Become Self-Empowered with the Window of Tolerance
Integrate this to Build Self-Awareness
One of the first things I like to walk clients through is the Window of Tolerance.
This can help us visualize and make sense of our dysregulated states and where we are in the process. The two horizontal black bars can be considered your threshold, which makes that Window of Tolerance. This is representing what stimulus you can Tolerate without getting sent into a hyper- or hypo-arousal state of survival.
When someone goes through a traumatic experience, they can stay stuck in a state of hyper-arousal (fight/flight/freeze, racing thoughts, hypervigilance, etc), or hypo-arousal (numbness, desensitization, poor boundaries, shut down, etc.).
Sometimes our nervous systems are ping-ponging from one extreme of hyper-arousal to an extreme of hypo-arousal.
Yes, if you're getting chased by a tiger, then you want to go into hyper-arousal to run away and survive. That's the nervous system doing its job. The problem occurs when that survival response is not able to come to completion, and stays in the state of running from the tiger while we're sitting on the coach trying to enjoy a rainy afternoon.
The key is to build awareness of the survival state that you are in so that you can stop identifying with it, meet it where it is at with unconditional presence in which you have the capacity for, and nurture it with what it needs (safety). This is where SE comes into play, using certain tools of pendulation, titration, and other exercises to help activate the parasympathetic system to allow regulation and discharge to occur.
As you do this work more and more, little by little (titration), you can increase this Window of Tolerance (imagine the black lines getting farther apart), and you can have more capacity for life without going into states of survival.
The goal is to get into a state of being in which that red line is just modulating up and down within that Window without getting sent past the thresholds.
Happy healing, folks.