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Alienated parents: Are you shutting down or spiraling into anxiety over things that 'shouldn't be a big deal'? An email from your ex. A call—or no call—from your child. Even opening your mail. Your body either goes into overdrive or completely powers down, and it feels out of your control. In this episode, I'm breaking down why this happens through the lens of your window of tolerance—and giving you the exact steps to widen it so you can finally stop living on that emotional rollercoaster and start living your life in peace.

 

Main Talking Points

 

1. Understanding Your Window of Tolerance
2. Why Alienation Narrows Your Window
3. The Elevator Metaphor
4. Outsourcing Your Regulation
5. Maladaptive Coping Behaviors
6. What Expanding Your Window Actually Means
7. The Paradox of Regulation
8. Practical Steps to Widen Your Window

 

 

Key Takeaways

• Your reactions are normal: If you shut down or get anxious over "small" things, your nervous system is doing its job—it's trying to protect you based on past trauma.
• Alienation creates a narrow window: Chronic stress from parental alienation keeps you cycling between hyperarousal and hypoarousal, shrinking your capacity to handle everyday stressors.
• You learned to outsource regulation: Many alienated parents learned in childhood (and reinforced through alienation) to rely on others to feel safe, rather than self-regulating.
• Coping behaviors are symptoms, not the problem: Scrolling, overeating, overworking—these are your body's attempts to escape unbearable emotional states, not character flaws.
• The goal is presence, not perfection: Expanding your window means staying present with discomfort a little longer, not eliminating all difficult emotions.
• Fear is about internal states, not external events: You're not afraid of the email, court date, or phone call—you're afraid of the feeling you expect to have (humiliation, rejection, helplessness).
• Small experiments create big changes: Use "safe playing fields"—controlled, time-limited exposures to discomfort—to teach your nervous system that difficult emotions are survivable.
• Regulation creates boundaries: As your window widens, you become less willing to be everyone's emotional caretaker and clearer about where you end and others begin.
• Integration requires body and mind: You can't think your way out of nervous system dysregulation—you must show your body through experience that you're safe.
• This week's action step: Pick one avoidance zone, name the feeling you're afraid of, and design one small task where you let yourself feel just a little bit of it on purpose while supporting yourself.

 

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Episode Transcript

 

You are listening to The Beyond The High Road Podcast with Shelby Milford, episode number 173.

 

 Welcome to Beyond the High Road, a podcast dedicated to healing your heart and life following the grief of alienation. I'm your host, Shelby Milford, a twice certified life coach specializing in post-traumatic growth. If you're experiencing the effects of alienation and you're ready to heal, then this show is my love letter to you.

Stay tuned.

  Hey, y'all, what's happening? I don't think we have any announcements today. Um, so I'm gonna pull my notes up and we're gonna get started.

“Why do I react like this?” Understanding Emotional Triggers

So today I'm gonna be talking to those of you who find yourself either shutting down or getting super anxious in situations that quote unquote, shouldn't be a big deal.

Maybe it's an email from your ex, a call from your child. No call from your child. a social invite even just opening your, like your mail. Mail,  your body either goes into overdrive or just completely powers down and it feels like almost out of your control.

It happens so fast that you don't even know how you got into that state, you know? So you might wonder, why do I react this way? Why do I avoid situations that I need to face?  Or it could be, why do I always get so intense? Why does this still bother me? It's been so long.

How come I'm still so activated each time? Some little, Everyday sort of stressor comes up for you.  So that's what we're gonna be unpacking today we're gonna do this though through the lens of your window of tolerance.  We're gonna just do a quick overview of what your window of tolerance is, why your window might be narrow right now, and what happens when you expand that window, right? Like all the  shifts that you might notice when you do expand that window.

And of course all of the practices you need to get you there. Well, I'm gonna name probably three, four steps. Um, there are different approaches to this, but anyway, I'm gonna give you some , practices. That can definitely assist you in getting there. so 

first we're gonna talk about, got this huge water, you guys pour into a glass, but I'm so thirsty. Doesn't matter right now Anyway, um, alright.

 

The Narrow Window of Tolerance Explained

Right now we're gonna talk about the causes and the everyday signs of a narrow window.  Easy activation or shut down for you. So chronic, as you guys probably already know, that chronic or traumatic stress disregulates the nervous system

keeping us either in high activation, hypervigilant anxiety, which is hyper arousal, right? Dorsal shutdown, which is the opposite of that, going, maybe numb, dissociated, what have you. Or often,  if it's for a prolonged period of time, then you'll be cycling back and forth between those states,  which of course, if you are cycling back between back and forth between the hyper and hyper arousal. Doing that repeatedly over time will cause your window of tolerance itself to shrink, right? Because you are reinforcing the hyper and or the hypo so much that it just pushes the limits on what you can actually tolerate on your everyday basis.

Signs of Trauma-Induced Dysregulation

parental alienation of course adds layers of attachment, injury and emotional abuse, which research links to, anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, and problems with affect regulation, which is basically your ability to manage your emotional states, right?

That's all that is. Manage your emotions in a healthy way, and also it affects self-organization in adulthood, which was such a huge thing for me. I noticed that, I mean, I was always kind of here, there and everywhere, but I noticed that after. All of the real trauma of alienation after my daughter was gone, you know, for a period of time when she was four, you know, for a couple months.

And then of course, after she left when she was nine, that I had a real problem with organizing myself in my life. I already, this was already a challenge for me, but it was magnified and so much more after alienation at a real, a really difficult time, you know, manage, for instance, managing my time, getting places on time.

Um, that's also kind of a side effect of A DHD, but I know that we've talked about before that A DHD and trauma, the symptoms of long-term like C-P-T-S-D trauma, um, can often sort of overlap. They look quite similar, but anyway, at a really difficult time with organizing my mind and myself, my home, all the things following alienation.

