The power of Partitioning

Partitioning: a valuable tool and a recent discovery for me.

I’m the kind of person who needs others to function well but at the same time, I am someone who also needs enough distance from others in order to function properly. So there might be a paradox, or not. I believe the contradiction between my endless struggle to surround myself with stimulating people (on all planes, be in mental, emotional or physical) and my perpetual urge to have distance from these exact same individuals, resides on top of this relatively-new concept: partitioning.

I might mistake this for building limits and enforcing them in times of need, but I think partitioning is a different tool in the toolbox: throughout life, we discover new people, almost on a constant basis. From time to time, we get to interact with new individuals, who might possess something that we haven’t met until then: a new way of seeing things, a powerful ability to understand and decipher us, maybe even a strong energy that offers confirmation and validation on who we are or who we can become. And this enhancement, this addition to your already-established life script, can bring certain imbalances or self-inflicting emotions. We might be tempted to think “why do I feel this?” or “I’m not allowed to feel this way, because X reason” and this is where we might start losing instead of gaining new experiences.

Enter the powerful concept of partitioning: the moment we feel freshly stimulated by someone or something, we should study the matter as objectively as we can and try to place it in one of the three dimensions that I feel are appropriate for classification: mental stimulation, emotional stimulation, physical stimulation.

Of course, these are, most of the times, intertwined. Just like we cannot precisely say what type of personality someone is, with an 100% exclusion to traits that belong to other opposing personalities.

But we can certainly see and understand what is the most dominant type of stimulation we perceive? Is it mental and are we being provoked to think more and to create more mental processes? Is it emotional and we feel a river of creativity and inspiration when and after we interact with this new source of stimulation? Or is it physical and all we can feel is our body screaming for reciprocity?

In a certain sense, things can get blurry and they have the potential to do so. (There is a very big but…)

BUT in order to understand and deal with this new stimulation, we can use the information we already possesses: how does this new stimulation compare to what we already have in that sense? How does this new stimulation enhance what is already available for me right now? Is this new thing adding something to my life or does this have the potential to take things away?

Once we answer these questions, we can partition things better. And once we do that, we might get rid of initial conflicts, we might feel better about ourselves and we might enjoy this new stimulation without having the sense that it can be a threat. When we get to see things clearer, we can be able to balance between closeness and distance with the people who offer us stimulation.