Why Can't I Stay with Good Feelings?
The Pattern
Something good happens and within minutes you find a reason it is not really good. A peaceful moment arrives and you reach for a worry to fill it. A compliment lands and your body deflects it before your mind has registered it. You are not ungrateful. You are operating within a window of tolerance for good feeling that is smaller than your window of tolerance for hard feeling, because the hard feeling is what your system was built around.
Origins & Context
Dan Siegel's concept of the window of tolerance describes the range within which the nervous system can hold experience without dysregulation. For most people raised in chaos or scarcity, the window for difficult feeling is wide, because the system learned to handle it. The window for sustained good feeling is narrow, because the system never had to expand to hold it.
Rick Hanson's research on the negativity bias adds that the brain is evolutionarily designed to retain negative experience more readily than positive. Trauma exacerbates the bias. The result is a system that absorbs hard feeling at full volume and lets good feeling slide off, not because it does not want the good, but because it has no infrastructure to hold it.
You absorb hard feeling at full volume and let good feeling slide off, not because you do not want the good, but because you have no infrastructure to hold it.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You have a good morning and by noon you are anxious about something unspecified. You succeed at the thing and within hours you are looking for the next problem. You receive love and within the week you are testing whether it is real. The reaching for the bad is not pathology. It is the system returning to its baseline level of activation, which it learned to recognize as familiar and therefore safe.
It shows up most in the moments that ask you to receive. The praise, the gift, the love letter, the unexpected ease. You feel a faint discomfort that you mistake for boredom or suspicion. The discomfort is the system stretching past its window. The stretching is, ironically, the work. Staying with the good is the practice. The good is the new range you are slowly teaching the system to hold.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Window of Tolerance (Dan Siegel), with specific attention to the asymmetry between the window for hard feeling and the window for good feeling. It is also named through Rick Hanson's research on the Negativity Bias. Contemporary therapists describe it through the language of Capacity for Receiving, the somatic and nervous system work of expanding the range within which good feeling can stay.
Related entries in this library include Healing Is Direction Not Destination, Reparenting, and Self-Abandonment.
Nikita's Note
I could hold grief for hours and could not hold joy for ten minutes. I noticed this and was embarrassed by it. The embarrassment was not useful. The noticing was. Once I knew the asymmetry, I could work with it.
The practice was small. When a good thing happened, I would sit with it for slightly longer than was comfortable. Thirty seconds, then a minute, then five. I would feel my body try to deflect and I would stay. The window widened. It took years. The window now holds an amount of good that the old me would not have believed was possible. The expansion was the work.
From the work
You absorb hard feeling at full volume and let good feeling slide off, not because you do not want the good, but because you have no infrastructure to hold it.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.