Speaker 1: 0:00

I usually talk about myself or my personal life, but it's not every week in which my house gets hit by a tornado and I get COVID all in the same week, and so I thought maybe this week should be an exception. So today I'm going to talk with you about how my house getting hit by a tornado and me getting COVID all in the same week affected my window of tolerance and my ability to self-regulate. I'm recording this on a Sunday. Take my week back to the beginning of the week, back to, you know, last Sunday. Monday, I was increasing the dosage of a medication and it was causing me side effects, so I wasn't sleeping very well. I was getting like an hour, hour and a half of sleep, kind of uninterrupted, before I would wake up and then have some trouble getting back to sleep. So, coming into the middle of the week, I was very tired already and I was having other effects. I was feeling sick, almost like I had the flu, and I thought those might be some side effects from the medication as well. I didn't realize that I was coming down with COVID and that started getting us into the middle of the week. So on Wednesday I wake up as I normally do. I've got a routine I get up about 4.30 in the morning, I go to the gym, I come back, I get into infrared sauna that we've got and then I have my breakfast. So on this past Wednesday I was following my routine, even though I wasn't sleeping or feeling well I probably should have just slept in, honestly but I had gone to the gym and I was driving back and the weather didn't seem too bad. I wasn't paying attention to the news and I didn't realize that there were tornado warnings and watches in my area. So I get back to my house, I get into the sauna and it starts to thunderstorm and my wife, rebecca, comes and says hey, maybe you should not be in the sauna while this is going on, which my original thought was well, it's made of wood, so it should be okay, probably not the smartest. So I get out of the sauna and then I do the next not smart thing, which I tend to do in a thunderstorm and if you're from Oklahoma, you probably do something similar.

Speaker 1: 2:10

I went out back with my coffee and I was just watching the thunderstorm on the back patio. Well, rebecca comes out to the back patio to say, hey, maybe we should go inside because it started picking up and no sooner had she come outside. Then the rain went from vertical to horizontal and it started hitting us directly. And then, within another second, it went from being horizontal to going up, coming from the ground and hitting us upwards, and we realized that was no good. So we immediately came into the house and barely got the door shut and as we were coming in, that's when the tornado hit we. Another second or two we would have been outside in it.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Fortunately it wasn't the strongest tornado ever. It was an F1, a little over a hundred mile an hour winds. It wasn't enough to cause us to need to have a brand new fence. It took out our fence, took out trees. Our roof has to be replaced. One of the scariest things was it took a roofing tile from someone else's house through our bathroom window, this big window in our bathroom that's frosted and it's where Rebecca and I usually that time in the morning are sitting at our or standing at our sinks getting ready in the morning. And it came through the double pane window with such force that it ruined the mirror, took chunks out of the wood cabinets and out of the wall, from all of the, the panes of glass, the pellets of glass that came through into the window, so right where we would have been standing. We would have been shredded if that had come through when we were standing there, which was something to take in. So that tornado hit and we go outside and it's, you know, a lot of destruction. We see other houses on our street, garage doors mangled and gone, roofs gone, portions of roofs gone, sides of homes sort of exposed, and so not a good situation.

Speaker 1: 4:22

While we're dealing with that during the day, I'm starting to feel progressively worse. And then I realized the next day that I've got COVID, and COVID hit me hard this is the hardest it's hit me since it first came out. Rebecca and I first got COVID. Rebecca and I first got COVID, we believe, in January of 2020. Our son was in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena and we were flying through LAX right when COVID was first making its appearance in the United States and we both came down with something that just knocked us on our tails and the doctors didn't know what it was at the time because it was in January of 2020. Turns out, we think it was COVID at the time, and from that I developed a heart issue that required treatment, and so I have a kind of a checkered past with COVID.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Every time it comes around, every time I think I have it, part of me flashes back to having those heart issues and being worried about that. So this week was a lot for me and a lot for my family. Plus, also, this is the time of year when my son is now turning 20. And that has a lot of baggage for us, emotionally too. We're really happy for him, but also when your kid turns 20, you're thinking to yourself what does that mean for me? So, lots going on.

