. Within a safe environment, choose a recent distressing event to think about. Depending upon your comfort level, you can choose a relatively minor recent event or perhaps one where you found yourself triggered outside your window of tolerance. Mindfully observe any emotions, thoughts, and body sensations that you experience as you recall the event. Bring your attention to the areas of your body where you feel tension or discomfort. Stay with the sensations for a few breaths.
• Choose a descriptive word for your distress. Your word can correspond to a sensation, an emotion, a color, or an image. Some examples are “jumpy,” “angry,” “hot,” “locked,” “fear,” or “dark.”
• Now, bring your attention to any area of your body where you feel calm and at peace. Maybe this resides around your heart, or perhaps in your hands or your legs. If you are unable to find any positive sensation, look for an area of your body that feels neutral. Again, allow your awareness to reside here for a few breaths.
• Choose a descriptive word for your calm or neutral sensation. Again, your word can correspond to a stay with the uncomfortable experience just a little longer. Then, return your attention to your calm or neutral sensation, any related image, and descriptive word. Perform several rounds, alternating your attention between your calm place and the distressing event.
• Notice any new sensations in your body, including the desire to breathe deeply, let go with a sigh, or move your body in response to your felt experience. Perhaps you feel the impulse to shake or push your arms or legs. These impulses are part of sequencing—a normal and healthy resolution of the fight-or-flight reaction. Follow any urges to move until you feel complete. . .
Window of Tolerance from The Complex PTSD Workbook
“The window of tolerance is a concept developed by clinical psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Siegel.
It refers to an optimal zone of nervous system arousal where you are able to respond effectively to your emotions.
When you are outside of your window of tolerance, you will go into survival modes.
Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or panicked is a sign that you are hyper-or over-aroused, whereas feeling shut down, numb, or disconnected is a sign that you are hypo-or under-aroused.
It is common with C-PTSD to alternate between the two extremes or to feel stuck in one or the other.
When you begin to practice emotion regulation, you focus on developing the capacity to stay within your window of tolerance by cultivating mindfulness of the fluctuations in your sensations, thoughts, and emotions.
Through this, you increase awareness of the subtle signs of dysregulation.
An early sign of distress might be a sense of slight irritability or growing frustration.
Maybe you observe that your breath has become shallow or that you are clenching your jaw.
When you are able to recognize the slight changes in your body, you can engage self-care resources before you get overwhelmed or shut down. . .
“We willingly spend a dozen years in school, then go on to college or professional training for several more; we work out at the gym to stay healthy;
we spend a lot of time enhancing our comfort, our wealth, and our social status.
We put a great deal into all this, and yet we do so little to improve the inner condition that determines the very quality of our lives.
What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred?”
Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind. . . My two cents: What an ominous phrase, at the frontier of our mind. That means our mind is massive.
Talking with my grandson’s soccer and baseball coach, he said confidence, the attitude of the mind means everything even at 9.
Can we have a good attitude living with PTSD?
Our mental attitude means everything when dealing with PTSD.
What does your scoreboard look like, time of day with good versus bad attitude?
PTSD - A Way Out.com 
