I do a lot of my thinking or general brain-tinkering in words. A lot of my idle time is spent formulating ways to communicate things verbally, either to have a greater grasp on the subject myself or to prepare for explaining it to others. I totally get what you're saying about logic existing underneath the use of language, and I often find that my understanding of things precedes my ability to explain it. I also find that I don't really like not being able to explain something in words, even if it's just to myself, so I'll spend a good chunk of time pinning it down consciously.

Quote Originally Posted by Animal View Post
I ask because... it occurs to me that NOT allowing my thoughts to become verbalized is perhaps causing me problems. In particular, it limits my ability to moderate my mind. This allows for the most ridiculous negative self-evaluations, anxiety-inducing imagery, and other forms of intangible, but psychologically harmful thought processes, to get out of hand, unquestioned. And this poisons my climate of mind with a generalized, vague weather pattern of generalized shittiness. Most forms of psychotherapy rely on the patient to be able to verbalize the content of their thoughts. Journaling, writing, self-insight, etc. are all depending on this ability. But I find that it's not something I do automatically, as other people report doing. It's something that I have to make a concerted effort to do. It's an extra step. And I'm considering whether it would be helpful to make taking that extra step into more of a habit for my own benefit.
IME, being able to verbalize whatever problems you have only works as a means of discovering what the problem really is, and it's merely one of several methods I'm sure the human brain can manufacture to meet such an end. For someone like me who's prone to overthinking problems until they're firmly rooted in the ground, any answer I come up with will never be an adequate substitute for acting on the problem and fixing it first hand; it's simply the way I know best of dealing with it. Plus as you mentioned before, at its core the brain functions without verbalization and can just as easily go off of gut feeling gestalts/impressions/impulses; but like before, feeling these negative impressions is not a means of fixing them. There has to be some action taken, and if your feeling sense is fine-tuned enough then simply spotting these impressions and images, understanding their nature on a core pre-lingual level, should be enough of a catalyst to stir activity for combating it.

 
I wonder if this is head triad vs gut triad related?