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In therapy, we’ve repeatedly encountered one of my defenses–a part that engages in intellectual analysis. He usually steps in when there’s a question to another part about what their experience is or something else, and just yesterday I got the barest sense of what it was he was defending against–that is, why he has the job he has.

It’s yet to be fully explored but there is a great deal of fear beyond his analysis, almost to the point of terror. It was only when I was in the moment of experiencing the terror that I began to get a real sense of what this part feels like… because before, it didn’t feel any different. I didn’t notice when he came up, and I didn’t really feel any different when my therapist asked him to step aside for the time being (except that he did withdraw).

This makes a tremendous amount of sense, of course… if the body reaches a certain level of intense, constant pain, it will go into shock and shut down, even to the point of going into a coma. This intellectual defense is basically emotional shock.