The Window of Tolerance

I've been contemplating making this graphic since January. But I had no idea it was going to be so pertaining to these times. I have had a lot of interest in the window of tolerance and how it relates to boundaries and agency and therefore to trauma recovery. I made the relationship in between these 3 pieces (boundaries, agency and the window of tolerance) more recently while in a Somatic Experiencing training about schock trauma, near death experiences, perinatal trauma and global high intensity activation (GHIA), where I realized my window of tolerance around the subject covered was much more narrow than I imagined, but I have lived within a false window much bigger, as a compensation strategy.

Nausea was one of the signals during that training that would let me know (and would persist throughout the day) that I was going beyond my window. It is fascinating to realize how the signals from our nervous system are exquisitely fine-tuned and precise. Once I figured that the nausea wasn't going to dissipate, I decided to utilize boundaries and exercise my agency around how much material I was going to be able to tolerate and digest. Since I have experienced shock, developmental and GHIA trauma from the age of 6 months until my late teens, I can understand well what works and what doesn't within this realm. 

Why am I telling you this? Because that training made me realize that the subject of boundaries is crucial to understanding, returning and eventually expanding our window of tolerance without slipping unconscioulsy into a false one. During the training I started exercising the boundary of saying no and saying no grew my capacity to exercise something that shock trauma and global high intensity activation have in common: the theme of inescapability and lack of agency. Saying no and creating space for our agency, our ability to make decisions, moment to moment, is a very important step when dealing with this kind of trauma.

But also, here we are, experiencing many of the same elements that I already named. In my opinion, we have been living globally within a false window of tolerance forced by capitalism, of constant growth and achievement, of stress and overschedules, of consumption of indigestible and unprocessable experiences and foods, many times not being able to return to our original window of tolerance, adding to that, and because of birth trauma, many of us haven't even had the somatic experience of our real window yet. We have grown beyond the biological capacity and sustainability of the Earth to recover and renew, and now we are forced to stop, to move way back, to exercise boundaries with our way of living and with each other. I feel that these exercises of boundaries are also because we need to return to our real window of tolerance and step back from our false aggrandized one.

I feel we have the right to be feeling off and disoriented right now. Bringing our window from the false place towards our real tolerance level feels very disorienting and also very contracting, since we overstretched our capacities, so a first step I have been suggesting to my clients and have heard other colleagues talk about is orienting to safety with the present. We want to use as many senses as possible to orient: see, feel, sense, hear, taste, etc.

Our nervous system doesn’t know what’s going on in these circumstances, because it is much older and slower than our new logic brain, and it’s not picking up on the safety cues as fast as our newer brain wants it to, it’s still protecting us from prehistoric threats, battling with imaginary saber tooth tigers, and trying to keep things as predictable and as safe as possible. But when we watch or read about the news, things are not predictable and don’t feel ‘safe’ in the current times. The news and media in general are not the place to orient ourselves to safety. The first choice of our nervous system is always to socialize, but if socializing seems dangerous or ‘infectious’, the next step is going be fight, flight, appease, or conserve energy via shut down. Notice how any of those choices is becoming the normative in your system after you watch or read the news.

Also, an easy step to recover post watching is to first normalize the experience, igniting our curiosity about our "state". Curiosity is not about "fixing" our state, but instead, it's a way of connecting with whatever is up, without making it "wrong". Also, curiosity is a great place to notice our window of tolerance, because it will reveal some of the subtle signals of it moving out further than our system's tolerance, which could be represented by sleepiness, anxiety, appeasing behavior, nausea, sympathetic responses of fight/flight, etc.

Also, remember that boundaries are wonderful containers of safety, that they allow for our energy and nervous system state to return to a regulated place that feels digestible and settling. After a while we can work on building resilience to tolerate a little more, titrating our way. Patience is crucial during that phase. Any signals that reveal that our window is off, mean we went too far again and we need to return back to our current real window. This is the way to expand our window. A little goes a long way.