I used to beat myself up around that. Like, why can't I just keep my place clean? You know? Now it's not a problem, but it was a problem for a really long time. I still have piles. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. So if that's, you, just know that this is also can be a symptom of, , prolonged activation, and trauma from alienation and whatever else has happened in your life.   📍 📍 📍 📍 So. On the hyper side hyper side of things. It may look like, your heart racing, obsessive thinking, replaying arguments, maybe it's panic about sending a simple text to someone or opening a document over explaining yourself to everyone or the powers that be, if you will, so if that's you and there's more symptoms, but you get my point. So that's, you just know that, and I've said this before to you guys, you are not being dramatic as maybe you have been called, your system is genuinely taking these situations as threats. And I'm gonna go into that a little bit further here in a minute, but. It makes sense that you go into the state, your nervous system, your body is trying to keep you safe. Even though like many times you mi might, after going through what we have and whatever else has gone on in your life, you may get over aroused, if you will, or overstimulated, anxiety ridden, panic ridden, um, at little things that you know, otherwise intellectually aren't actually threats.

You know? And that may be a problem. There may be some dissonance between you because you're telling yourself, I don't know why. I'm just, like I was saying in the beginning, I dunno why I'm getting so excited about this. I know that it's not a big deal, but your body says something different. Okay. And so your nervous system learns in one way.

It has its own sort of memory, if you will, and then your mind. Is entirely different. The intellectual part of you that your prefrontal cortex, as I've talked about in many of these episodes, when you're in nervous system activation, the blood supplied to your prefrontal cortex sort of shuts down.

It slows down. So then you, the energy supply is dimmed, if you will, you're, you're not able to use the information that you would otherwise have access to. And because your body's trying to save energy so that you can fight for your life, even though if you were able to use your prefrontal cortex, you would know that you were not actually fighting for your life.

You get me? Okay.   📍 📍 📍 📍 And the hypo side of th things like the shutdown , it's the opposite. You feel blank. might feel numb, exhausted, like extremely fatigued. Well, your brain just completely checks out.

You sit there staring, oh God, just me just saying it the way I did, just brought me back to being back in Texas when I was, I thought there was something wrong with me. Like I, incessantly Googled, fatigue, numbness. Foggy brain, not able to put together sentences, all of that stuff. I kept thinking that something would've really gone wrong with me.

Um, so if this is you  you may sit there staring at whatever task you have in front of you, but not doing anything about it, just staring at it, blank, stare at it.

Or you may disappear from conversations. You might tell yourself that you just don't care anymore, or you just don't have the energy what's the point?  That is the hypo the shutdown side of things.  just know that you're not lazy or indifferent as a whole, you know, it just, you might be experiencing a sense of indifference because you're nervous system.

Is hitting the overload button for you, basically shutting the lights off. In the rest of you, it says, we need to conserve energy. Right now, this is all too much, so you can't care. You don't say it like that. It's not, most of the time, maybe  but otherwise it's just you.

You feel like you can't lift your legs, your arms, your, I talked about this in the, um, prolonged freeze episode. I think a while back you feel like you can't even lift your finger. I mean, you go and you get stuff done. If you've been in that state for a long time, you will get things done, but it's just freaking heavy and hard to do.

It feels like everything is so much effort. Um, and it's really difficult in this state to, like I said, to gather your thoughts and think clearly without feeling so clouded and keep saying heavy, but it's true, heavy.  📍 📍 📍

Coping Behaviors and Emotional Numbing

So in either of these states, when you're experiencing either of these states, it is not uncommon for like before you hit the hyper arousal or even throughout, you might use a habit.

It's sort of a byproduct of this whole process because maybe it's somewhere you learned that if you divert attention to something that can numb you, then it's an easy out for you. There's nothing wrong with you that you've done it. This is how you learned from whoever in your life, or maybe just for from your own experimentation of like, how can I get this feeling, move this feeling away from me.

Because it feels so painful. It feels, and for your nervous system, it feels like death. So you might reach for scrolling, food, fantasy of some sort, drinking some sort of substance, Overworking is another way. Shopping, whatever. But those I just want you to know that, those are byproducts or outcomes of a narrow window.

It's not the whole story. It's not that you are, someone that always overeats and has a problem with food or problem with drinking. Now, drinking or food or whatever may have caused like your drinking or food may have actually caused some problems in your life. But it doesn't need to be the end all, be all.

Like you will always have a problem with whatever you're using right now to byproduct. Okay. And any of my habits episodes, which were awfully long time ago, but the information still stands if that's you right now, and , you're leaning into some sort of numbing, habit. Go back to, I've got, there's three episodes in a row in the very early days, not videos.

There're um, like strictly audio podcasts, but they talk about how to, let go of habits. Okay. but anyway, it's not the whole story. Like I was saying, going back to my notes Maladaptive behaviors are your body's way of saying, this is too much.

I need out. They're fast exits from emotional states that feel unbearable. Shame, helplessness, terror, loneliness, panic. You get me, distress, basically. So if you grew up with chaos, criticism, emotional neglect of any degree, or of course if you have been living through parental alienation, your system has been in a long-term survival state mode, you know, so of course your body is going to look for quick exits.

Okay? It makes sense. And the more that you can make sense of why you're doing whatever you're doing or not doing, whatever you're not doing, like , in any of my tolerance episodes before this.

I've talked about this, that if you're tolerating your life by way of using some sort of behavior in order to avoid whatever emotion you're feeling, it's going to cause you to prolong your suffering like whatever you're tolerating now, you're numbing it, which helps to make the whole situation tolerable, So you never experience the discomfort needed that's there for you in order for you to move to the next level. Like you need to have a certain amount, level of discomfort in order to say, okay, this is enough. I need to move through this. ? Until then, you stay in this buffering zone and this bobbing in the water zone.

