I've been thinking a lot about my and other people's windows of tolerance, thinking about it for the past five years to be honest. I learned about the concept in therapy and was astounded to finally have words for my constantly changing emotional state. When you have traumatic experiences or attachment issues in your past, your window isn't very big—the opening is so small and it takes a lot of factors to keep you in this very small area where you feel safe in your brain and especially your body. You can make your window bigger though. Therapy helps, bodywork helps, processing in safe relationships helps a lot. You open your window more and that state is easier to access because there's literally more room where you feel safe.
Here are things I've been asking myself a lot, especially recently:
what makes me feel safe?
who makes me feel safe?
what factors make it hard to stay in my window?
what do I need to feel safe enough to be with myself in my body?
how do I listen to what I need without judgment?
My window used to be really small. The most seemingly little thing would set me off and I'd plunge into dissociation or surge into fight mode; it's easy to think something is wrong with you, that you're broken because you can't take things in or talk about them without shutting down in either direction. There's nothing wrong with you though—something, maybe even multiple things, happened to you and your body found ways to survive. You took care of yourself for a long time in these ways; it's just that eventually the very things that kept you safe can keep you from connecting and growing. I think of it almost like you've always had a really sensitive smoke alarm because you had to be hypervigilant to stay safe but now you're not in that situation anymore and that alarm is waking you up and interrupting the things you're doing, getting in the way more than helping. You're growing and your window can grow with you. Your window changes and you change because what you're able to withstand, what you want and need, changes and shifts. Let yourself change. Let yourself shift.