In therapy, just like in life, we want to stay within our window of tolerance. Our window of tolerance is our individual capacity for experiencing emotions, or the amount of charge that our nervous systems can handle without resorting to a maladaptive coping mechanism or a survival mechanism like fight/flight/freeze. The good work in therapy happens when we push ourselves near the edge of our window, but don’t go too far outside of it into overwhelm and possible retraumatization.
What does that look like IRL? It could be a good cry in therapy, voicing anger in an embodied way, staying with our anxiety and exploring it for a little bit longer than we are used to. What does going outside the window look like? A cry that doesn't resolve itself but spirals into shame and victimization. Tapping into anger that is so intense it makes us leave our body. Anxiety that escalates into panic.
When we are able to consistently stay within our window in therapy and push to the edge of it repeatedly, we expand our window over time, and that means growth. A big part of growth is the ability to experience the world more fully and go deeper in relationships because we’ve expanded our own internal capacity for emotion.
This sounds great in theory, but can be a bit harder in practice. So often in therapy, we go for too much too fast. We recognize we have trauma, and then we want to heal it. We recognize that it’s difficult to manage our emotions, and we want to find the fastest path to ease so that we can be productive again. We know that therapy is a significant financial expense, and we want to make the most of it. Emotional pain is often understood by our rational brains as a problem to be solved. The strategies we take from this place of problem solving can lead to increased suffering when it doesn’t go the way we want.
Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes we tend to avoid emotions in therapy. We stay intellectual and controlled. We treat therapy like an investigation of content without acknowledging the feelings that accompany the exploration. We deflect our therapists' attempts to slow down and go deeper and we keep charging forward in our analytical brains. We have all done this at one point or another. Our brain and our culture favors this type of avoidance.
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What does it mean to bend not break in therapy?
Within the context of therapy, bend don’t break means flexing our emotional muscles without overwhelming the system. You want to experience the good discomfort of emotional growth while staying within your limits.
This concept is more about intent than perfectionism. There will be times in therapy when you do get overwhelmed because a trauma surfaces that you and your therapist are unprepared for. There will be other times when you don’t go deep enough to flex the muscle at all. All of that is okay and part of the process. A good intention for each session is to find the sweet spot of leaning into emotional discomfort without getting overwhelmed. This can be an intention that you and your therapist work on together. You want to have some language around finding and staying within that zone of productive emotional discomfort.
Often this means slowing down the pace of therapy. Going slower and chipping away at trauma and emotional discomfort a little bit at a time in each session actually means going faster in the long run. Beginning to draw attention to the signals in your body telling you that you’ve done enough emotional work for the day, and respecting them. Challenging the narratives in your mind that tell you that you need to heal within a certain time frame, and embracing healing as a lifelong journey.
It also means starting where you are. If you haven’t experienced a lot of emotional validation in your life, then your nervous system capacity is probably not very developed and can only handle a small amount of charge. It’s also likely that it will take you a while to build up trust with your therapist. Both of these things are also okay, and it’s also okay to tap into emotions just a little bit in the beginning, and slowly build up momentum over time. Therapists understand the slow and delicate nature of this work.
Starting small is an act of self love, not neglect.
What does it mean to bend not break in therapy?
Within the context of therapy, bend don’t break means flexing our emotional muscles without overwhelming the system. You want to experience the good discomfort of emotional growth while staying within your limits.
This concept is more about intent than perfectionism. There will be times in therapy when you do get overwhelmed because a trauma surfaces that you and your therapist are unprepared for. There will be other times when you don’t go deep enough to flex the muscle at all. All of that is okay and part of the process. A good intention for each session is to find the sweet spot of leaning into emotional discomfort without getting overwhelmed. This can be an intention that you and your therapist work on together. You want to have some language around finding and staying within that zone of productive emotional discomfort.
Often this means slowing down the pace of therapy. Going slower and chipping away at trauma and emotional discomfort a little bit at a time in each session actually means going faster in the long run. Beginning to draw attention to the signals in your body telling you that you’ve done enough emotional work for the day, and respecting them. Challenging the narratives in your mind that tell you that you need to heal within a certain time frame, and embracing healing as a lifelong journey.
It also means starting where you are. If you haven’t experienced a lot of emotional validation in your life, then your nervous system capacity is probably not very developed and can only handle a small amount of charge. It’s also likely that it will take you a while to build up trust with your therapist. Both of these things are also okay, and it’s also okay to tap into emotions just a little bit in the beginning, and slowly build up momentum over time. Therapists understand the slow and delicate nature of this work.
Starting small is an act of self love, not neglect.
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Join our mailing list
Want more content like this?
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Want more content like this?
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