How to Use externalize in a Sentence

externalize

verb
  • So one of the main directives was externalizing the events of the book.
    Tasha Robinson, The Verge, 3 Oct. 2018
  • Watching these stories and externalizing them is a way to deal with that anxiety in some way.
    Addie Morfoot, Variety, 28 July 2023
  • After picking a fight with kids at his new school, Mahito externalizes his pain by taking a rock and bashing it into his own head.
    Nina Li Coomes, The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2024
  • The feminine style of grief is to externalize emotions and express them—to talk with others, cry, lament, and reminisce, say by going to a support group.
    Colleen Murphy, Health.com, 12 May 2021
  • There's some kind of externalizing your inner pain to your outer pain that felt really good.
    Anchorage Daily News, 28 July 2019
  • The risk in playing this kind of suffering lies in the temptation to externalize the misery, but Mr. Hawke strips away everything that might turn this into a performance.
    Paul Schrader, New York Times, 17 May 2018
  • Is everyone an artist, or are there only some people who are compelled to externalize their inner life?
    Vulture, 24 May 2022
  • Their methods for coping with this as adults are different: Kate externalizes her guilt, but Kevin internalizes it.
    Christopher Rosa, Glamour, 20 Oct. 2017
  • But at Verge, allowing people to understand themselves better and face their fears has led to less externalizing blame on others.
    Byalice Zhang, Fortune, 5 June 2024
  • As with Steinbeck’s work diary, the primary benefit of the practice seems to lie in externalizing our inner turmoil.
    Sarah Todd, Quartz at Work, 30 July 2019
  • The sisters’ sadness is scarcely externalized, but the creeping ooze of their despair pervades every frame, including a striking shot of a wooden crucifix with a pink lacy bra slung across it to dry.
    Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 22 Jan. 2024
  • So Koepp employs recurrent mirror imagery, dream states, and sudden shifts in time and space as a way to externalize Theo's fracturing internal state.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 20 June 2020
  • The entire process, by being externalized, seems repeatable, unlike the chance encounters of poets with their muses.
    Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2018
  • Now, pause for a moment to imagine creating all that without using a word processor or a paper and pen, or really anything at all to externalize thought to something outside of your head.
    Malcolm MacIver, Discover Magazine, 17 Aug. 2010
  • Corporate branding is about the core values and behaviors that your employees will externalize in the marketplace.
    Braven Greenelsh, Forbes, 14 Apr. 2022
  • But, to externalize Irene’s internal thoughts and her sublimated identity, the movie makes what is suggested in the novel far more explicit.
    New York Times, 19 Nov. 2021
  • Yet, many investors are stuck in idiosyncratic land, where they are focused on enterprise value, which is best maximized by externalizing risk.
    Peter Vanham, Fortune, 29 Feb. 2024
  • All this emotional processing is needed to write these songs, but the next step is externalizing and actually performing these songs for people.
    Jessica Lipsky, Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2024
  • Whether that pain is internalized or externalized, someone ends up hurting.
    Holly Thomas, CNN, 29 Mar. 2023
  • Nostbakken and Sadava have visually externalized the internal monologue, constantly swapping the role of who plays the Cassandra the world interacts with, and who plays the psyche.
    Katie Walsh, latimes.com, 6 June 2019
  • Just as Americans do, the Soviets externalized their values and believed that those values contributed to their power against their adversaries.
    Christian Schneider, National Review, 21 Dec. 2023
  • But sometimes having your darkest anxieties externalized into gripping, scary theater can be a splendid means of catharsis.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 4 Nov. 2016
  • Finally, the new policy risks simply externalizing the consequences of its economic and industrial policies in the form of higher exports, lower prices, and, for countries such as the United States, bigger trade deficits.
    George Magnus, Foreign Affairs, 29 May 2024
  • In order to externalize Brown’s own emotional reality and character growth, Hawke focused on the beard, which Brown originally grew as a disguise but which artists often portray as his defining feature.
    Salamishah Tillet, New York Times, 13 Oct. 2020
  • Boys in general tend to externalize anger and sadness against other people, whereas girls are more likely to internalize those emotions and have higher rates of depression and anxiety, Peterson said.
    Rebecca Boone and Lindsay Whitehurst, Star Tribune, 7 May 2021
  • Climate change is a textbook example of environmental justice, a concept that includes the idea that those causing environmental problems should be the ones to solve them without externalizing harm to others.
    Daniel Bednar, Slate Magazine, 27 Mar. 2017
  • Watching a reporter follow bum leads, spool out her own thinking, and otherwise externalize her shoeleather fact-finding turns this from a Shadowy Conspiracy saga to something somehow far more satisfying: a process story.
    Peter Rubin, Longreads, 30 Oct. 2021
  • By externalizing criticism, China's government may be able to further rally the country behind its leaders.
    James Griffiths, CNN, 10 Mar. 2020
  • By pressing subjects to execute specific poses and gestures, death photos helped the living externalize personal loss.
    Nancy West, The Atlantic, 19 July 2017
  • When someone lacks the words to process these experiences through traditional talk therapy, art therapy can provide an indirect way to express and externalize those feelings and memories.
    Girija Kaimal, Discover Magazine, 26 June 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'externalize.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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