[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing fine really.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got work handle the relationship seems okay You've moved on from that fight or that disappointment and you're not thinking about it anymore Except you kind of are you just don't know yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what compartmentalization does It doesn't actually clear your feelings away it boxes them up and slides them onto a shelf So you can keep functioning and that shelf it fills up
[SPEAKER_00]: So today, we're going to talk about what compartmentalization actually is, why your brain learned to do it, what it costs you in relationships, and what you can do to start clearing those shelves before they collapse, so stay tuned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Relationships Made Easy Podcast, where I give you the exact steps to create connection, joy, and ease in all your relationships, whether it's with your partner, your family, your friends, or most importantly yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Dr. Abby Medkath, psychologist, bestselling author, TEDx, speaker, and the bossy Jewish mom you didn't know you needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each week you'll get no nonsense, research back strategies, serve with humor and love, so you can stop second-guessing yourself and start having the relationships you deserve.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll always leave knowing exactly what to say and do to shift your relationships for the better.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's get to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, I'm glad you're here back at the podcast with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your host, Dr. Abbey Metcalf.
[SPEAKER_00]: And compartmentalization is one of those things I talk about so much with my clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once again, I'm kind of amazed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've been doing this, it'll be eight years in July.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't done this topic yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the one thing with psychology.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it's never ending our human problems, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, so what is compartmentalization exactly?
[SPEAKER_00]: What am I talking about?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's basically compartmentalization is a psychological defense mechanism where you mentally separate conflicting thoughts, emotions or experiences,
[SPEAKER_00]: from each other, so they don't interfere with your ability to function.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's basically what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in plain terms, it's something, something happens that brings up a feeling, your brain decides that feeling isn't convenient right now, and it gets filed away, out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except it's not really.
[SPEAKER_00]: The term has its roots in really it's psychoanalytic theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sigmund Freud originally described it as one of the ego's defense mechanisms.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a way of keeping incompatible ideas from creating internal conflict basically.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, it's been expanded upon over the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: George Villent, I'll say his name right in the notes in the blog, but he did a lot of research on psychological defense mechanisms, and he classified compartmentalization as an intermediate level defense, meaning it's more adaptive than say denial, but it's also not the most mature
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's what makes compartmentalization tricky.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might not know what's happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like deciding to table a conversation for later.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your nervous system quietly sealing a box before your conscious mind even registers there was something in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might feel vaguely off little flat, maybe irritable for no clear reason, disconnected during
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a sensation of the shelf being full.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always talk about it like putting it in a box on a shelf.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's probably the metaphor I'll use a lot today.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does your brain learn to compartmentalize?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the honest answer, I guess, is that compartmentalization usually develops because at some point it worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: It helped you survive something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Children who grow up in environments where emotional expression isn't safe, where feelings are dismissed or ridiculed or punished, they really learn very early to split their inner experience off from their outer presentation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You learn to go numb on the outside while something is very much alive on the inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that split,
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I feel, you know, feels like control and when you're eight years old and the adults around you aren't emotionally available or actively threatening, uh, you know, that kind of control is genuinely protective, but
[SPEAKER_00]: compartmentalization, it doesn't only come from difficult childhoods.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might have developed it in response to a high-pressure career where you're showing a motion felt like a weakness or a past relationship where your feelings were consistently used against you or a family culture where stoicism, you know, maybe was really prized and sensitivity was seen as a flaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it can really just be the cumulative experience of being let down enough times that you decided consciously or not that feelings weren't worth having.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's the research by there's an emotion theorist named James Gross.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's done a lot of research on emotion regulation strategies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his research shows that suppression, which is basically closely related to compartmentalization.
[SPEAKER_00]: It really, that it becomes an ingrained habit when it's used repeatedly and rewarded.
