How Trauma Creates Narrow “Windows of Tolerance” in Survivors

Transcript

and we will start with the nervous system an impact of charge of a system so in order to understand impact of trauma on the dynamic nervous system we need to review the concept of the window of tolerance so just to remind you that the window of tolerance really deals with the levels of arousal that are maintained by our economic nervous system and there are in general two branches in our dynamic nervous system sympathetic and parasympathetic now parasympathetic is really complex system and we can say that there are two branches of the parasympathetic as well but just for the simplicity and clarity we will keep it as you know two branches sympathetic and parasympathetic with those branches work together well in a coordinated fashion we maintain optimal level of arousal and we are inside that window of Tolerance so our arousal doesn't stay the same during the day and from one day to another day you know sometimes we may feel a little bit more energetic and present sometimes we may feel a little bit less energetic and present but if our nervous system is healthy we generally stay within this window of tolerance when we are awake now when something really unusual hits something unexpected and really stressful those two branches may get dysregulated and then we are thrown outside of the window of Tolerance in the ether in the hyper arousal zone underneath or hyper arousal zone above so in the hyper arousal zone we have parasympathetic response that is very very pronounced there is too much parasympathetic activation and not enough sympathetic activation so if we seen about sympathetic branch metaphorically is a gas pedal in the car and parasympathetic branch is a brake in the car so in this situation there is too much break and not enough gas in the system right so it's very very we slow down everything slows down in our body the symptoms of the hyper arousal have to do with a lot of fatigue and lack of energy slowing down of our cognitive processes we cannot quite figure out what's going on we feel overwhelmed very often we may experience memory issues when we are in the hyper arousal emotion-wise we may either feel down depressed said I like suppressed or we may feel numb and disconnected from our emotions now when we are in the hyper arousal rage there is too much gas and not enough brake in the car so it's everything is really you know increase and expedited in our system so there is too much arousal we are feeling fidgety and nervous and rushing and you know we may experience our cognitive processes as you know having 300 thoughts in one moment and not really being able to catch any one of them or focus on any one of them there may be increasing anxiety emotionally or in anger and irritability now if our autonomous nervous system is healthy this true branches will catch up and calling you late with each other we don't have to do anything consciously it will happen automatically on its own and so before we know it we will be back inside that windows tolerance and we'll continue going right so this is normal functioning now in order to compare and contrast normal functioning of the dynamic nervous system with the complex and developmental trauma I have chosen an image and a metaphor of a bridge so think about windows tolerance is a bridge in the normal situation we have wide steady bridge person may run on it dance do flips you know whatever they want and they're not going to fall off the bridge they will keep moving through the day causing the day you know on this bridge now something really unusual happened like huge storm came and drew them off the bridge no big deal because there is Crick and Denise they dry themselves off put themselves back on the bridge and keep going so our complex and developmental trauma situation is very different from there so the bridge here is really narrow and Shake here step to the right step to the left and personable fall of this bridge so it takes a lot of energy to just stay on the bridge okay not to not fall off it so to speak now when our trauma survivor falls over this bridge there is no clicker Denise so they hit pretty hard very often there are high there is higher cost for them of being outside of the window of Tolerance and its associated with more negative consequences when they fall outside of that window of Tolerance now to give you an example of that of what we might see in our offices and how this might present you know in our authors I wanted to tell you about the client that I have been seeing for a few years now she is the woman in her forties she is white she has been married for 20 years and she and her husband have decided one day to sell some furniture from their house so you know he's a photographer they agreed that he will take some pictures and post them online on different social media sites and so forth and this is what he did so one day she opened up her Facebook account one morning and she saw those different pictures on her Facebook wall she started looking at them and as she was looking at the pictures she said that suddenly she felt the surge of anger and and just like resentment and and heard and she started hearing thoughts in Hue mind my husband really doesn't care about me anymore he humiliated me in front of my friends and family I cannot believe he will do something like this to me she ran to her husband and started screaming at him and calling him names so she was extremely upset and really outside of human-dog tolerance when she came to the session she see me she was crying and shaking and sobbing and she was saying to me that she and her husband haven't choked for three days this they had this you know thing happened three days ago it was a huge fight they were trimming each other about divorce and now they're not talking and she's afraid that they are moving towards divorce right so when you know I