And so that's why tolerating your life, by using behaviors, , buffering behaviors can be harmful. But anyway, you can use, I just got off on a tangent. You can use, otherwise like positive, seemingly benign behaviors your body will be like, oh, but at least I'm just doing something good.

I'm channeling it into something good. And there's nothing wrong with that. But ultimately, if you're still using that behavior over exercising could be one of them. You go run, not that again. I want you to send a message that there's not a problem with going in. In fact, I think it's one of my top, solutions to get yourself out of, especially if you're in prolonged free state to go move your body, right?

But when you're using that. There's a, a fine line to everything when you're using whatever behavior it is to avoid something, it's going to end up creating that same cycle for you. Okay? So,

It makes sense that you have, if you have in the past and up until today have been looking for quick exits out of this nervous system activation. Makes a hundred percent sense. .

The problem with behaviors, and I don't want this to be a behaviors episode, but I think it's important because it's a human tendency. Our bodies seek pleasure, avoid pain, be efficient. That's really what runs us from, thousands of years ago,

that's what it does. Seek pleasure, avoid paying, be efficient. That's all it really wants to run on. So chronic relational stress, right, including alienation, shrinks your capacity to stay present with intense feelings, ? Your body learns, we can't handle this, so we need something to take us out of it.

We need to either fight, we need to flee, we need to freeze, or we need to fawn, right? We go into activation of some sort, wanting to, your body is trying to regulate you so overeating, overworking over, analyzing court documents, obsessing about your child's every move, obsessing about their.

It's natural too, of course. I mean, it makes sense why you would obsessing about what their wellbeing in the long term. All of that is. Your nervous system trying to keep you away from a state that it believes will crush you, will annihilate you. So just know first off that your body's not trying to ruin your life, but it's also a good thing to understand what exactly is it trying to protect, right?   📍 📍 What is my body trying to protect me from here? It's good to become aware, name it, 📍 and become accustomed to when it is that you enter those states. Okay? So.  This is where the idea of the window of tolerance comes in. All right?  📍 📍 📍

The Window of Tolerance Explained

The window of tolerance is the range where you can feel and think at the same time where your emotions are present, but they're not overwhelming, and where you don't have to shut down or, go into arousal, hyper arousal to cope. That the concept was originated by Dr. Dan Siegel.  So the way that I want you to picture it right now, there's a lot of, um, analogies or metaphors out there to explain this. There's one where there's, you can explain it as a river There's a few different ways to look at it, but I like the idea of thinking about it as an elevator.  The middle floor is your window of tolerance, okay? This is where you can feel your feelings, think clearly, and respond instead of react. Okay? So on this floor, your breathing is steady, your muscles are present. Like you notice that you're here, but you're not braced and you're not completely flacid lax, right?

And you can stay with your own discomfort here, right? Without needing to explode or disappear, okay? Or fawn, or whatever it is that you do. Um, you can also be with somebody else's emotions, without losing yourself completely in them.

 

The top floor of this elevator is your hyper arousal, if you're in that elevator, imagine the elevator shoots up. Your heart's racing, your mind spinning, maybe anger, anxiety, panic is going on for you. This is like your fight or flight energy, right? It's very urgent. From here, you might overtalk, overexplain attack people please or scramble to make the other person okay.

So that you can finally feel safe again. Okay? And I know that right there I described fawning behaviors too, but it's, this energy is more like when you're fight flight, you can also use this like you're over people pleasing as a way to s to regulate you. And it's a matter of overdoing. Do you know what I'm saying?

So, um, yeah, I'll leave it at that. The basement of this elevator. Is your hypo arousal. Imagine that the, your elevator goes from up here in hyper arousal where you're agitated, panicky, whatever it is, and all of a sudden, boom. I think of like, when I was writing this out, I think of if you've ever ridden that ride at Universal Studios, MGM, wherever Tower of Terror is MGM, I think Tower of Terror is like this.

It's done modeled after the Twilight Zone, which this is probably not the most comforting, um, analogy or metaphor for you guys, but this is what I think of when I think of, um. The window of tolerance, right? Not when you're in the window of tolerance, but when you're cycling up and down from hyper arousal to hypo.

The, the ride at MGM studios, if you haven't been on it before, is, and maybe there's something similar to this where you are, but it's basically, it's modeled after that show that was like, you know, years and years ago, the Twilight Zone. you're in a seat with some other people, there's a few rows, and the elevator will shoot you up and then drop you down and then shoot you up and the elevator opens to the park, And sometimes it, there's a narrow open, and then sometimes it's like a big wide opening, but either way, you're only seeing seconds of it before it drops you and shoots you back up in the sky. Right? It feels like a rollercoaster. It is a rollercoaster, it's a ride, you know? But when. Let me finish this and I'll explain how I think that this fits in.

Sorry. So imagine the elevator drops down to a dim, dark basement, Dan basement. You feel numb, spaced out. Heavy, maybe hopeless, maybe not on that ride here, but you get the idea in that room. If the elevator opens in that room, that's where you're at, right? Hopeless, spaced out, heavy, numb, detached.

This is shut down. As you know. It's freeze collapse. It's foggy, , disconnected. Okay. From this place, it's easy to, I really dislike this term because of its overuse and actually I've got a story behind it, but it's easy to ghost people. Okay. It's easy to withdraw or tell yourself that you just don't care when underneath you actually do care, in fact, a lot.