[SPEAKER_00]: So your brain learns, um, hey, feelings create problems, not feeling fewer problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So over time, that sort of equation becomes automatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think here's the part that surprises a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the most high-functioning capable, seemingly together people, are the most skilled compartmentalizers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ability to set aside emotional distress and keep moving is probably what got you through hard things.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem isn't the original skill.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is when it becomes the only tool you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let me go somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to go there, but I'm not.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how does it show up in your relationships?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, you know, this is relationships made easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where it gets costly.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where you all pay in the paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because in relationships, the things you box up, don't disappear.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just accumulate until they kind of come out sideways.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what usually happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what compartmentalization can look like in practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say your partner says something that stings.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't address it in the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, you generally feel like you've let it go.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a few weeks later, maybe you notice your colder with them, less interested in closeness, and you're not connecting the two things, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good example.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's something I just said to apply in the other day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another example, you're going through something hard at work or with a family member and you decide not to bring it into the relationship because you don't want to burden your partner, you know, or because it doesn't feel related or because you just don't want to deal with it, right, but you show up emotionally absent your partner can feel that something is off, but doesn't know what and so that usually creates a lot of problems because you're not being transparent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, you're being honest, there's nothing between nothing you've done, you're fine, we're fine, you know what I mean, just something at work, maybe you're even saying, but you're not sharing.
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to think of examples in different areas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, you and a friend have a conflict that never really gets resolved, let's say.
[SPEAKER_00]: You tell yourself it's fine, you've moved on, but you noticed you're less willing to be vulnerable with them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You keep things lighter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the friendship is going to slowly get what's like hollow, I guess, for lack of a shallow hollow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you end a relationship or experience some major loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: You process it just enough to function and then again, you put the rest away, it's on that shelf.
[SPEAKER_00]: Months, years later, those unfiled feelings show up in a new relationship as,
[SPEAKER_00]: disproportionate reactions, difficulty trusting, maybe a vague inability to fully commit those situationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so there's been a lot of research on emotional suppression and relationship quality, and there's a wonderful psychologist, Sonia, oh, I always say her name wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: LAYU, but more mersky, it's like L-Y-U-B-O-M-I-R-S-K-Y.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm assuming she's one of my people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're Polish.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm assuming that could be wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, she's got a ton of research on this, and she found that, and again, I'll link to it in
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever I say the research or anything else for the new people it's always there's a full blog post on my website related to this episode just go find it or below the video on YouTube you can find all the research and look for yourself and see all the names I've said wrong and I'm sure that I'll make you very happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also the free downloads and all that stuff is there.
[SPEAKER_00]: which I'll talk about later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got a good one for today, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: So her research found that people who habitually suppress emotion, report lower relationships satisfaction overall, and less emotional intimacy over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are partners, notice it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a partners described feeling shut out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, they can't quite reach the other person.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm saying all this because, again, you're cost to your relationships,
[SPEAKER_00]: for compartmentalizing is high.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are paying a premium.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's really happening neurologically, I think is worth understanding here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know me with the biology of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like, you know, you're a pre-final cortex, again, that part of your brain that handles, you know, rational thought and decision-making.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can temporarily override your limbic systems emotional responses.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, your fear systems emotional responses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So compartmentalization essentially asks your prefall cortex to keep overwriting.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the limbic system, but your other doesn't forget, it just keeps generating the emotional signal, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Your body keeps trying to process what your mind has decided to skip.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that creates kind of a low grade internal, I'm gonna call it like a static that you probably experience this chronic tension, emotional numbness, anxiety without a clear source, general sense of disconnection from your own life, sound familiar, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a few ways I want to go here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to go here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's the difference between healthy compartmentalization and chronic suppression?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you can, again, some compartmentalization is important and needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a really, a genuinely important distinction and it's worth making here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be really clear about it because compartmentalization isn't inherently pathological, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There are situations where temporarily setting something aside is adaptive, even smart.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a first responder who needs to stay focused in a crisis, you need to table your emotional response until the emergency is over, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're in a high stakes presentation and your mind wants to
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... chew on an argument you had that morning right setting aside temporarily sensible if you're in the middle of a difficult conversation and you need a moment to regulate before responding that's healthy emotional management okay and it's really a kind of suppression or uh... compartmentalization the difference between adaptive compartmentalization and the kind that costs you
[SPEAKER_00]: really comes down to, I think, two things, the intentionality and completion, and really those two.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, adaptive.
