The Interconnected Life

I recall the first time I heard the word "compartmentalize." I was in high school, dealing with some kind of romantic drama I'm sure, and struggling to keep up in one of my classes. I preferred to think about whatever personal misery I'd been feeling (because teenage hormones, obviously) in lieu of learning anything at all.

And then I was introduced to emotional compartmentalization. 

It was described to me as the recognition, and subsequent action, of when and where it is appropriate to deal with difficult emotions. If I was going to get out of Algebra 2 Trig alive, I needed to learn how to "turn off" the emo dialogue within. "Turn it off," they said, "and deal with it at a more appropriate time."

It wasn't until recently that I realized how damaging this definition of compartmentalization can be.

Listen, I'm all about maintaining overwhelming emotions so they don't get in the way of the rest of your life. But "turning them off" to "deal with them later" doesn't fly. When a person learns that he or she can turn off a feeling, it becomes a pattern. Why deal with it later when it can perpetually stay turned off?  👈 The problem with this line of thinking is the assumption that feelings can be turned off, at all. They can't! They can simply be "pushed down."

When we confuse a "pushed down" feeling for being "turned off," it destroys the rest of our lives for the simple reason that the pushed down feeling finds all kinds of ways to spring back up.

Think of the dad who comes home, tries to "leave work at the office," but finds himself decompressing with a cold beer in front of the TV instead of enjoying the few hours he has with his kids before bed. This behavior isn't a sign that he's processing anything—it's a sign that he's actively trying NOT to process. He's trying to "turn it off." And that leads to a distraction-based style of rumination.

Compartmentalization at this level is not fully possible because life is interconnected.

Of course your bad day at work is going to effect how you relate to your family in the evening! No matter how you spin it, it will. Suppressing the feeling is just as damaging as lashing out. In fact, they're essentially the same because they're centered on avoidance.

Acknowledging the interconnectedness of everything is the only way to alleviate overwhelming emotions.

If the same dad, before entering the house, were self-aware enough to recognize his frustrations about work, name them, and then acknowledge how that frustration might come into play with his kids, he'd be walking through the front door with intention.

"I'm stressed, that's okay, and to help alleviate this stress I'm going to let my kids' energy fill me up with joy because it's the part of my life I enjoy." That kind of self-awareness fueled intention allows the father to 'compartmentalize' in a way that doesn't turn anything off, but invites something else in.

Similarly, if I had entered my Algebra class thinking, "I am sad, that's okay, and while I know I need to process this feeling of rejection, I also know that learning a new skill makes me feel smart, empowered, and ultimately more confident. So I'm going to prioritize that as a method to help heal the sad feelings," I would probably have learned a hell of a lot more in class.

That's compartmentalization with intention.

I experienced this misinterpretation of compartmentalization while working at various startups, too. As soon as a company starts to gain traction—or grow quickly—they compartmentalize their departments out of necessity. Each department isolates itself in order to grow bigger, faster. They stop communicating with partner departments because there just aren't enough hours in the day. This always leads to trouble, dissatisfaction, and missed opportunities.

If only there were a simple way to link these departments more cohesively, without succumbing to long-winded meetings that are intended to 'catch everybody up to speed,' growth would be more fluid and symbiotic. The problem with those meetings is that they often create more roadblocks to success. As departments watch each other blossom, they begin to confuse these check-ins with a sort of competition for company resources.

Management falls into the same destructive pattern, often providing resources only to the teams that seem to be making the quickest growth, or who are most directly affecting company profits.

But no single team can sustain its growth without the others!

The company is an organism—if Marketing takes over and the whole PR team is laid off to cut costs, eventually a select group of people within Marketing will inevitably have to take on various PR roles to make up for the loss. Those people will become frustrated, overworked, and resentful.

Perspective that everything is interconnected allows each department to work autonomously, but with an intention to support the other departments, as well.

Next time you consider compartmentalizing or "turning off" your feelings, simply notice how they engage with your new environment. Can one help strengthen the other?

Acknowledging that your feelings exist, that they affect you, and that they are independent from and yet might very well impact your environment is the best way to avoid "bringing your baggage" into a situation—because it's not baggage if you're wearing it with confidence.

This is also called self-awareness. And it's a major component to accessing a felt sensation of happiness.

If you're interested in diving in deeper to this philosophy of interrelatedness, I suggest watching In Search of Balance and Inn Saei, both streaming on Netflix. They both touch on the importance of viewing the world as a complex but deeply connected system, and not simply a structure composed of separate parts.

You are a deeply complex being. And that's okay. Own it.