But it's so much easier in this state to just retract, move away from whatever might be going on for you when you've lived through alienation, And chronic relational trauma, your elevator gets very sensitive, It takes less to shoot you up or drop you down in your middle floor. Your window of tolerance can feel very narrow, like I was talking about with the Tower of Terror, the doors opening it, they start to open less and less while you're going up and down that ride. You can only see like little itty bitty, Flashes, of the blue sky and the park, the beautiful Disney World out there, you know, otherwise you're in this terror, this tower of terror going up and down, every maladaptive behavior that you use, if you're using any, is basically you jumping off the elevator as soon as you get close to whichever floor that scares you, okay?

It's you going, I can't take this. And so you like hit the emergency exit and you're stuck in between floors, Like drinking or shopping, or over doing something, whatever it is, netflixing, whatever, so, instead of riding the elevator through the discomfort and discovering that I can survive this,

you're like, fuck this, I'm out. the easiest way to do that is to numb, And whatever capacity that is, that's how your window stays narrow. You keep proving to your body that certain states are too dangerous to feel, to experience, right? So it never gets new information. So by tolerating the current state of your life, or by avoiding areas that you know, like for instance, maybe you, it is so, such a common thing for such a long period of time, it was like a way of life for many family units and just

relationships in general is if something bad happened, like in a family, right? Somebody passed away and it was untimely maybe there was a car accident, something tragic, right? Many people for a long period of time, it was so common for people to say, we just don't talk about that time period.

We just don't even bring it up. Maybe this happened with you and your family, or like one of your parents was like this. They wanted to shut down and not talk about anything activated because in their minds, and maybe in yours too, talking about it, it is only giving energy to and reactivating whatever happened back in the past, and now there is.

I'm not gonna get into it today. I do believe that just deserves some context because I do believe that when it gets indulgent and you're just giving energy to it, you're just like. Feeding a loop, that's one thing. But when you are actively avoiding situations, conversations, experiences, because you are fearing what that will give you, how that will doom you, then it's going to shrink your window of tolerance.

And the more situations or topics or touchy areas that you avoid, the smaller your window of tolerance gets. now that you have that picture, let's bring it out of the metaphor and into your life, real life, especially into your relationships and your parenting, whatever's going on with your situation of alienation. Okay?

Outsourcing Regulation: How Others Became Your Emotional Operator

I wanna talk about. How others became your elevator operator? Briefly.   Basically this is about outsourcing regulation, 

Which is usually grounded in some sort of attachment dynamic from childhood for you, right? And of course then alienation, whatever led you to, uh, choose the person that would alienate your kids from you,  me, , me included. You know, so if it began in childhood, which, you know, my stance on that, I, I. Chances are, it probably did. I'm not gonna say that as a blanket statement to everybody, but if as a child your emotions were dismissed, shut down, mocked, maybe stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about.

That sort of attitude or that sort of comment from a parent, you know,  or they were overmanaged, right? Don't be sad, I'll fix you. Let me fix it for you. Let's go get an ice cream. Let's go, you know, divert attention to something. But somebody was your mom, your dad was really overly, um, comforting, right? And didn't allow you to work through the emotion.

You probably never got to learn how to man your own emotional elevator, right? You never learned how to  regulate yourself. you probably learned to wait for your mom or dad to. indicate what was appropriate and when.

So like, if you had a parent who, like for me, my mom was, um, I, I believe is disorganized attachment style, which is not a problem, but it's unregulated, you know? And so, , it was very, uh, chaotic or just not, I wasn't able to predict.

how she was gonna respond or react to certain things as a kid. And so that, for me, I was, it was a heightened sense of activation for me always, which had me go between, agitation at some points.

panic, anxiety, fawning, And then I would shut down and I would just escape to my room and, um, you know, self-soothe by listening to music or something like that. But My meter, my emotions meter was in her pocket right at all times. And so I learned from an early age that it did not serve me to make my own decisions or work through things because she was going to fuck it up in one way or another.

I didn't say it like that back then, but that's really the idea. Like, I can't rely on, on anything to be predictable. I'll just wait for her for, to tell me what my day or life is gonna be like. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't mean to demonize my mom when I'm saying it like that, but that's just how I saw it when I was a kid.

I know she didn't mean to make it like that. So I just wanna say that there's no blaming me or it is what it is, and it made me who I am today. It's fine, but it does help to explain where I developed and for you, maybe where you might've developed this, the, the tenancy, you know, the, the habit to rely on other people, uh, external sources, external, factors to determine.

Your safety really, you know? that's just one dynamic. I'm sure there's many of them. You apply that to you and your world and maybe you could just sort of recognize, you know, within this time that we're talking, where might you have looked to others to regulate you as a child?

Which makes sense by the way, because as children, that's kind of, we look to our parents to tell us what's okay and what's not. But if parents are not actually giving us the space to do that, leading us in the direction, then it can result in, us repeating that in future relationships.  📍 📍 📍

Okay, so in alienation, the alienating parent often becomes. The monitor of the elevator and you don't, of course you don't want that to happen. You definitely didn't, you know, intend for that to happen. That's not your goal here. But it is true, like I think that most of us, we don't say it this way, but it's maybe something close to it, is that our safety a hundred percent depends on, relies on reading and matching the alienating parents' state.

Meaning like, your body learns I'm okay if I keep them okay. Like if I don't piss them off and I don't poke the bear, God, if I had a dollar for every time somebody said that to me in, early coaching sessions and also in, in, , consult calls, Is I don't wanna poke the bear and I get it because we know that's dynamic.

That's what happens, ? But. When your body, not just your brain, your body learns that it has to, and it doesn't. But this is how, what it thinks, it has to fawn or has to tread lightly, walk on eggshells in order to feel okay. Like they come first, the alienating parent. And if you guys aren't together anymore, which most of you guys aren't, you know, then it takes a lot of energy because now you're manning, this person who is already unpredictable and is already, doesn't have your best interest at heart.

