Traditionally, April is a time of wind, rain, and chill; however, like many other hard times, we must look to the silver lining because just a few days later May is when Earth’s flowers begin to bloom and take growth.  When we think of this statement more jovially, we see that with most periods of discomfort and hardship, our time of happiness and light is just around the corner.   Still, when dealing with the emotions that come with grief, we often lose sight of our own threshold of pain and while we have been trained to look at things with a sentiment of happiness, it is not always easy for us to do. 

 

The truth is that everyone experiences grief in their own way but just like most things, there is only so much we can handle.  When we are handling our life in healthy and pro-social manner, we are operating on a good/healthy/positive note.  This is what we refer to as our Window of Tolerance. 

 

What is a Window of Tolerance?

Everyone has their own Window of Tolerance, especially when it comes to grief.  While it has been said that there is no right or wrong way of handling our grief emotions, this is not always the case.  The emotional energy that we are forced to assert after the loss of a loved one can be very draining.  This is because our grief emotions often force us to operate outside of what we call our “Window of Tolerance”. 

 

The grief we have from losing someone or something of value to us has changed our Window of Tolerance.  Years ago, Dr. Dan Siegel first coined the term “Window of Tolerance” to describe the way our mind and body react following a distressing situation.  This can be especially true when we experience grief because our Window of Tolerance is quite literally forced to shrink, which may mean that we are not able to access reason and emotion in as manageable of a way that we had before we experienced our grief. 

 

Our Window of Tolerance is a term that is used to simply say that we are operating the best we can; we are at our healthiest and are doing healthy things. When we leave our Window of Tolerance it is because two or more things have been activated in us at the same time.  If we think about grief, how many things do you think have been activated in you all at once?  I would say several. 

 

What does it feel like when we leave our Window of Tolerance?

Imagine getting the call that your mother had passed away while you were sitting in your bathtub trying to soak away the harsh edges of the day before.  What would you do?  What would you want to do?  For most people, they would have an automatic need to ‘get there’.  Where?  No one quite knows but that desire to ‘get there’ and get there quickly is a feeling that most people experiences when they are at the tip-top of their Window of Tolerance.  This is called hyperarousal. 

 

Hyperarousal is when our flight-or-fight response sends signals to our sympathetic nervous system saying “hi, go; you need to go” and prepares our human body to face the threat we instantly felt once getting that telephone call.  Using the same analogy, you heard the threat, experienced the feeling of “go; you need to go”, but quickly realize that you cannot maintain that “go; you need to go” feeling for long.  In fact, what feels like days can just be hours that our body must make a choice. 

 

If our body chooses to stay in hyperarousal, it will begin to manifest itself as forms of anxiety.  Or our body can hit the “stop” button and send itself into a freeze or collapsing state known as hypo-arousal.  This feeling of hypo-arousal is when we are feeling numb, empty, afraid, shut-down, and we notice our body feels more and more drained.  One may even say that this is when they feel the most dysregulated. 

 

Feelings of Dysregulation

No matter if we are in hyperarousal or hypo-arousal, we are in a state of dysregulation.  So, it often feels “hard” to get through the minor stressors that life brings us.  Let’s imagine that a woman recently lost her father after a year-and-a-half fight with cancer.  The woman has not been sleeping, has not been interested in showering, and has not felt like herself. 

 

Today, she makes a grocery run at the nearby corner market, hoping that she can prepare some meals for her and her family so that the coming week isn’t as difficult on her.  The lines at the market are unexplainably (at least to her) long for the end of March and she does not recall this year having Easter at the end of the month, so she is not prepared for the long lines, loud customers, and everything else a busy corner store brings her the days preceding a big holiday. 

 

The woman starts to feel her breath increasing in pace, her hands growing moist, and she no longer wants to be at the store any longer.  This is the time that she has to make a choice.  Should she stay in the busy corner store where the lines are like madness and the noise is definitely too loud or should she give up on her attempts to try to make her following week better and just go home?    This is a lose/lose scenario.  It’s like saying she either cusses out the man at the cash register or she bed rots, a term that has definitely been making its way around the tik tok station recently and refers to “give up and go to bed only to stay there for an unusually long time”). 

 

Understanding Yourself

Learning to understand your feelings, your thoughts, and your actions, will undoubtedly help you understand your own Window of Tolerance.  By understanding our own Window of Tolerance, we can increase the limits of our personal Window of Tolerance thereby adjusting our reactions to even our darkest of moments. 

 

By doing things that can increase our dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, we are growing our Window of Tolerance.  These things can include going for a long walk, eating healthy, getting the adequate amount of sleep, hanging out with friends, spending time with family members that we have healthy bonds/relationships with, going to see a movie, and even practicing mindfulness and yoga as well as many others.  No matter what we choose to do with our time, it takes time to turn our choice into a pattern.  It’s important to remember though that we have the power to turn our darkest moments into the next brightest experience.  No, I’m not saying that we can ever fully get over the loss of someone important to us but I am saying that we can take our grief emotions and channel them into something we feel is right for us. 

 

Learning to Live

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Social Worker who is known best for her work with grief and loss, along with her colleague, David Kessler state that “the reality is that you will grieve forever.  You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.  You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.  You will be whole again, but you will never be the same.  Nor should you be.”   

 

By learning to remain in our own Window of Tolerance, we can find regulation both physically and emotionally, which will help us channel the toughest of our grief emotions and help us learn to live a life worth living even without something as important as what we have lost.

About the Author: 

Tammie Makely, LMFT

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist #113186