The Lives We Keep Apart
Why We Compartmentalize And What It Costs Us
What you might have missed:
After the Door Slams - On conflict, rupture, and repair in relationships.
The Thing That Cannot Be Said - on how keeping secrets affects us and those around.
When the COVID lockdowns hit in 2020, and uncertainty reigned over our lives, I kept my sanity by roaming the beaches and Montana De Oro with my little doggie. Nature replaced doomscrolling for enough hours every day to allow me to remember that I have long-term plans, control over my health, and lots of humans I can be in touch with to support each other. My mind created a container for the chaos and uncertainty, keeping them there so I can function, plan, explore, and even enjoy the gifts of extra time and bonding with my doggie.
It was during that time that I realized that I could have a completely different life, the life I am living now. The mind’s ability to compartmentalize is one of the oldest adaptive strategies we have. At its core, it is the psychological act of separating conflicting thoughts, emotions, identities, memories, or behaviors into distinct “mental containers” so they do not collide all at once.
It exists on a spectrum. At one end, it is a healthy emotional organization. You still need to go to work, even if you are waiting for news about a sick parent. Parents embroiled in a contentious divorce still need to care for and love their children. Trauma survivors still need to function every day. Tragedy does not stop the bills from piling up. Some emotional distancing preserves cognitive bandwidth.
So, compartmentalization helps us retain emotional resources in the face of stress and unfortunate or unavoidable situations. It helps us delay emotional processing to preserve emotional stability when needed most.
It also enables role fluidity. Humans occupy many identities. We are children and parents. We are artists, lovers, nature enthusiasts, musicians, political activists, professionals, spiritual beings, friends, athletes, dancers, etc. We can occupy some identities at the same time. Others we occupy at different times for a fuller life experience and for different opportunities to express ourselves and fulfill our potential.
At the other end of the spectrum, compartmentalization becomes fragmentation, denial, or dissociation. It can preserve functioning, protect identity, reduce cognitive overload, and help people survive impossible situations. It can also distort reality, delay grief, sustain hypocrisy, enable bad behavior, excuse hurting others, and lead to disconnection from oneself.
At around the same time in 2020, I ran into a story about a man who maintained three separate families across different locations, convincing three women that he worked for intelligence agencies like the CIA or MI5, which explained his frequent absences and secrecy. He managed to father 13 children and was a convicted pedophile with a long history of fraud and manipulation.
The deception unraveled when one of his wives, Mary Turner Thompson, received a phone call from one of his other wives, saying, “I am the other, Mrs. Thompson.”
While this example may seem extreme, and while most people are not psychopaths, there are still plenty of unfaithful spouses out there, maintaining extramarital relationships sometimes for years. There are also people embezzling money and committing various crimes with otherwise perfectly normal lives.
What’s striking in many of these cases is that the person often does not experience themselves as “living a lie” in the simple way outsiders imagine. They can psychologically “enter” one compartment fully while temporarily suppressing the existence of the others, sustaining double lives for years.