You know, they're in a completely different household, maybe not even the same state. So how do you man that it takes a lot of energy? And so you try to think your way through every single little, situation, scenario try to determine all the outcomes, and then pick the best way to proceed with whatever's going on for you.

It's so time consuming. But anyway, okay. There's nothing wrong with you if you're doing it because we've all done it. Um. Your body learns that if I keep them okay, then I will be okay. Things will, can stay smooth. Just don't make any waves. You know, which trains your nervous system to regulate around other people's reactions and not your own inner signals.  

Some other adult patterns like outsourcing regulation.

You might look to partners, right? Your friends, your child, even professionals to be your elevator operator. Right. Tell me I'm okay. Fix my feelings, please regulate me. Those are not the words you're using, but that's the idea you're looking for. validation, permission in some cases, Not making decisions without someone else's approval.

Avoiding conflict at all costs or needing others to calm down before you can breathe. Lot of you empaths out there, You probably understand what I'm talking about here, right?

When someone's outside their window, it can show up as emotional neediness. Constant reassurance seeking anger or collapsing into helplessness, not as a moral feeling, but as a nervous system in survival mode.

You might notice yourself getting stuck on the top floor, right? Being hypervigilant, overexplaining to the courts, to your ex-partners, or even to your kids, in effort to control every variable. Or you might swing into the basement and you might stay there shutting down, going numb, disappearing from relationships when it feels like one more thing you cannot carry. 

Expanding Your Window of Tolerance

So if that's what a narrow window looks like, what happens when you begin to widen it Why might that actually make you less willing to carry other people emotionally?   📍 📍 📍 Expanding your window, I just wanna say right now, doesn't mean that you suddenly enjoy hard conversations or stressful events. It just means that you can stay more present in them without either exploding or needing to disappear or numb,

it's basically moving from this is uncomfortable and uncomfortable is absolutely unbearable, To, this is uncomfortable and I can stay with myself in this for a little bit longer. It's you being the controller of all of it.  It's like, okay, I'm noticing how I'm feeling right now. I'm fucking angry, I'm enraged, I'm, devastated, whatever it is.

And being the watcher of you in that emotion, changing the relationship you have to that state of mind or emotion, right? So that you're present in it as opposed to fleeing from it or shutting down or going into like acting out that emotion. You know what I'm saying? , That's you expanding your window of tolerance.

I wanna tell you a little bit about why I think this is so life changing is, well one is, like I just said, when you learn to expand your window of tolerance and be okay with, , getting. activated feeling a sense of panic, feeling whatever it is that you're feeling that is uncomfortable and causing you distress, you can change your entire relationship with it by not acting out.

Like I was just kind of touched on by not acting from it and noticing being the watcher of your experience and allowing, dropping into your body like I've been talking about while I've talked about always, but dropping into your body and connecting, like actually, developing a relationship with the, the physical feelings like the sensations that are going on inside your body, right?

Like the hotness in your face if you're angry or the tightness in your, um, chest, solar plexus area, or the sadness that's at the bottom of your belly, whatever that is. Without making a be like dun, dun dun. becoming fascinated by it, while still sitting with the emotion, but sitting with the emotion doesn't mean that it needs to affect you to the point where you express it outward.

Does that make sense? Like, uh, by way of screaming or yelling or, you know, having it rule you, So that's one of the ways, but then also what I think is so great, and I'm sure there's so many benefits, but today, just for the purposes of time , keeping this on the shorter end, um, what I've noticed is that I have, after doing so much work on my knee and on my own nervous system regulation over the years.

 My, patience and my desire to be present in the ways I used to, the unhelpful ways I used to isn't desirable for me anymore. Basically, what I'm saying is, is when other dysregulated people are wanting me to help regulate them, I, I don't, my patience is short for that.

These days like, I have less tolerance for people who want me to be their nervous system for them to man their elevator for them, you know? .

 With my clients.  I just wanna say it's different that is our agreement. You come into my world, I hold your space, I guide, I co-regulate with you while you build your own capacity, right?

That's my job. That's my passion. I love doing that, and it's entirely different to hold space with someone and help them cope, regulate with them. Then when I'm outside of that container and I'm not working with my clients, I'm no longer willing to be the person that someone calls every time they melt down, but rarely actually takes a necessary action or responsibility for their own healing.

Does that make sense? I value my energy, my time so much. I have constrained my world into caring for my clients, being present for them, being available, serving them, serving y'all during in this podcast.  And otherwise, I really guard my, I don't know if I love the word guard, but that's really what it is, is I guard my energy, I reserve it, and I no longer want to feel for everybody.

I'm not unloving to them. Like it's not about that at all. It's just that I know where I've purposed myself and so my boundaries, my window of tolerance has widened, you know, so much immensely over the last few years, right? I have learned to be comfortable in a much wider range of experiences and states of mind,  📍 📍 📍

the paradox is, when you have that window of tolerance, that wider window of tolerance, you can handle more, but you choose to take on less. That isn't yours and that's what it is for me. Like I can handle so much more, but I don't wanna take on other people's shit, you know?

Especially when I know, well, I'll leave it at that.  So regulation doesn't mean that I tolerate e everything. It just means that I'm finally clear on what I will and will not tolerate. Does that make sense? So your window of tolerance is one thing when it comes to like that, um, concept is about how much that you can tolerate within your own world, but then how much you can tolerate versus how much you want to tolerate when it comes to external is a whole different ballgame.  📍 📍 📍

For some of you that might sound like, I love you and I'm not going to be your crisis line every day. I don't mean to be insensitive, but I'm working on keeping my own nervous system in a safe range right now.  Also, it could look like I'm available to talk when you're ready.

But I'm not available, not going to make myself available for like the endless venting that leaves us both fried. I don't wanna go into a retraumatization for you . That's not what I'm here for.