[SPEAKER_00]: compartmentalization is intentional.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know you're setting something aside.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a plan to return to it and you actually do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The box gets reopened.
[SPEAKER_00]: You stick it on the shelf, but it's like a low shelf that you can see and you know it's there and you put it there very purposefully.
[SPEAKER_00]: The feelings, they all get processed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You integrate the experience, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Chronic compartmentalization is unconscious.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know you're doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no plan to return.
[SPEAKER_00]: The box stays sealed and the shelf keeps filling up.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of really good research by a psychologist named George Banano, who on resilience and emotional processing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he found that people who demonstrate genuine resilience aren't people who feel less.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people who process emotions more efficiently and flexibly.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't avoid the feeling, but they do move through it more quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a very different thing from like sealing it off, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about the signs you might be compartmentalizing without knowing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to give you four or five, probably five.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can think of five.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because this defense mechanism often operates sort of below, again, conscious awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it really helps to know what to look for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, these aren't character flaws.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are patterns I want you to notice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one would be you pride yourself on not letting things affect you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see emotional reactions as something to manage or to overcome, but not something to listen to, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, check your toxic masculinity or whatever of the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two, you regularly feel disconnected and close relationships, even when things are technically fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you're present, but not quite there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're probably a compartmentalizer.
[SPEAKER_00]: three, you have how I want to say this.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have disproportionate reactions to small things, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the emotional content that got boxed up, like I said, doesn't disappear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It usually comes out through something unrelated that kind of finally breaks the seal, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're, quote unquote, overreacting quite a bit, that's probably this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fourth thing I see, or is
[SPEAKER_00]: symptom you might have compartmentalization is you find it hard to identify what you're feeling when somebody asks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because there's nothing there, but because you've gotten so good at redirecting your attention away from your inner experience, it's like you've just lost easy access to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't even access it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the fifth thing I see a lot is you tend to move on very quickly from difficult experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, not because you're generally a piece, but because
[SPEAKER_00]: efficiently filed the experience and just gone right back to functioning.
[SPEAKER_00]: So any of those and trust me, these all describe me in my former life and probably to some degree now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I relate to compartmentalization a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one of my favorite things to do and I still do it to a point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously if I'm talking to a client and they say something that
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, triggers an old feeling or so I know I notice that see it's healthy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I notice it and like, oh, this reminds me of my stuff with my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to project my own feelings on my client.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to go box this up right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to come back to it and process it different later, differently later.
[SPEAKER_00]: See what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, can be very healthy to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just you got to be careful of not having it be all you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, if you do it in your job, it doesn't mean that you want to do it at home all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, sometimes, you know, if my, if I have a, if one of my kids triggers me or my partner triggers me, again, it's good in the moment to notice and file it and try to stay really present and then come back to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so let's talk about that cost again in relationships because the costs are real from compartmentalizing and they're, I want to name them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first big cost, I think, is intimacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Genuine closeness requires that you be knowable.
[SPEAKER_00]: When significant parts of your inner life are boxed away, your partner or your friend or your family member, it's connecting with a curated vision of you, a version of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, a vision too, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a curated version.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not all of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a gap.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gap even when it's invisible,
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing that really costs you is trust.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you don't share what's actually going on with you, others can feel that something is being withheld.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they can't name what it is, but the sense that they don't have the full picture is gonna erode trust over time, even when you're not doing anything deliberately deceptive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I even then, and remember the 40 bits versus the 11 million bits so I talk about all the time, that's what this is about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is your own emotional health.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a big cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's been a lot of research into this.
