The Window of Tolerance is a visual and metaphorical map of your nervous system. It helps you know when you are triggered and lose your emotional balance, causing painful or frightened responses, or, paradoxically, no response at all. When triggered, we can feel too much (hyper-arousal) which rouses us to action, or too little/numb (hypo-arousal) which allows us to opt out of, or escape perceived discomfort.
Frequent and/or intense trouble with emotional regulation can be the result of past trauma resulting in problems in three areas:
hyperarousal—a heightened state of anxiety
numbing—feeling too little instead of too much
re-experiencing—best understood as emotional or sensory flashbacks that make present events feel like past trauma
So staying within the Window of Tolerance involves managing our painful emotions and the self-protective defenses erected against them.
Certainly, there are times when going out the window is a necessary and appropriate response to external stimuli. An example might be getting yelled at by an intimidating person, or experiencing a near car accident, both of which require that we react quickly—perhaps causing us to go out the window up, and then perhaps down to hypo-arousal to recover from a sudden energetic impulse to fight or flee (always our first choices) or freeze. However, things become confusing when our subjective, often automatic, interpretations to benign events send us flying out of the window of tolerance, up or down.
To add complexity to complexity, sensory stimuli that are linked with prior threats or unsafe people can also prompt dysregulation, a process which may be conscious or unconscious. This includes smells, tastes, textures, auditory cues, or visual images—like the smell of a particular cologne (or alcohol, or grilled onions) or the sound of a rainstorm (or a crackling fire or wind chimes). The everyday-ness of triggers is part of what makes them so difficult to track.
The fact that triggering present-day events and sensations can evoke past feelings so quickly and invisibly further makes their connection to here-and-now events seem reasonable and appropriate. It follows, then, that being familiar with past events, experienced as threatening to our safety or the safety of those around us, might help us to more consciously sort out why we seem to lose our cool in certain situations. A response that is too big or no reaction at all might be because our current situation involves themes that have been difficult for us in the past.
Past threat or trauma that has not been acknowledged or not worked through—intellectually, emotionally, physically—remains unprocessed. It cannot, therefore, be fully held in consciousness. This can include neglect, mistreatment, or abandonment; rejection, loss, or separation; disapproval or disappointment in or from a significant other.
Two aspects of our neurology are particularly interesting when thinking about intrusions from the past coming into the present. The first is that billions of neural networks in our brains, that process sensory input and make sense of the world, are continually finding new pathways in response to novel experiences. They can also become wired together in sequences that repeatedly fire together, and can become even more rigidly connected if they:
objectively involve death, serious injury, or threat to physical integrity, or
subjectively involve feelings of helplessness or fear.
The second quick dip into our brains is that traumatic events are often improperly stored. The part of the brain that makes short-term occurrences become stored as long-term memory is pruned to provide more capacity in the limbic fight-flight-freeze part of the brain. They can, therefore, pop up and hijack our nervous systems.
(Also see: The Brain and Trauma)
So how can we better protect ourselves when we are losing our footing in a wave of emotion? When we need it most, how can we dig in and stay on-shore, grounded in the hope that we can access our emotional intelligence and remain reasonable at the toughest moments? We know that the neural networks in our brains can also continually find and create new pathways through novel experiences. Another key ingredient is the body.
Keep reading about the body, and more, in our next gobl: Staying in the Window: Emotional Flexibility and Acceptance
