Ups and Downs - Part Two
How did it go reading the Psalms and noticing the Psalmist’s “ups and downs?” Were you able to practice accepting your emotional state? How about being able to practice self-compassion?
In this blog I want to look at how we neurologically develop a specific type of “window of tolerance” and what we can do to expand it so we are not so easily emotionally dysregulated. Let’s begin with the neurobiology of an infant.
Infants do no have the neurological development to regulate their own emotions. If you’re not sure about this just hang out with some infants. Their “ups and downs” are extreme! (I believe the infant’s extreme emotional expression are because the he thinks he may not survive.). They easily go from calmly cooing to a crying meltdown in a matter of seconds. The infants emotional brain is online at birth, maybe even in utero. Their cognitive brain does not turn on until the end of their second year. What this means is the infant and the young chid do not have regulators for their emotions.
So how does the child regulate emotions? The parents are the child’s emotional thermostat. For instance mom can hold the crying infant close and speak softly to him. Often this closeness is enough for the baby to begin to calm and quieten. As this comforting is repeated hundreds of times throughout childhood, the child ever so slowly learns to regulate her own emotions.
If a child does not get a “good enough” amount of emotional comforting and soothing she compensates by some less effective strategy. She may: learn to not depend on others, learn to desperately cling to others, or vacillate between not depending on others and being clingy. Over time these practices become habited and take on a permanent role in her personality.
As an adult your emotional “window of tolerance” was set by the way your parents related to you. This “window of tolerance,” that you learned with your parents, is now a neurological network in your brain. Think of this way, you plug into this young neurological network when you get triggered as an adult and move outside the “window of tolerance” you learned as a child. This idea explains why you can be in an “adult state of mind,” get tapped and shift to a “child state of mind,” that’s characterized by extreme emotion.
Can you see how important self-compassion is when you realize you have plugged into an neurological “child state”? Self-compassion gives you the comfort and soothing that your brain never got as a child. It is also critical that you develop relationships that comfort and soothe. Remember we get hurt in relationships (parents) and we can heal in relationships (adult connections).
Practice. I want to encourage you to keep practicing “self-compassion.” Recall how you treat a good friend that is hurting and treat yourself that way. I have provided the following 3 statements that you can practice when having painful emotions or circumstances.
“May I be kind to myself in this moment.”
“May I hold my pain with tenderness.”
“May I be gentle and understanding with myself.”
These statements come from author Kristin Neff and her writings and research on on self-compassion. Her website is https://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/.