Increasing capacity

 

Capacity is a crucial concept in trauma treatment. It describes the zone in which we are regulated and able to regulate ourselves after we get stressed. In a way that makes it more important for daily life than the Window of Tolerance, which puts a greater emphasis on noticing our dysregulation. It is normal to get stressed and have stress responses and that will be with us all our life. Resilience, our ability to return to a calm state after stress happenes, is more important than never getting stressed. When we move beyond our resilience, we are in trouble. Understanding our capacity helps us to navigate life and make good choices so we can manage the stress and not get overwhelmed by it.

With complex trauma, our capacity might be very small. We have to avoid a lot of things to keep us from being overwhelmed and getting retraumatized and that will limit our freedom considerably. If we try to just push through we will have to make use of more dissociation or other coping methods of the past. When we are forced to function, we will increase our structural dissociation and split off huge parts of the experience. It is the opposite of healing.

 

 

When we push ourselves into an overwhelming situation we don’t develop more tolerance for it, we just numb and dissociate more. Pure exposure will not solve our problem because our problem is not anxiety. Our problem has to do with our nervous system that gets overwhelmed and shuts down. If anything, we make it worse when we force ourselves into even more overwhelm. That is not therapeutic. It is just often done because CBT is still believed to be a useful approach for trauma when it really isn’t. We cannot scare ourselves out of a damaged nervous system that doesn’ tolerate stress. There must be another way to increase our tolerance, one that has something to do with growth, not force.

The regulation skills we usually learn in therapy are good for regulation but they have no impact on our ability to tolerate something. We can manage a situation but we won’t be able to tolerate it any better the next time we face it. Our stress response will be just as big and then we regulate again. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. For me, that is not a solution, just management of a problem that could be solved.

 

 

The method I know to be effective comes from Somatic Experiencing and uses Pendulation and Titration while challenging the edge of our Window of Tolerance. The idea is to face the stressful situation for a short moment, the smallest possible amount of it. You can go up to 3% above what you can already tolerate and no more than that. Nobody who works out would add 50lb to the weight they regularly lift and expect to work out on that level without injury. We want slow growth and we need tiny steps to get there. It is more than enough to challenge our nervous system. To make these tiny steps possible we usually start with either imagery or talking about the situation. That is more than enough to create the impact we need. There is no need to be in this situation in real life for now. That comes a lot later.

 

Once we notice that we are getting stressed and before we hit a real flight/fight/freeze response, we drop the topic or the inner picture and move directly into grounding. That means we need to have enough body awareness to recognize our stress responses, otherwise we won’t be able to pace ourselves and help from outside is needed for that. And we need to get good at orientation and grounding before trying any of this. We can also change the topic, focus on an area where we have some expertise to create different brain activity and look around while we do that. The goal is to calm all the way down. When you think you are ready to move on, use your grounding tools for 3-5 more minutes. We have a tendency not to calm down completely and move on too quickly because we always move through life with elevated stress levels. Regular trauma therapists usually make the same mistake. They support us to calm down enough so we can keep talking, not all the way. Our ability to function is not what matters here. We need our nervous system to do certain things for us and in this case it needs to calm down all the way and not just to the point where we can function. It makes a huge difference.

 

When we are super calm and there are signs that our safe & social system is on board again, we can turn toward our stressful situation again. We are just dipping our toe in. No diving in head first. All we need is to give our nervous system a nudge. It will start getting stressed again and then we repeat the process where we stop immediately, turn toward Orientation&Grounding and our other regulation skills, all the way down. One of the challenges is not to go too deep into the stress response. The other one is to actually calm down. That is why it helps a lot to learn this in the presence of a person who is trained in observing stress responses in the body. At first that will need support because our inner gauge isn’t very sensitive.

 

This back and forth movement using tiny steps can be repeated a couple of times. If it is done properly it is absurdly exhausting and I wouldn’t recommend practicing for a lot longer than 30min, even if 27min of that are needed to calm down and it seems like not enough hard things happened. 3/27 is probably a good ratio! Calming down is very hard work, harder than looking at the stressful situation. It is essential to the process, because this method really is not about exposure at all. We need to forget about exposure and think in terms of nervous system movement.

 

It doesn’t take very long and we will notice that we can be with our situation a bit longer before we feel the stress levels rising or we can get a little closer or deeper into the topic. The improvement will come as our nervous system learns how to move again in the face of that situation. What was frozen in place becomes more dynamic. Maybe we can think of it as if we train moving in different paces. What our nervous system is used to doing is to run like crazy and then drop because it was too much. We train it to sit, walk, run for a moment, slow down and stand around etc. That way it learns that there are options, that not every response has to be a sprint. It can move faster and slower and it’s safe to do that. We restore a flexible dynamic. Eventually it will reduce how often it overreacts. It learns that a slower pace is enough and how to enter that slower pace.

 

You might not need a body-focused therapist to use this tool, as long as there is awareness of stress responses and signs of stress. You shouldn’t work with trauma therapists who are not at least somatically aware anyway. Today it is literally part of their job to know about stress and be up to date with trauma science in that regard. In my experience, Ts will chronically wait too long before they intervene though because they work with a concept of functioning and that isn’t what is needed here. You will have to talk about the details of this technique to make sure you are on the same page. All thoughts of exposure as a tool need to be eliminated. It is not about exposure, it is about movement in the nervous system, about stress and regulation. Our problem is not fear. Our problem is a small Window of Tolerance. It can be carefully expanded from the inside out, when we use pendulation at the edge of our ability and calm down fully. That way we can slowly and gently increase our capacity.