Because before, like for me back to what my example, I would, it was sort of a sneaky way, I guess I should say. I wasn't trying to be sneaky, but it's like this backwards way of when we people please we're not doing it to actually please the other people. Well, we are, but we're doing it because  pleasing the other person, in the people pleasers mind will provide us a sense of safety and security.

A sense of certainty and belonging, right? Something like that.  And so when I would overdo for all the people outside of me, it was really about me trying to outsource. My own nervous system regulation. Do you understand?  And so now that I have widened my window of tolerance, and I know that I can regulate my own self, I'm not willing to be anybody else's emotional life raft.

Not outside of my, the container of being present for my clients. Which, like I said, I love that. And that is my task. That is my job, you know? But otherwise I save my energy, you know, and I'm not using them to make me feel good. And I do it without apology, and it feels amazing. It's freedom because I'm not taxed by other people's problems anymore,  And again, it's not being cold, it's just knowing where I end and the other person begins, or vice versa, . I also wanna say that it doesn't mean that if you are, , an empath, for example then maybe it is that you do love giving that out.

There's nothing wrong with that. And I don't mean to poo poo, however you're going about it, it's fine if you're doing that and it may not even be coming from, um, dysregulation. I know for me, my actions were, okay. So I have much more to say on this whole topic. Like there's, I got many more notes and personal thoughts, just things that are jotted down. But I think for the sake of, you know, keeping this episode manageable, timely, manageable, you know what I'm saying? I'm gonna leave it now, and if we need to do another episode, I will.

And we can always come back to some of the stuff that I eliminate today. So I wanna right now go into how you can widen your window, basically, your practical steps to, um, widening your window of tolerance. Okay?

Uncovering the Internal Fears Behind Your Avoidance

  📍 📍 📍

So one of the first things that you can do, basically you can ask yourself the question like, look at your life and notice where you typically try to avoid.  📍 📍

Like what areas of your life do you just try to stay away from? Like where you either consistently dodge delay, you know, procrastinate, or maybe you numb around instead, like you just avoid like the plague. Like, I can't do this, I can't do this. Or you do it , in a numb state of some way, you know, like in a detached state. So which conversations or tasks or decisions do you avoid on the reg? 

Okay. When you notice where your avoidance zones are, then you can ask the deeper question. Which is because, well before I even pose this next question. The thing is, is that when we are scared of something happening, , you are not actually ever   📍 fearing the outcome itself, like ever.

It's not the outcome that you fear, it's the state of mind that you believe your body might believe that you will experience as a result of whatever outcome. Always. I don't care what we're talking about.  You, you know, you've heard me say before, we either do or not do everything based on the emotion we think we're gonna feel.

And it's the same thing like with relationships. You guys heard me talk about before, like. Relationships exist in your mind and it's not somebody else that can hold it. Like the relationship is not outside of you. Yes. Maybe in a two person relationship, there is another person somewhat required to be, to exist at some point.

I don't even wanna say be present 'cause they don't need to be present to have had existed in order to take up space in your mind. Right.  But the relationship does not exist outside of you. It exists within your own thoughts and concepts, like ways that you have filed them away in your mind. Okay. States of mind that you generally inhabit when participating in that relationship.

Does that make sense? And it's the same thing when we fear some sort of outcome. It's not the outcome. It's not the outcome. So look, that is amazing news for you because that means that you have  all of the control, never have to outsource it, hand it out, or wait for something else to happen in order for you to feel or not feel something. 

Okay? And I know you've heard me talk about that before. So the deeper question I have to pose to you now that I just explained that, is   📍 📍 what state of mind am I really afraid of here? It's never just the email, the court date, the phone call. It's the feeling you expect to have. Humiliation, rejection, anger, grief, hopelessness, anything like that.

Like I just said, the big, the key of this is whatever you fear is about your internal, internal experience of whatever it is that you feel. It's not the external event, it's your internal experience, which, like I said just a second ago, means that the control is always so much closer than it feels it's within you. 

You know, because you can learn. If you can learn to be with like be okay and feel experience, that internal state, then there's nothing to fear anymore. Do you see what I'm saying? Like no matter what it is,

and I'm not saying go learn to be okay with terror, but make, uh, I'll tell you in a minute, So when you can see that clearly, , the avoidance becomes less mysterious. That is the biggest thing in our minds is that we avoid what is vague, right? It's like that you've heard me talk about before, like 📍  lightning crashes, you know, like thunder rumbling and like, Scary, right? But we never really fully live it out in our minds about what that is and how we think it will affect us, how it will define us. And then when we remember that it. whoever it is outside of us or whatever, e event doesn't actually have the authority to define us, that we define our experience, then you have so much more control,

So you're not lazy, you're not overdramatic. You're just basically protecting yourself from a feeling that your system isn't yet convinced that it can survive.  Yet convinced that it can survive.  So what do you do next?

Small Experiments to Teach Your Nervous System Safety

This is where we can create basically Safe playing fields. .   📍 📍 📍 📍 So Instead of waiting for big, overwhelming life events to force your growth, you wanna create small controlled experiments where you can choose to feel a tolerable dose of the thing you actually usually run from.

Okay? So example, if you typically avoid setting boundaries, because you fear guilt and rejection. If you avoid speaking your desires, your wants, your needs in the moment because you fear them having some opinion about you, your playing field might be telling one person. Just to start, right? I can talk for 10 minutes today, not an hour. 

Okay? This is the time I have for you. And defining that in the beginning to show your nervous system, your body, that you are okay with making these statements or divulging these desires or needs for yourself to the other person. it's just cultivating small winds,

showing your body and like sticking your toe in the hot water of Scaryville. So if you avoid legal tasks because you fear overwhelmed, despair.   📍 📍 📍 📍 Your playing field might be 15 minutes with a timer on.

