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COMMENT today made at Your Page – Readers… : I wanted to talk to someone who had been through what Dr. Daniel J. Siegel said in “The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are” about windows of tolerance and an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION. This happened to me so I want to talk to someone who has had the same experience. Your blog has illuminated my life THANK YOU! I don’t want to miss the answer if it is a post on this site (checked the notification box below) because I don’t know how to navigate blogs, I’m a newbie. If they have a blog or something, please tell me how to connect to their site. You can send them my email address or if they will allow it I can email them. Thanks for all of your help!
REPLY: Good Morning! This might sound strange, but I also want to say “Congratulations!” and that I am proud of you!
The kind of information Dr. Siegel and other researchers are shedding on the subject of the human experience is finally the truth that those of us with ‘unfortunate’ beginnings in our lives absolutely NEED TO KNOW!
If you are reading Siegel’s book you mention, I hope you are highlighting and underlining, writing in all margins, and have your own notebook at your side to write in as you read. You can do a Google search any time you find something like “Windows of Tolerance” and begin to follow the links that pop up.
Dr. Siegel’s website is THE MINDSIGHT INSTITUTE at http://www.mindsightinstitute.com/
If you Google ‘Siegel mindsight’ you will find many links to follow, and among them might be a blog – I don’t know.
I can tell from your question that something went wrong during the first two years of your life. Siegel has written another book in which he has done his best to simplify the information he presents in “The Developing Mind,” and if you haven’t come across it, here’s the link on Amazon for it:
Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell (Paperback – Apr 22, 2004) at
Siegel has also authored a series of extremely informative books that can be found on this Amazon.com link, though I haven’t read them all I would recommend anything he has written:
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In the smallest nutshell I can put this vital information into, I would say that when the interactions between a newborn infant and its primary caregiver (nature has dictated MOTHER – though most often there are multiple earliest caregivers) cannot happen in the most safe and secure environment possible, so that the caregiver can exactly and appropriately respond to the signals the infant is sending out and resonate with the infant, mirror the infant’s state back to it appropriately and correctly, the infant cannot possibly develop itself in the best way possible.
An infant’s primary caregiver is literally ‘downloading’ its brain into its infant. As all these books describe, it is the RIGHT brain that develops first through these interactions. Our right brain, according to how these early interactions actually went, either can regulate and control emotions ‘properly’ or will be built in ‘traumatic’ infancies NOT to regulate and control emotions. Then we have problems with emotional DYSREGULATION, which is where the description of windows of tolerance fits in (along with a whole lot of other things: ability to smoothly transition between emotional-mental states, the ability to self-sooth or ‘down-regulate’ emotional intensity (yes, like a car’s gas pedal and brake system) — etc.)
This entire right brain development is NOT ONLY about emotional regulation abilities. This same right brain develops through SOCIAL interactions and is, in fact, our SOCIAL brain as well as our emotional one. All these complexities are tied through our earliest experiences with our primary caregivers into the development of our entire nervous system (of which the brain is a part of), our autonomic nervous system (and vagus nerve system) which is our STOP and GO part of our body that governs our stress-anxiety (fight flight, freeze) response AND our calm and connection system, as well as the development of our entire immune system and the development of how our very DNA manifests itself (which changes in early stressful environments).
Because you have found Siegel’s work, I strongly suspect you (as I am) fit into the category of less-than-best earliest caregiver interactions. This has affected how we grew and developed — and who we are today.
I am going to give you here a link to an article written by Dr. Allan N. Schore. His books can be found also on Amazon.com, but believe me, he is NOT easy to read though his work contains the absolute truth about how this entire human development process is affected by early caregiver-infant interactions:
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AND HERE IS Dr. SCHORE’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ONLINE ARTICLE – which I recommend you read ASAP:
http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreDP97.pdf
and here:
EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH
http://www.atlc.org/members/resources/schore1.pdf
This article is absolutely fascinating, and provides the foundational information (including drawings) that all the other developmental neuroscientists are ultimately referring to.
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As if this isn’t already a BUNCH of information, here’s what a search of this blog for “Teicher” leads to:
https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/?s=teicher
His work, (search Google for Martin Teicher child abuse) concludes that given enough ‘trouble’ during early developmental years, it is possible that an entirely different brain forms from the one that would have formed in a safe and secure “good enough” early attachment environment — and he and his Harvard researchers call these trauma altered development brains, “evolutionarily altered.” I extend his thoughts to include an entirely different BODY as a whole.
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To address your mention of “an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION” I would say that an experience of this nature, and one that led you to this blog and to Dr. Siegel’s work, is a piece of the puzzle whose bigger picture is included in all this information I have provided you links for. This ‘sense of explosion’ is probably NOT happening in a body-brain-mind-self whose earliest body-brain (especially right brain) needs were met ESPECIALLY birth to age one. It is an experience of emotional-physiological intensity that (in my thinking) missed its chance to be regulated BEFORE it reached this state because those abilities were NOT built into the body-brain adequately in the first place – as all these researchers describe. AGAIN, read the Schore online article!!
When an infant’s earliest caregiver interactions do NOT build the right brain and its related physiology within an OPTIMAL infant developmental environment, the SET POINT for the entire body-brain will not be set at CALM. That is the GOAL, and any of us who did not get what we needed for this to happen have the center point for our entire physiology SET somewhere else — like the timing on a car, perhaps. Homeostasis, or a state of ‘balanced equilibrium’ is supposed to be where our nervous system-stress response system comes to rest. That point is CALM — not over or under amped! If we didn’t get our internal balance point set at CALM before we were one year old, we will struggle the rest of our lives to balance-regulate our emotional-physiological state.
Lots of info. Include ‘child abuse’ even if you do not believe you suffered it in your Google searches for information along with ‘brain development’. As you read what comes up I think you will be amazed at how this ‘new picture’ describes the basis of our adult difficulties all the way around! Please stop by here again with any comments you would like to make, and have a wonderful new learning experience! Linda
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Stop the Storm 