started first of all I helped her come inside human-dog tolerance by doing a couple of ug practices that we will actually do this morning later on once she was inside human dough of tolerance we started trying to understand we started exploring to understand what has happened what has happened what made her so angry and she had real difficulty visit you know she couldn't really remember or understand or grasp it in any way the only thing she could remember is that she looked at the pictures and she doesn't know what it was in the pictures but suddenly she got into the state you know when she was just raging so we started looking at those pictures picture by picture by picture and we spent some time you know looking at them and finally she said this and she pointed you know to a specific pitch and a specific place on the picture and you can see that there is a sticky note that she's pointing to a sticky note on the door of the cardboard okay that was in the picture and when she's saying this this the sticky note so we enlarging the sticky note when you enlarge it you can see that there is a recipe written on this note there is the name of the dish the ingredients that go into making the dish and how to make the dish and she proceeded to explain to me that in her family they have a family cookbook that you know has a number of like really interesting original recipes in it that they're not sharing with the rest of the world okay so they are passing this book from like one part of the family to another from one generation to another and it's they sing so in there in her extended family this cookbook has been a theme for quite a while now and she's not supposed to share this with the rest of the world so she wrote this recipe because they were expecting company of new friends from church who she wanted to surprise with this dish and she cannot remember things so she wrote it down for herself Susan posted it so that she can remember the dish and what you buy and so forth now as she's telling me about it she more cunning getting more interviews thinking process and what was happening at that moment and she said in that moment I felt like he betrayed me because he posted this recipe for everyone to see and so now my family sees that I shared this recipe you know all of my friends now know what the recipe is so it's not even a surprise anymore and she felt really bad about it so once you got outside of her window of Tolerance she couldn't think what it means and why maybe her husband did that right so she just assumed that he did it maliciously and he was out to get here and he despaired here and so forth now when she's inside human those programs in the session and we are talking about it she's saying things like you know what now that I think about it my husband is not a detail-oriented person he probably didn't even notice you know that there was the sticky note on this door you know and then she's saying and even if you noticed he's not a cook in our family he doesn't give a damn about who books and recipes and all that it doesn't mean anything to him she said I'm not even aware if he knows about this generational cookbook thing you know this is going more than my family so and now she's realizing oh my god you know I really hurt my husband and I really heard this is you know relationship and connection that we had with each other so fail really down and hit pretty hard as far as the consequences go it took you a while to really repair that with her husband because he was very hurt by you know how vicious she was in her attack this emotional verbal attack at him okay makes sense as far as what happens given the window of programs closes okay so now with our complex and developmental trauma survivors then we have the situation when they really spend most of their time outside of the window of tolerance not necessarily as far as this particular client and the particular situation that I described but pretty steadily outside of the windows tolerance is in the hyper arousal zone hyper arousal zone or more often moving back and forth between hyper arousal hyper arousal and not being able to land for any long period of China in said that wind of tolerance now I wanted to talk about one specific nerve that is a part of our economic nervous system and I wanted you to see kind of the schematic picture of this nerve so I'm talking about the vagus nerve here which is the longest nerve in our body and it innervates all kinds of different organs internal organs and runs so most of our torso starting in the brainstem and running down you know through the whole torso so this nerve of course is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system but it's also you know who regulates this true branches it participates it has very important role in coagulating the branches and as a result maintaining that window of tolerance so the width and stability of our window of Tolerance is pretty directly connected to the health of the vagus nerve and its ability to pass signals really quickly and to pass high quality signals from body to the brain back and forth now you know what we know from research is that in trauma survivors a lot of them have vagus nerve that is not really very healthy they have low heart rate variability this is how we measure their strengths and health of this nerve we also know that in yoga a lot of different physical practices are really focused on improving the health of this nerve from all kinds of different perspectives movements breathing chanting there is a lot in yoga that really effects vagus nerve the more we trigger the vagus nerve the strong and the healthier it becomes so that's kind of the you know the formula for improving the springs and their health of this nerve as we are moving through different practices I will point out to you which particular poses and practices improve you know the strength and quality of the vagus nerve you