You've heard me talk about this before. I'm gonna do one form, fill out one form, do one legal task, whatever it is, and then I'm gonna go outside for a run, or I'm gonna go take a hike, or I'm gonna take a hot bath. You are gonna do, give yourself that reward, right? But it's also showing you your nervous system that I can do hard things.

I can experience discomfort. This is not gonna be puppy dog tails and rainbows and I, this is in a conta small container. This is 15 minutes only, which is entirely manageable. And then I can go do something that shows my system physically that we are okay, we are safe. Okay. It's you having the control to bring yourself into the discomfort and then also to lead yourself out. 

When you say that you will, you hear me? So that because the dun, dun done is your body saying that we're gonna go into this discomfort and it's never gonna stop. It's awful. I don't wanna look at this. It's face reality. You don't wanna do it, right? So it's like, no, forget it. But reality's always like bumping, knocking at your door when you don't do it and it feels awful.

And the second that you just create that small little win, create the container, and then step outta the container intentionally, you've now become the person that can do this, experience the discomfort, and still be safe signal to your body that you're safe. Okay? The point here is not to be brave or bulldoze your feelings, bulldoze your past experiences. The point is to teach your nervous system through experience that we can feel this and nothing catastrophic happens. Okay? That's what starts to widen your window. It's you creating containing little ,   📍 📍 experiences and then going outside, doing something the opposite of that, that shows you creates trust with yourself and also shows you that it doesn't have to last forever.

I'm only setting a a timer here, and that's all. It'll last in the beginning, and then once you get more comfortable with it, you can of course push that time window up. Longer, longer, longer. So you're not just totally submerging yourself, flooding yourself with discomfort. Okay. Scary.  you can also, you guys, just so you know, and I think that you probably already know this, but I'm gonna state it anyway, you can do this.

Like this is what I do with my clients in our sessions is I create space, hold space for them to sort of tap in and out of whatever emotion that they're feeling or ever scary topic that we're talking about. And we either lighten it up with some humor or we move to another topic and then we come back to it.  📍 📍

There is a way that you can use a professional, like professional will. If you've got a good therapist or coach even to help you to create a safe space for you to experiment with this, then that can also be, um, a of course. Invaluable tool to widening your window. You know, uh, when they're able, the professional, whoever it is, coach therapist, is able to, identify when you are like, just outside of your window of tolerance and not submerged on either side. 

They don't always have to tell you, but they can also help to guide you back into your window of tolerance. And then only your, the most, um, healing, like the, , most benefit that you'll get. The most growth it works the best when you're just barely outside of your window of tolerance and you're trying to push it up or down on either side of it, um, by just dabbling is what I'm saying.

On the edge, living on the edge is actually where you receive the most benefit. Okay. It's the same thing, like when you're, think about if you're a, maybe I've used this example before, but I always think about it when I talk about this, is that when you, um, are, if you've are into fitness and you're trying to push your anaerobic threshold, your at, the, area or the heart rate basically at which you personally everybody's at is different and aerobic threshold's different.

But the threshold is the area or the spot where you are now have now become breathless and you cannot hold a conversation while doing some cardio workout or even a weightlifting workout. And so in that spot of just over your threshold, if you kind of touch that threshold and then come back down into the center of your window of tolerance, if you will, and then go like in your ideal fat burning.

Heart rate, you know, and then push up again and then come back down. And then sometimes to the low point, right where you come all the way down to almost cool down and then go back up, it's hit training, you know, that is going to, uh, cause your window, your anaerobic threshold to raise, giving you a much more, uh, a wider area of comfortability.

And of course it's going to increase your cardiovascular fitness and all the things. So it's the same thing here. Okay, I'm getting, it's getting to be too long, so I gotta hurry up ' when you're doing whatever it is, like, one of the things that I just suggested, like identifying the states that you avoid and then creating small, contained playing fields, 15 minute segments of you doing something unpleasant, distressing even, but knowing too that you can bring yourself out of it. It's a controlled environment. When you,   📍 📍 📍 📍 are doing that, you want to keep asking, checking in with yourself, which floor am I on right now? Okay, where am I on the activation scale here?  📍 📍 📍

If you notice you're hitting the top floor like you're racing, thoughts, tension, slow your exhale, like, you know, I would talk about in order to hit the vagus nerve, inhale through your nose, expand your belly, and hold it for a and you'll feel it like expands there and that will hit your. Vagus nerve, which signals to your body, to your nervous system, that you are actually okay and not in a dangerous situation.

Okay? So when you notice that you're feeling a little fidgety, agitated, or even in panic mode as you're doing these exercises to widen your window, just slowly exhale. Look around the room, find your feet, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, exercises, whatever, to bring you back into a comfortable state. Maybe a discomfort, but like not to the point where're at the top floor, okay?  📍 📍 📍

If you drop towards the basement where you're numb and you're , foggy, whatever, wanting to detach, feeling exhausted, right? Try. Three tiny movements. Either wiggle your fingers, wiggle your toes, roll your shoulders, shake your hands. I just said three tiny movements and now I'm giving you a ton.

Um, shake your hands. Stand up. Sit down. Jumping jacks is great too. I, um, used to use jumping jacks all the time. think and like inhabit the idea or the frame of mind that you're inviting a little bit more energy into your world. Not forcing myself to be okay and not forcing myself into some state that I'm not ready to go in, but things will be okay And the more I move myself, the more I bring myself out of whatever free state you might be in, right on the bottom floor in the basement.

Okay?  📍 📍

 

Embrace Discomfort for Growth: Your Weekly Action Step

 

Every time. Just remember too, you guys know that I always talk about that discomfort is the currency to whatever success you are going for, okay? Discomfort is your key to growth. And so every time you stay with that tolerable discomfort, instead of escaping, you're buying another square inch of space in your window of tolerance.

