“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?
. “Aversion is the negative side of attachment; we may have aversion to failure, loss, instability, or discomfort; and we usually believe that if the things toward which we feel aversion happen, we’ll surely be unhappy.
It can’t be emphasized enough that to experience genuine happiness we first have to recognize what blocks it.
This includes seeing our attachments, the things we believe will bring us happiness, but which actually do just the opposite.
We will continue to pursue the conditioned strategies of behavior that we hope will bring us happiness as long as we believe they are working.
And because they sometimes do bring us some degree of personal happiness, these behaviors can get reinforced for a long time.
That’s how people get caught on the treadmill of their attachments and routines for a lifetime without making any effort to change.
Paradoxically, we’re actually fortunate if life occasionally serves us a big dose of disappointment, because it forces us to question whether our attachments and strategies really serve us.” . .
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 