[SPEAKER_00]: James Penabakers done a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll definitely link to his stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's really a pioneer in the study of emotional expression.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his research shows, I mean, consistently, that's suppressing emotional experience has physiological costs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of chronic suppression, feelings like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: associated with increased stress hormones, you know, all the cortisol and adrenaline, all that could stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's associated with a compromised immune system, immune function, higher rates of depression, higher rates of anxiety, the feelings don't go away when you box them up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They go into your body.
[SPEAKER_00]: It all, another cost is your relationships ability to repair.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, repair after a conflict in your relationship and you're going to have conflicts.
[SPEAKER_00]: It requires that both people can acknowledge, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Really truly acknowledge what happened and how it landed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you've filed the hurt away before that can happen, you're not going to have repair.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might act like everything's fine, but you're a little less open than you were before a little more defended and so there's like a pattern that accumulates and that's a big problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, what's another, you know, your own sense of self and I think this is subtle but significant when when you chronically, chronically bypass your own emotional experience, you lose contact with your own, with yourself, with your own preferences, your needs, your values, you become very good at functioning and less sure of what you actually feel or want and that's a form of self disconnection that makes
[SPEAKER_00]: healthy relationships harder to build and sustain.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean you don't have any.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just means it's harder.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do you start opening the boxes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to undo years of compartmentalization with obviously one conversation or one journaling session, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can start and the most important starting point, I think, is awareness, which is exactly
[SPEAKER_00]: why I created the download I did today, by the way, but I'll get to that in a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, but let's talk about five tools to begin the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, five tools to begin this work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two number one is to practice noticing not analyzing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's two number one.
[SPEAKER_00]: When something
[SPEAKER_00]: happens that might carry a emotional content.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to pause and ask, what am I noticing in my body right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not what do I think about this?
[SPEAKER_00]: But what am I noticing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have tightness in your chest?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a heaviness, a vague restlessness?
[SPEAKER_00]: your jaw tight, you know, what is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Your body is often several steps ahead of your conscious awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So getting curious about those physical signals is such a good starting point for accessing what's been boxed up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, this is where mindfulness becomes genuinely useful, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again, I'm not gonna stop saying mindfulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: It won't it fits, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't just make up things so that mindfulness fits the other way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, mindfulness isn't about clearing your mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about learning to stay present with your experience, non-judge mentally, instead of redirecting away from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a skill.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a foundational skill, and you're going to need it for all these tools.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tool number two is to, I don't want to say this one, us schedule a emotional processing time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to say it that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: If adaptive compartmentalization involves intentionally setting something aside and returning to it, you can build that return into your day deliberately.
[SPEAKER_00]: So after a difficult conversation or after a really hard day, or any experience that you had where there was, again, emotional content, where you didn't have space to process it in the moment,
[SPEAKER_00]: Give yourself 15 to 20 minutes to sit with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to solve anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not about problem solving.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just to let it surface.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, what happened?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did I feel?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's still unresolved?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are my caring resentment?
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I still feeling frustrated?
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I feeling sad?
[SPEAKER_00]: Numb?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is going on here?
[SPEAKER_00]: The tool number three is something I've talked about before, the five and reset, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a framework.
[SPEAKER_00]: I use it with clients all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've talked about on social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: The five and reset, you can call it whatever you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, I built it directly on Matthew Lieberman's research.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's at UCLA.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which found that simply naming a feeling reduces activation in the amygdala and engages your prefrontal cortex, right, turns off your fear brain turns on your thinking brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: I started there and then I used everyone else's research to keep going with.
[SPEAKER_00]: every end is backed by research of some kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: So because naming alone, I think isn't enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: I take you into it a sequence that I want you to use in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So basically it's this.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to name it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, identify this feeling as specifically as you can.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just I feel bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Try to get, right, I feel hurt, I feel dismissed, I have a, I feel anxious about what this means.