Remember that each time that you stay in that discomfort, so long as you are,  the master of that, you're moving the walls out, you're pushing the walls out. Over time, those inches become rooms and those rooms become floors, and then you've got a whole mansion you're living in,

window of tolerance to be a mansion of tolerance. And again, doesn't mean the way that I just said that, that if you're living in a mansion of tolerance and you can tolerate all of it. Doesn't mean that you need to tolerate behaviors of other people or even your own. I just mean their tolerance, your nervous system, activation, tolerance of , states of mind for you.

So just to re to summarize and to restate,  it's super helpful, important, productive, super helpful for you to determine which states of mind or emotions. Experiences that you tend to avoid  or want to hide from in your life. Okay. This is why I ask my clients always throughout our sessions, sometimes it's several times through our sessions.

What emotion does that cause you to feel or what emotion do you feel when you think that A, B, C, X, Y, Z is going to take place? What you believe on whatever you're thinking fearing is coming true. It's gonna cause you to feel some emotion, obviously a fear-based emotion, the way I just framed that, right? But when you recognize what. States of mind and emotions that you tend to avoid, then that's where you know that your work is if you want to expand this window of tolerance.

And by expanding this window of tolerance, you maybe will stop cease over functioning in relationships, right? Um, people pleasing, rescuing others so that you don't have to feel. Your own loneliness or fear or whatever it is.

After doing a lot of, nervous system work you will be able to stay present with discomfort long enough to choose how you want to be and how long you wanna feel and what you wanna feel. Even you get to define it all after regulating it, and by doing that, a lot of times you will be far less willing, like I was talking about , earlier, to be everybody's babysitter, which saves time for you. And it also, , def fogs, I guess your ideas of. Your daily purposes. Do you know what I'm saying? You're, it's less noisy so that you actually can focus on what you truly want to purpose yourself to doing.

I hope that's making sense here. So basically, by expanding your window of tolerance and regulating yourself, you will find that your boundaries for yourself, not for other people, but your boundaries for yourself will clear up,

and you may even develop less tolerance for emotional chaos, if you know what I'm saying. so it doesn't mean that when that happens that you are cold or that there's something wrong with all the other people in the world. It's fine that they're maybe unregulated or whatever's going on for them.

They're just signs that you are finally operating your own elevator, right? And that you are being selective about who you let on and into your space. It's you taking care of yourself to the utmost degree, right? You don't need external regulation in the same way you once did,

you are choosing where you invest your time and your energy, right? Which is one of the clearest markers that you have expanded your window. Alright? So

just remember to that you have learned to avoid and um, for really. Understandable, valid reasons. Okay? You may have learned to hand the elevator controls to your parents, to your partners, to the courts, The alienating parent to people maybe that you really, truly don't want to hand your power over to, and your kids and or your kids, but you're allowed to take that back.

Just because you acted that way for all this time, and they're used to a certain dynamic, doesn't mean that you have to continue acting that way or fulfilling the same role that you once did. You get to define it now, right?

So this week, pick one area, one avoidance zone. Name the feeling or the state of mind that you're afraid of, the internal state that you're afraid of, and design one small task, safe playing field, if you will, where you can let yourself feel just a little bit of it. On purpose while supporting yourself and being, the controller of your elevator and the one who takes you out of it too and puts you to the new task,

And then you wanna basically pay attention to, not necessarily to whether it went perfectly right or if it went exactly how you planned, whatever, but whether you stayed with yourself just a little longer than you usually do. So that you stayed present with your emotion, whatever discomfort that you expected to feel, that you allowed yourself to feel that and not act out on it or run from it.

Okay? That's your window expanding. That's your relationship with yourself and with your internal experiences states expanding. It's you learning to be comfortable and love your internal environment of you. 

Your work is not to white knuckle your way through every hard situation or thing, It's to gently teach your body over time that a wider range of emotions and situations are survivable, And you create that playing field with the steps that I just gave you.  So you're not meant to carry everyone, okay? You're meant to come home to your own nervous system, one breath, one boundary at a time. Okay? Re like, just changing, reintegrating your ideas of what is possible for you.

What states of mind are scary, survivable, what have you? You've got this, and the more that you're willing to experience the discomfort or even distress you otherwise labeled as, you know, your nervous system labeled as deadly, the more that you poke holes in that story by showing your body, it's not about, that's one thing I didn't say and I should've said it before. 

It's not about reasoning your way out of it because like I said, your uh, prefrontal goes offline. There's the blood supply is gone. Right? It's numbed when you're already in an active state of arisal, hyper or hypo arousal. Okay? So it's not about bullying your way out of it, it's about showing your body that you can experience this.

Whatever discomfort or distress you might feel like you might be under, you might feel like you'll be under. Okay. And then creating a, a new emotional or nervous system memory for that experience. And you widen that over time. Like do more frequent, experiments and develop a state of tolerance for whatever that emotion fearful emotion is. 

So you have to integrate your mind and your body together. It can't just be that you think your way out of it, it won't work, especially if you're coming from trauma. You have to show your body different.  And so the overthinkers out there, the intellectuals, you wanna just reason your way out of it.

And if you keep running into the same walls, this is why, because you have to incorporate, um, your nervous system into it. So that means sometimes feeling like that you're taking the hand of the 4-year-old you and walking yourself through it, even though you know intellectually that it's not scary, maybe your body is showing you different.

So that's why this practice is helpful.  Okay. All right, you guys. I gotta edit this. It's long. I gotta go.

Bye.

 Thanks so much for listening today. If you like what you're hearing and you'd like to hear more, please make sure to click subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Also, for bite-sized clips and tips, be sure to find me on TikTok or Instagram. See you next week.