Theoretical models can only take us so far, so I decided to create an example of the the over-intellectualization/hypervigilance spiral and compare it to healthy intuition. This particular example is fiction, but what I’m describing has occurred many times in my life in many ways (and I have been both people in the dynamic!) This case is written objectively from the outside, but I’ve also written a much more personal perspective about hypervigilance vs. intuition, which you may also want to read.

The Disconnection Spiral: a case study
Sara is supposed to see her friend Rachel for coffee this week. The last few times they’ve tried to arrange a coffee date, Rachel has had to cancel. She has seemed distracted and off emotionally, and the last time she said she’d reschedule, she didn’t end up reaching out to do so. This time, Rachel cancels again last minute and seems like she’s rushing to get off the phone. Sara ends the conversation feeling a deep sting of rejection, and this feeling grows throughout the day. She has a history of wounding with rejection, so this feeling is not only big and palpable, it also has a familiarity to it that feels a lot like certainty. As she replays the conversation in her head, the underlying anxiety and urgency of hypervigilance become increasingly loud. As days pass without any conversation with Rachel where she actually expresses what she’s feeling, Sara’s internal emotional experience is like a pressure cooker: the feelings become overwhelming and she is totally thrown off and dysregulated. To bring the intensity down, Sara starts compulsively scrolling on social media, where the algorithm has set the perfect stage for over-intellectualization: Sara’s feed is a curated collection of posts about how to read other people’s behaviour, how to recognize “red flags”, over-simplified pop-psychology concepts, and trusting your intuition. Seeing posts that feel highly validating allows Sara to start to form conclusions and rationalize what’s happening by putting names and labels on things. This is satisfying and gives her a sense of resolution, so she keeps doing it. Hours later, Sara is quite certain she’s figured things out: Rachel has an Avoidant attachment style, and she’s distancing herself instead of rejecting Sara directly. This is a big red flag, and from what she read, what she should definitely not do is try to reach out- this just encourages Avoidants to distance more, and anyways, Rachel not reaching out herself is just another strike against her, because “if they wanted to, they would!” (Sara loved that post so much she saved it!) She finishes things off by skimming through posts about how intuitive people always know when something is up, and she gets a big rush of relief – it feels like her intuition has saved her from being hurt yet again. No one can hide things from her – she reads vibes and she’ll figure it out, so take that! Nice try, Rachel!

All the rationalizing has helped dim the overwhelming emotional experience, so Sara now feels far more settled: the out-of-control feeling of rejection has been soothed by how certain she feels in her conclusions. But the next day, Rachel calls Sara and throws it all off: she explains that her sister has been sick, and was hospitalized on the day of their scheduled coffee date. Her sister initially wanted to keep things private, but she’s ok now with Rachel sharing what happened to explain why she’s been preoccupied and canceling things. Although Sara feels some relief in hearing this, she also has some resistance to it: she’d already created her own resolution and conclusions in her head, and this news rattles her feeling of certainty. It also pushes against the belief she’s just reinforced for herself about how she can always intuitively know the answer, disrupting her sense of control and even part of her identity. What Sara does next may affect the health of the relationship.

Breaking it Down:
Sara’s hypervigilant state is activated when a big wound is touched on: rejection. Her friend cancelling on her twice pulls this to the surface, and all the emotions from previous experiences of rejection co-mingle with the current situation, creating a very intense experience. This intense emotional experience isn’t “wrong”, and please note that I’m not saying Sara’s hypervigilant state is all just fabrication: she truly does feel rejected, and her initial sense that something is off with Rachel is actually accurate. Using intuition in a healthy way, this is the point where Sara could engage more deeply. She knows she feels rejected (which may or may not reflect reality but she’s entitled to share this), and she knows her friend well enough to sense something is amiss, but these are the limits of what she knows. If she communicated with Rachel here, naming and sharing her internal experience, deeper connection could happen: Rachel may not be able to share all the details about her sister yet, but she can reassure Sara that she isn’t rejecting her, and maybe look at how her stress has been affecting how she’s coming across and repair things if she’s been hurtful. She can also feel seen in the fact that Sara is paying attention to her and noticing her emotional state.

But Sara is caught in the disconnection spiral, and so she uses her intuitive nudges to distance herself instead by not communicating anything at all. She becomes more and more internally focused, until her emotions are too much to bear. Although again this is a point where reaching out to Rachel could ease distress, the more time we’ve spent in emotional intensity, the harder it is to risk vulnerability by inviting someone else in. Rather than take this risk, Sara eases the intensity from a distance by retreating into rationalizing. In her head, Rachel becomes more of a theoretical concept than a person, and Sara becomes convinced she fully and accurately understands Rachel’s motivations and feelings without involving Rachel in the process at all. Our brains are meaning-making machines, and over-intellectualizing lets Sara fill in all the gaps of uncertainty by herself. The soothing sense of resolution that this brings on can feel a lot like certainty, and we can see that Sara becomes totally convinced that her conclusions are accurate. Rachel, meanwhile, is still absent from this process – and she’d likely be pretty uncomfortable with the way she’s being analyzed and pathologized by her friend, too!