[SPEAKER_00]: The, the more precise you are, the more your nervous system registers that the feeling's been seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that registration.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it starts to interrupt the current part mentalization that kind of reflects you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so that's one, you want to name it, you're named the feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And remember, it's not, I'm anxious, it's unfeeling anxious, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you also want to do a little self distancing there, which is more research.
[SPEAKER_00]: then you want to neutralize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the one people usually miss and why you have problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do something physical to bring your nervous system back on towards baseline.
[SPEAKER_00]: My double inhale, you know is my favorite, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You inhale all the way through your nose.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you get to the very top, you take another sip of air at the very top and a long slow exhale through your mouth, it's, there's no, I don't think there's anything faster than that and easier to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one's gonna see you do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cold water on your wrists or on the back or something cold on the back of your neck, a few slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale, press your feet into the floor, all the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not suppressing the feeling you're making enough room in your nervous system to stay with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're getting out of the trigger, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you name it, you neutralize it, then you normalize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is from the self-compassion research.
[SPEAKER_00]: You remind yourself that what you're feeling makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's normal to feel hurt when someone dismisses what I said.
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes sense that I feel anxious here, given what I've been through in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just makes you're not being too sensitive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And normalization doesn't mean you stay in the feeling forever, it means you stop fighting the fact that the feeling's there and you have some compassion for having it, that you don't beat yourself up about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you narrate it, and this is your contour reframe, and it's really working on two levels at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, you remind yourself that the feeling is safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can feel this without just drawing me or this relationship, right, whatever that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you remind yourself that the habit made sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned to put feelings away because at some point, that's what kept me safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was smart then, I don't need to do it right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both things are true simultaneously, of course, you're not weak for having a reflex, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're not stuck with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what's good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're going to reframe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to, like, constantly reframe.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a, this is an,
[SPEAKER_00]: a challenge, not an obstacle that even that is a really quick, a life is happening for me, not to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are all quick cognitive reframes in a moment so that you can narrate it differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: The store you're telling yourself in your head needs to shift.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally, you navigate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now you're from a regulated place, you can ask, okay, what do I want to do about this?
[SPEAKER_00]: You might decide to bring it up with the other person.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might decide to sit with a little longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could journal, you could go for a walk, you could call a friend, let it move through you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point is that you're choosing from a place of awareness and self-regulation and self-compassion and understanding and point of view, not finally at a way by default.
[SPEAKER_00]: So navigating is really about intentional action, sorry, navigating is really about intentional action, not reactive suppression, that's really what we're.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's what I want to say about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it doesn't always feel natural to do these five ends at first, you know, you're kind of asking your brain to pause a reflex that's had years to solidify in you, but I'm telling you that each time you practice it, it gets faster and the whole sequence becomes second nature after a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do it so quickly now, I don't even notice.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a therapy to go bundle for this episode, and there's a dedicated practice sheet for the five ends in there, but again, if you want to work through the real example, I give you a real example on all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tool number four, I'm giving you lots of good tools today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on, come on people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is to build a tolerance for emotional discomfort in small doses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you've been compartmentalizing for a long time,
[SPEAKER_00]: Feelings are probably going to feel genuinely threatening to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So an opening all those little boxes on the shelf can feel really destabilizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a sign to go slowly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a sign to stop a sign to slow down.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're essentially teaching your nervous system that feelings are survival ball, which it probably didn't fully learn yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you want to start small.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let yourself feel something uncomfortable for 60 seconds without doing anything about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: then 90 seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're building a tolerance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And over time, that capacity does really grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a muscle.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets better.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've talked a lot about the nervous systems role in how we, you know, like in all of this, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm trying to think, there's any way.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a ton of episodes on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll link to them now that I'm saying all this on the nervous system or regulating your nervous
[SPEAKER_00]: Two number five is to practice, um, like, one of my one I call it, like chosen vulnerability in, but you want to do it in low stakes moments.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you don't have to start by opening your biggest boxes, I guess is what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Start with something small.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell a friend you were actually bothered by something that happened instead of saying it was fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let your partner know you're going through something at work, even if you don't go into every detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mention that you're feeling a little anxious today instead of performing, you know, being performative and everything's okay, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like small acts of disclosure because they're going to train your nervous system that's that sharing what's actually there doesn't destroy relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually often strengthens them.
