In my last blog, I wrote about Making Sense – the IPNB process of linking past, present, and potential future into a coherent narrative. I wrote about standing in front of the house where I was born, in Washington, D.C., where I had lived from birth to age seven. And I wrote about how, instead of being pulled back or destabilized, I was fully present. Clear…joyful.
What made that possible?
One thing that really helped – and continues to help me -is The Window of Tolerance.
The Window of Tolerance – another IPNB concept – describes a span of tolerable levels of arousal – an internal space in which stimuli, whether coming from inside us or outside us, can be processed in a flexible, adaptive manner. When we are within our window, we can know, think, remember, and respond. When we are pushed out of it either into chaos – flooded with emotion and sensation – or rigidity – shut down and disconnected – we lose our ability to remain flexible and adaptive, at which point, we’re no longer thriving…we’re surviving.
For much of my life, my window was very, very narrow.
That’s an impact of DID. The fragmentation of self-states, memory barriers, and the disconnection I described in my last blog – all of it was my mind’s way of keeping overwhelming experience outside of my window that had no capacity to hold it. Childhood experience that would flood me, destabilize me, shatter me – was held elsewhere…in other states of mind. Protected within walls I couldn’t see or cross.
I didn’t know about the window – I only knew I couldn’t function well – if at all – in certain moments, certain conversations, certain memories, certain sensations… and I didn’t know why.
Feeling crazy.
Learning about the Window of Tolerance – having a name, a map, a way to understand what was happening in my nervous system was a pivotal step towards healing. As a therapist today I teach the window very early in my work with clients. Early… because when people understand what’s happening – why they go numb, why they explode, why certain things feel unsurvivable – something shifts. The experience of seeming out of control gives way to the experience of being human. Adaptive. Doing the best a nervous system can do.
Not crazy.
Then the real work begins.
Widening the window.
Widening the window’s not dramatic. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly, in therapy with Dr. Siegel, over time – through relationship, through safety, through the experience of being seen, soothed, safe, and ultimately…secure. By tolerating a little more feeling than yesterday…by staying present in a moment previously I’d have fled. Through learning slowly…gradually…that I could hold what had felt intolerable.
Widening our windows can impact implicit memories – those body-held, felt-sense memories that are very much in conscious awareness as present-moment experience, but whose origin in the past is not – can become known in a new way…they can be encoded as explicit memories – memoires you know are from the past. You can know them and tell the story of them without feeling them any longer. This is part of Making Sense. As the window widens, the implicit becomes explicit…what was fragmented can connect. A coherent narrative unfolds.
Standing in front of the house in D.C. was evidence of decades of therapeutic work.
I wasn’t triggered…not flooded…not pulled back into the terror of my childhood. I stood there as a 72-year-old woman who knows what happened…and remain grounded in presence.
An ever-widening window.
IPNB Resource:
“The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology,” by, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, MD – Norton IPNB Library