it's 'all in my head' because I have not experienced any major negative life events or traumas. This has prevented me from discussing the things that I believe could be contributing to my symptoms because they don't feel important enough... 25:16

4. Hi Kati, I was wondering if you could talk about healthy ways to express anger. I come from a culture where expressing anger is shameful, especially for women. So my anger is as scary as fire flames for me. However, I have noticed my binge eating is fuelled by my unexpressed anger. So, can you please teach me some techniques about handling anger. Thanks for all your amazing work. 34:13

5. Hi Kati! Hope you’re doing well. I am wondering how a relapse in an eating disorder is defined. Is there a clinical-based definition or is it more of a gray area? Does it mean meeting the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder diagnosis once again... 40:47

6. How do you figure out what's just 'the human condition' or a personality trait and what's an actual symptom? 55:08

PUBLISHED BOOKS

Traumatized https://geni.us/Bfak0j

Are u ok? https://geni.us/sva4iUY

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By Kati Morton, LMFT

4.9

394394 ratings