Speaker 1: 5:57

This week I found it really interesting because in the last several weeks of this series we've been talking about the window of tolerance and we've been talking about the three or four R's depending on how you want to look at it of regulate, relate, reason and repair, and it started making me think how am I doing with my window of tolerance? How am I doing with my window of tolerance? And without me having to ask her? Rebecca let me know, she let me know that I was having some difficulty with my window of tolerance. Having been talking about it for the last two weeks, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how it impacted me this week me this week. So my window of tolerance is more narrow than I'd like it to be.

Speaker 1: 6:57

I'm a very, extremely hyper-regulated person, just as a result of my family history, and so I tell people a lot. I've had clients who used to be a little concerned because it seemed like I didn't care about their situation. Sometimes I wouldn't react the way that they wanted me to react, and I would have to let them know that this is you know, this is the way that I react. This is me happy, this is me mad, this is me sad. You're going to get the same affect from me Oftentimes, regardless of what I'm thinking or feeling, and I'm improving on that. That's what I've told people for years. But it's been getting better with some good therapy, and had an amazing transformative experience not so long ago with ayahuasca. That really helped me connect with my emotions for the first time, and so I am, generally speaking, extremely hyper-regulated Through all of the work that I've been doing. One of my safe spaces is my wife, rebecca, and she was able to help me understand that I was not in my window of tolerance this week, and the way that looks for me is I don't get angry right, and so I'm not lashing out emotionally, I'm not raising my voice, I'm not doing anything like that because I'm hyper-regulated.

Speaker 1: 8:31

What it looks like for me is I get extremely distrustful when my nervous system gets triggered, when I'm having my physiological response that's booting me out of my window of tolerance, I start to fall into the pattern of thinking that I can't trust anybody, that no one is safe. And so if you have, if you've ever been in a situation where there's been some sort of natural disaster, hurricane, tornado, flood soon after that incident, so soon after this tornado came through, our streets were completely clogged with people who were here to do work, some who were called and some who weren't weren't we had. Fortunately, because we have lots of connections in the area, we were able to get ahold of some good folks who were on their way to our house pretty quickly. My wife's grandparents live three doors down from us, on the street behind us, and unfortunately their house got hit as well, so we had much of family coming around as well.

Speaker 1: 9:44

And when you have a personality where, when you get kicked out of your window of tolerance and you don't trust anybody, then everyone on that street is predatory. You see a work fan and you're thinking don't come up and talk to me about having work done, because I don't want to talk to you Like I don't trust you. You're going to try to get something over on me, and it's this anxiety that someone is going to hurt you in a way that maybe you don't even understand, because I am not a handy person whatsoever. You could tell me that you know, to fix the roof we're going to have to order a new flex capacitor, and I would be like, oh, that's, that sounds like a lot, but I'll have no idea that you're, you know, saying something that doesn't make any sense. And so when you take that level of ignorance together with the level of anxiety and this inherent distrust of people that I get when I'm outside of my window of tolerance, then it's not a good mix, especially when you have to work with a bunch of people that you've never met before, who are coming to talk with you about the damage to your house that you don't understand, to start to give you estimates so that you can deal with the insurance company which you imagine is going to try to screw you over. It's not a good mixture, especially because when I'm within my window of tolerance.

Speaker 1: 11:04

When I'm a better self, the self that I like myself to be, I'm much more optimistic. I tend to see some of the good in people. But my wife was able to say to me hey, you're being negative, like you're only seeing the negative. You're thinking everyone's against you. You know, are you okay? And I was able to receive from her that feedback that helped me understand that I had shifted, because when you're outside of your window of tolerance, very often you're not going to notice it. I mean, I wasn't thinking to myself hey, I'm outside of the window of tolerance and that's why I'm perceiving everyone to be against me, or I'm perceiving people to only be here to try to get something from me or take advantage of me. Right, my thinking in the moment is that's what these people are. I mean, if I'm really deep into it, I may be thinking see, and I'm the smart one because I know what they're about, you know, I know what they're trying to do, so it can be a self-reinforcing thing as well.

