How to Expand a Client’s Window of Tolerance Helping clients remain within their window of tolerance can be critical to healing. So how can we help clients whose windows have been narrowed by a traumatic experience? Many great poets have described their emotional experience as an ocean, ebbing and flowing with the tide. But when […]
Search Results for: window of tolerance
How to Help Your Clients Understand Their Window of Tolerance [Infographic]
Clients are best able to cope with stressors and triggers when they can manage the resulting emotions. So how can we help clients who struggle to manage the anxiety, anger, and pain brought on by everyday stressors? In situations like this, psychoeducation can be one of our best tools – and one helpful concept is […]
How to Help a Client Come Back into Their Window of Tolerance
The window of tolerance is such an important concept when we’re working with trauma and dysregulation. For clients who have experienced trauma, that window often becomes quite narrow. They may space out and dissociate, or get too angry or anxious to focus. Or, they might fluctuate between hyper- and hypo-arousal. When they’re too far outside […]
A Sensorimotor Technique to Guide How and When You Self-Disclose
When it comes to self-disclosure in our clinical work, it can be critical to weigh very carefully just how and when we use it . . . . . . especially in cases where a client relays an experience that bumps up against a painful or overwhelming experience, we may have had ourselves. But according […]
An Exercise for Working with Hypoarousal – with Eboni Webb, PsyD
There are times when a client may get triggered and overwhelmed in the middle of difficult trauma work. For some clients this can look like anger, irritability, a rapid heart rate, and other signs of hyperarousal. But for other clients, you might see them become less and less responsive as their arousal drops. And this […]