This has popped up around again this week and I want to offer a little bit of an elaboration of the idea here:
The thing is that compartmentalization is a coping strategy and it's a skill that does often turn out to be quite necessary to function in the world. And the more stressful your world is, the more necessary it is to function.
Compartmentalization means that when you're in a hella stressful situation (whatever that happens to be for you), you can sort of close off or move back from the front or the driver's seat, all the things that don't help with that situation - and that can be not only really useful but absolutely necessary for survival.
A fairly innocuous example of compartmentalizing is that when you've had a shitty day at work, but you're a parent, you still have to go home and do all the Parent Responsibilities; you have to compartmentalize your anger at your boss or at some part of your job, or whatever, from the space where you look after your kids, and vice versa.
Almost all of us will learn to compartmentalize a little, and we'll learn it because we have to.
Compartmentalization is not as clean as it sounds, because the human brain doesn't work like that.
Because all of the shit you experience is still there. It still exists, in your brain and your body and your memory and often the former two even if your memory of it is fuzzy.
All metaphors are flawed, you understand - none of this is actually putting anything in a box, or sweeping it under the rug, or under the bed. But for the purposes of an easy image that's useful to imagine this, compartmentalization is like sweeping stuff under the rug, or under the bed, or putting it in a box - you've got it out of sight, but it's still there. It still exists, and crucially, it's still having some affect on you.
And also - letting the "sweeping it under the rug" metaphor go, because it's only a metaphor, and using another one - it can become so habitual and complete that you're closing doors in yourself before you even really know what's behind them, and given that all these solutions will "leak" you can (almost certainly will) end up in a situation where your thinking brain, the part that is reading this post and thinking "this applies to me" or "this doesn't", has no fucking idea what you've got in all those boxes, or under the rug, or whatever, because you habitually shut doors on the whole thing before you were even aware of it.
Those of us who learned how to compartmentalize the hard way, and do it as a habit, will often be like yes, see, I am excellent at this coping skill. And we're not wrong.
But the compartments are all artificial. Fundamentally it's all you - fundamentally every part of your experience is part of you, is acting on how your brain works, how your body experiences the world, and if you don't learn how to un-compartmentalize and integrate and deal with all of that, then you get increasingly fucked up by the very thing that lets you function.
And if you are so good at compartmentalizing that in your first session your mental health practitioner (who you are almost certainly seeing because shit is starting to go wrong and you're not sure how to fix it) is like ah, this person is very good at compartmentalization and says so. . . .
That probably means that this habit is so advanced, and so automatic, and so inflexible, that it's harming you. That part of the reason you're struggling with depression, or anxiety, or rage, or hopelessness, or hypervigilance, or whatever (I could go through a lot of pathology here) is because there is shit behind doors that you have not dealt with or processed through, stuff under rugs that's decomposing, or in fact you've just got so many locked doors that parts of your psyche don't really function anymore, even if nothing behind them (so to speak) is that catastrophic - they're still closed and locked and that's part of you that you can't access.
But is still there and is still influencing what you do, how things feel, all of it, because you don't actually get rid of things by compartmentalizing. Sometimes the influence is like having a hidden bomb or button that makes things explode that you don't even know is there; sometimes it's just something that makes everything a bit more sharp, more pointy; and sometimes it's more just like . . . . part of being human, the flexibility and imagination and change and capacity for growth, isn't there; there's a rigidity or a touchiness instead. Sometimes it just makes you literally physically ill.
A lot of the time it's a mix of all the above and even more things.
A lot of the time we're pretty resistant to decompartmentalizing because the blunt truth is, it's probably going to hurt and going to be messy. The longer we've been Very Good at Compartmentalizing and haven't learned how to deliberately then stop, open the various things and lift the lids and process shit, the more it's likely to hurt. And to be totally honest the more likely that hurt is to impact multiple areas in our lives.
And because compartmentalizing often makes it so we don't have to feel Bad Shit with any immediacy, we are often convinced that we've "handled" the emotions, when really we've just hidden them even from ourselves. And since bringing them back out and integrating them means, you know, feeling shit and that shit is bad it really doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
Masking is a kind of compartmentalization - masking in the psychological terminology for things like ASD or ADHD or mood disorders. Masking often means that we take all the things that we feel or think that don't match what we want to show on the mask and we shove them away under the rug and pretend they're not there. We compartmentalize.
Unmasking is a kind of decompartmentalizing; that's why suddenly it feels like you've constantly got less Cope, that things that "never used" to bug you are now a massive screaming problem. You're opening those doors and now you have to deal with what you used to just deny, and at the very least if you're still shoving it behind a door you're now aware there's something there.
But let's be real: you didn't get a diagnosis because everything in your life was fine, did you? You didn't start wondering and start looking at things and so on because you were actually "fine". You did it because you were exhausted or horrifically depressed or just not functioning, you were coming to the end of your rope and something was wrong and you started looking for explanations and some kind of solution.
And you had to do that because all of the shit in the compartments doesn't stay there neatly. It always leaks. It is always still part of the body and the brain that you live in.
That's just one example, though. People also compartmentalize grief; they compartmentalize around relationships, especially ones that come from very strong bonds (like parents) but are also in some way toxic (like . . . parents, often) or hard to deal with, or cause cognitive dissonance in some way. We absolutely compartmentalize around cognitive dissonances that arise from conflicting beliefs, or needs that conflict with our belief, or anything else like that.
You compartmentalize around a horrible hateful job so you don't "bring it home with you" and that's admirable and noble and maybe even necessary - but if you don't have somewhere to decompartmentalize, integrate and deal with the shit that the work is leaving you with, you will still start spilling it on your home.
Compartmentalization is a very useful skill but it's a skill that ideally you use temporarily and briefly, and one that you do have to know and learn how to turn off. Because everything you experience is a part of you and keeping it rigidly compartmentalized just means you now don't know how it's influencing you, or what fault-lines or residue or rot is building up, because you've got it over there in a box you're not looking at. Sometimes you gotta, to get through the day; but it's risky to leave it there too long and the longer it stays the higher the risk.
I compartmentalize really well. A lot of shit happened to me in 2020-2021 that I literally looked a lot of people who were worried about me in the eye about and said, "I'm not dealing with it right now. If I try to deal with it right now I will drop something important that will have horrific consequences that I don't want to deal with. It's POSSIBLE that it will creep up on me and make me fall over before I get a chance to deal with it in controlled circumstances, but it's GUARANTEED that if I do so now, it will be bad. So I am very deliberately choosing to take 'possibly getting away with it' over 'definitely fucking everything up'."
I got about a year out of that, before shit caught up with me, but by the time that year was over yeah, I was in a place where I had a lot more leeway to crash and burn for a bit than I had at the time.
But you want to make those choices on purpose; you don't want to leave yourself armed mines in your psyche ready to blow the fuck up, and you can't rely on compartmentalization to save you long term. You gotta be aware that it itself can start being a pathology that means you just don't know what you're feeling (but what you're feeling is still affecting how you act and how you interpret how other people act).
That's why it's not "oh look at this very mentally healthy person!" when a mental health professional says that, especially on your very first appointment.
(Could I wish that some of them were better at explaining all the above? Yeah but that's true across the board of just about everything. Que sera sera.)
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