. 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. . .
“If the first goal of emotion regulation is to learn to sense the ebb and flow of your inner world, the second goal would be to increase the range of your window of tolerance.
Having a trauma history tends to result in a reduced capacity for sensation and emotion.
It is important learn how to exist with difficult feelings.
You can do this by slowly developing your ability to stay present with increasingly greater amounts of sensation.
You can broaden your capacity to handle distress by slowly stepping out of your comfort zone.
In somatic psychotherapy, you can learn to increase your window of tolerance through an activity called pendulation .
Pendulation involves alternating your attention between feelings of safety and feelings of distress as they are experienced in your body.” . .
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?
Bullying persists at epidemic levels among children and adolescents (Harris, Lieberman, & Marans, 2007). It has been described as an adverse childhood experience (Stopbullying.gov, 2017).
Bullying is most common in childhood and adolescence (Aalsma & Brown, 2008). Up to three-quarters of young adolescents experience bullying (e.g., name-calling, embarrassment, or ridicule), and up to a third report coercion and even inappropriate touching (Juvonen, Nishina, & Graham, 2001).
Does bullying affect only the victim? How long do the effects last?
Bullying has been found to affect the bullied person as well as the bully. Both are at greater risk of mental and behavioral problems, including a higher risk of depression (Smokowski & Kopasz, 2005).
The poor physical and emotional outcomes of bullying can affect an individual, both in the short and long term (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021).
A plethora of research shows that bullying experienced in childhood can go on to cause anxiety and depression (Stapinski et al., 2014) in young and middle adulthood (Copeland, Wolke, Angold, & Costello, 2013).
Adult suicidal attempts (Stapinski et al., 2014), poor financial management (Wolke, Copeland, Angold, & Costello, 2013), and poor career success as an adult are all negative outcomes (Takizawa, Maughan, & Arseneault, 2014).
What type of profile does a bully or a victim possess?
There is not one single profile of a bully or someone affected by bullying. Bullies and victims can be socially included or marginally excluded (Stopbullying.gov, 2021). Either the bully or victim may have been in the role of a perpetrator and victim of bullying at some point in life (Leiner et al., 2014).
One interesting study found that bullies, victims, and those who have experienced both have a plethora of emotional, psychosocial, and behavioral problems (Leiner et al., 2014). This highlights that interventions are equally important for all groups, not only the victims. . .
PTSD - A Way Out.com 