[SPEAKER_00]: People feel closer to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so I'm gonna wrap up and then we'll talk about all the goodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so again, what do I want to, I want to say this, compartmentalization is not a character flaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a learn strategy and it's served to purpose at some point in your life, for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what protected you in, you know, one context,
[SPEAKER_00]: can really limit you in another.
[SPEAKER_00]: When those boxes multiply and the shelf gets really full, the cost shows up in your relationships as distance, as disconnection, a vague sense that you're not quite present for your own life.
[SPEAKER_00]: it's it's just such a high cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the goal here isn't to feel everything all the time or to never set something aside when the moment calls for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The goal is to be in a relationship with your own inner life, to know what's on the shelf, and to have the capacity to return to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what makes real intimacy possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just with other people, but with yourself, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the free download for today is called Am I compartmentalizing?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a self-assessment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I try to do a lot of self-assessments with these so that you can even see if you want to
[SPEAKER_00]: do more work, you know, because the therapy to go bundle does cost money.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so before you, you know, you, sometimes, sometimes you know, you're like, I know I need that bundle.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Abby has been, I've been nodding my head for the last half hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, if you, if you are not sure a self-assessment's a great way to start, it's like a quick scorecard.
[SPEAKER_00]: It helps you see where compartmentalization is showing up in your relationships and your inner life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know where to start, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if you want to go deeper, I have a therapy to go bundle for this episode, all the therapy to go bundles or $10.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all include that free download so you don't have to download twice, but you can if you want, you know, you can get it first to see if you want to get the therapy to go bundle.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like,
[SPEAKER_00]: When you shut down a toolkit for compartmentalizers, that's what I call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in there, obviously, I have tools to help you identify your emotional boxes, to start processing, what's been shelved, how to practice vulnerability and small doses.
[SPEAKER_00]: build a relationship with your own inner experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't require you to perform all the time, you know, to be okay all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot in the bundle and there'll be an exact thing there.
[SPEAKER_00]: A little list if you choose to get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, it's 10 bucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can't afford therapy or can't access therapy, it's a lot cheaper than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a way of really doing the real work going deeper.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always give it away, as you know, I gave you a bunch of tools, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just if you want to go farther, if you need your hand held a little more, if you really want to go deeper, it's a place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you have a therapist, I have a lot of people who download the bundles and say that they do it with the therapist, so you can do it that way too, but either way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is it for today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you as always for sending an ideas for the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I do them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, that's where I get all the brilliant ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're from you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, and it really helps me know that I'm on target and giving you something that's going to be useful because otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?
[SPEAKER_00]: If no one told you this week, oh, you're loved, you're loveable, you deserve love, you deserve to have all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're gonna need to do the work to get there, but it's so worth it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so, so, so worth it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really hope you, you know, don't just listen, but,
[SPEAKER_00]: Take the action steps and go the, and go, you know, start doing and then practicing them and really change your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I'm not up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is truly the highlight of my week all the time when I get to record the podcast and spend time with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, have a wonderful week and we'll talk real soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending time with me today.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're loving what you're learning here, come join my one love collective.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my private community.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be take these conversations even deeper.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll get a ton of bonus content.
[SPEAKER_00]: Live Q&As with me, guided visualizations, journaling prompts, scripts,
[SPEAKER_00]: and an incredible community of like-minded people ready to support you as you create more ease and joy in all your relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all waiting for you at AppieMedKev.com or right on Substack.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you next week.