My Life sucks! A general notion/expression when everything seems to be falling apart, out of our hands. When we see ourselves surrounded by the darkness and close our eyes as we lose the strength to look ahead.
How to compartmentalise your pain areas in life? How to separate the pain, trauma, people and emotions from your life and focus on what remains in your hands. I have been hovering over these thoughts over the past few days before I sat to pen down this post.
It started, when I saw a man with a fractured hand and he was reading a book, totally engrossed in it. He was calm, still and unconcerned. It got me into thinking, why do we curse our entire life when a part of our life goes wrong?
Just like, if a part of our body is fractured, we won’t say, our whole body is fractured. We will focus on the treatment of that particular injured part, take all the necessary steps to heal and overcome the suffering. Take adequate rest and bounce back to normalcy.
Why can’t we apply the same principle in our daily life? Sounds complicated? How about compartmentalising the pain areas of our lives in small boxes and segregating them? Still not clear?
We can begin with compartmentalization psychology in relationships, and here is a compartmentalize relationships example– my relationship failed, it is ok for me to go through sadness, loneliness, emptiness and even have an impact on my mental health, but does it mean my whole life is gone? Over, just like that? Maybe, I am facing a severe financial crunch and a lot depends on my earning but does it mean my life is a total waste and unworthy?
I am not asking you to dismiss your feelings, emotions and thoughts and what you’re going through, but I am exactly requesting you to own and acknowledge each and every emotion, hold them and put them each in a separate box.
I believe till the day we are alive, we have chances, choices and greater decisions to make in our lives, for our life. Every day 24 hours gets deposited in our bank to make a new choice, I know sounds cliche, read a lot, heard a lot..doesn’t sound practical enough? Try these 3 ways to compartmentalise your pain areas in life:
3 Ways to Compartmentalise Your Pain Areas in Life
Compartmentalisation is a psychological defence mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that seem to conflict are kept separated or isolated from each other in the mind. It may be a form of mild dissociation. Practising dissociation is one of the life-changing exercises I learned in my NLP course which simply propounds having a mild emotional distance or detachment from your immediate surroundings.
It might appear as an alien word and something hard to practise, but I ain’t preaching before trying it 🙂 Over the period of the past few months, I have developed a mental map of small boxes in my mind. Each box denotes major elements of my life. My relationship, my career, my family, my future, my writing passion, my fears and my dreams.
This segregation helps me to gain clarity and focus on each element based on their relevance, yes you can program your mind, it is when you pick up the right box at the right time and place the most disturbing one in the last place.
Here are three ways you can compartmentalise your pain areas in life wit daily practise:
1.) Draw boxes physically on a paper
Yes, you read it right, draw small size boxes and label them ” relationship” or “ex” or “heartache” or “future” or any emotion, fear, grief and disappointment. Remember it is your personal belonging, your small box, it can be anything, so don’t judge, just do it.
Do you know why you should do this? This simple exercise will help you to develop a co-existing space for your inner conflicts and you. The closures we talk about, the acknowledgements and validation we seek, for our thoughts and emotions, here is the first place, to begin with, through self.
2.) Isolate each conflict
Once you are done making these small boxes on your paper, segregate them, rather sub-divide them, go deeper. Suppose if you are uncertain about your future, make a big box of future and what is that worries you the most should be a little smaller box and then label it with your exact worry.
How to compartmentalise your pain areas in life? This way you isolate all your problems that have been overlapping with each other and give them a proper acknowledgement, enough to calm down your anxious mind. Just like a step by step stress reduction process.
3.) Focus on the things in your control
Once you’re done segregating, labelling, by taking the first few steps to compartmentalise your pain areas in life, sit and focus on the things which are still in your hands. An option you can still work on, I know this will not happen all of a sudden, but at least you will be able to be in a position to think clearly.
All these heavy emotions, trauma and painful events sometimes create a fog inside our head and impair our vision, we lose all the focus and energy to look at things from a different perspective.
To conclude, I would say that inner conflicts are part of our life, losing and winning some battles are again part of life, success and failures are also a part of our life, but not our entire LIFE. When a part of your life stops working, you either stop wasting your precious energy into it or nurture it, enhance it to make it workable.
You can only develop this clarity when you learn to compartmentalise your pain areas in life and take complete command of yourself. It is ok not to be ok, but not ok to lose control of your life.
Love and light
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Priyanka is a published author of 26 Days 26 Ways for a Happier you, Ardhaviram and Broken & Beautiful. An NLP practitioner and Founder of Sanity Daily, helping you prioritize your mental health. Let’s build a happy community.