Speaker 1: 12:10

So when I found myself outside of my own window of tolerance and was able to be made aware of it because of the work that I've done and the work that Rebecca has done to build up that level of comfort and trust. It started to be a conscious effort for me to try to get back into the space of being more open-minded, of not assuming that everybody was against me, not assuming that people were going to try to hurt me. That can be really difficult and I know that this isn't a co-parenting situation, but you can make some analogies, I think, to co-parenting dynamics. So you run into a situation that's completely out of your control, like this tornado, completely out of my control. I didn't do anything to put myself in the path of the tornado. In fact I've done things to protect myself from a tornado. Our roof has what's called tornado strapping to try to make sure the roof stays on if a tornado comes, and in fact I think it helps in this case. You know I have good insurance that I pay a lot for to try to protect us in case there's loss. So we've done things to prepare ourselves for this situation that occurred to us, that we didn't cause, that, we didn't make worse, but it still affected us.

Speaker 1: 13:35

And I think when you get into co-parent dynamics, the same thing can happen to you. You can have a situation that is generated by your co-parent, which is coming at no fault of your own, which you may even have taken precautions against, but still you find yourself hit, smack with it and now it's upset your world. That can easily create in you this nervous system, physiological response that can kick you outside of your window of tolerance. How you deal with that is something that's different for everybody. Some people do really well breathing, having some intentional breathing. Some people don't do well with that because they start judging themselves about how they're performing that intentional breathing. Some people do well taking a walk, just getting that movement. Some people that sets them off. For whatever reason. There may be a sense, memory related to taking a walk. Or if you're in an area that's been impacted by the tornado, perhaps taking a walk is only going to make it worse because everywhere you go you're surrounded by the devastation. So it's going to be different for everybody what you do when you realize you're outside of the window of tolerance.

Speaker 1: 14:57

Sometimes the hardest part can be determining that you're outside of it To have sufficient relationships with people who are in your life who can help. You see that you're not thinking clearly, having at least one person in your life who will be able to tell you in the moment and have you receive it in the moment that you're not acting the way that you want to act can be incredibly helpful. It's important for us all to have friends who can help us feel better about things. It's absolutely critical to have people in our lives who can tell us when we're not being our best selves and we can receive it from them. That's an extremely powerful thing that I'm very fortunate to have, in which I haven't always allowed myself to have, so I definitely see the value in it the more I'm having access to it. I understand.

Speaker 1: 15:58

I feel like this is very rambling. I don't know if you can tell, but my energy is about zero. I'm still not quite over the COVID, although I feel better. I'm going to be going into work tomorrow, into the office, understanding that I have all sorts of work that didn't get done last week. Kind of like when you go on vacation and you come back and you know that there's all this work piled up for you, that at least you had the week of vacation and you feel good about it, I feel exhausted going into a week where I'm going to be trying to make up for last week but rather than not have a video today because I always put a video out on Mondays, or an audio if you're listening to the podcast and not looking on YouTube Today I wanted to share with you how I was feeling because I thought it was so interesting at least it was interesting for me that I've been talking about the window of tolerance and talking about regulating and relating and reasoning and all those things, and I got put through something, a combination of events in the last week that completely took me out of my window of tolerance.

Speaker 1: 17:12

It's so easy to happen, it can happen so quickly and it's not your fault. When you get knocked out of your window of tolerance, the thing that you can do is hopefully recognize it as soon as possible, repair any damage that maybe you did while you were outside of your window of tolerance, forgive yourself and move on, because that's what we're going to be doing. Going to be doing so. Thank you very much for allowing me to sort of ramble about my week and my experience with the window of tolerance. I'm going to be thinking more about this as we go through following weeks.

Speaker 1: 17:51

I was talking with my sister, karen, who is a licensed clinical social worker used to be an attorney still is, but she's also a licensed clinical social worker. Used to be an attorney still is, but she's also a licensed clinical social worker and I had a wonderful conversation with her today about everything, and I can't wait to get her for an episode because she has such great insight, and I look forward to talking with this more about her as well, so that you guys can hear some of the great insight that she was able to share with me. So thank you for listening. I hope you have a great day.