When Sara ends up finding out that the cause of Rachel cancelling is very different from what she’d concluded, we can see the clear difference between disconnected, false “intuitive” states and genuine intuition: true healthy intuition has space for unpredictability and getting things wrong (in fact, getting things wrong is part of how it develops, similar to training a muscle to failure to build it). But in her state, Sara has no space for this. She feels certain, but this is fragile: reality being different than what she’d decided it was is unsettling to her. This is another pivotal moment where she could open up to Rachel, but the stakes are higher now: at this point, if she’s honest about all she’s thinking and feeling it very well may create conflict, which she’ll have to experience directly instead of in her head, and/or she’ll have to grapple with her “intuition” not always being right and not letting her stay two steps ahead, which challenges her identity and worldview. She’ll either risk these things happening by connecting, or she’ll retreat even further into disconnection – she may convince herself her unsettled feeling is proof that Rachel is lying, become distant with Rachel or very guarded and resentful, or maybe even shut down communication all together.

Intuition as Identity: a barrier to intimacy
I have alluded to Sara’s intuition being a big part of her identity, which I’ve found is very common in healing/wellness spaces. But in reality, very little of Sara’s experience in this scenario actually has to do with true intuition – in fact, by retreating into herself and out of the present, she becomes increasingly far removed from her intuition and her body awareness. Genuine intuition doesn’t function properly in this state of disconnection, and the more Sara collapses inward, the more distorted her thoughts and feelings become and the less she can take in anything from outside of herself. Having our identity or worldview challenged is very destabilizing, and adjusting our perception of ourselves and how the world works is a demanding process: it would make sense that Sara may choose the safety of her identity as an “intuitive” over the relationship with Rachel. If she does, she’ll likely justify it by telling herself that her intuition guided her to distance herself from Rachel, and re-affirm that her intuition protects her from pain, loss, and other people’s dishonesty. There’s significant cognitive dissonance at play here though, because through this whole scenario, Sara has not been spared any of these things: she still felt hurt, she still felt overwhelming rejection, she will still experience loss if she keeps distancing herself, and her own behaviour is actually emotionally dishonest as well. At this point, Sara’s feelings and justifications are taking up all the space in the dynamic – there is very little room for Rachel and her own thoughts, feelings, and needs. What Sara views as her “intuition” is not really a protective ally in this process: it’s actually serving as a barrier to connection, both to others and to true intuition.

Final thoughts
I know that a lot of what I’m saying here may feel very confronting when being intuitive is a major part of our identity, and a part of us that we deeply believe always keeps us safe. It has been a difficult ongoing process for me personally to challenge and examine this part of my identity, especially recently in my life when I’ve been navigating serious illness and balancing my attunement to my body with outside feedback and opinions (which is something I’ll be writing about in future posts). And I also know many of us do recall times when we’ve been right about a person or situation, and may be thinking “but what if Rachel really is rejecting Sara – I had an experience just like this!” It’s possible she really is rejecting her. It’s possible communicating about it might allow Sara to learn something about Rachel’s experience of their friendship that she wasn’t aware of. It’s possible Rachel may not have the skills or capacity to navigate that conflict in a healthy way…but it’s also possible that she may. It’s possible that Sara may learn how to experience an ending or a rejection in a way that doesn’t completely shake her to her core. It’s possible that the friendship may fall apart, but it’s also possible that it may deepen instead. But so long as she’s closing herself off to feel in control, Sara is denying herself all of the possibility that uncertainty offers.

This loss of possibility is, to me, a dishonouring of our healthy intuition. Western wellness culture focuses relentlessly on developing intuition into an all-powerful tool of protection and righteous certainty, and I think it’s actually eroding our connection to our bodies, our psyches, and each other as humans. Learning to use it instead as a healthy muscle that works collaboratively with other parts of ourselves and gets adequate rest allows this muscle to truly help us and orient us the way it’s meant to. The more we can condition it in a balanced way, the more we can consciously choose to engage and let life and others in on the process. We’re ultimately interconnected, and none of our choices truly just affect us alone. Making sense of it all together is how we tend to intimacy, both within ourselves and without.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and thank you for reading! If you’re curious about methods to open up more to uncertainty, you may also want to read the previous post a new year ritual for honouring uncertainty.