My daughter was only 16 months old when COVID hit (or, at least, when California went into lockdown). 

In those first 16 months of her life, we never made it to a mommy-daughter swim lesson at one of the public pools here in the Bay Area. 

She had never been in a pool. Had never been in a lake.  She had never been in any body of water bigger than our bathtub.

We didn’t go to any pools or big bodies of water during COVID and so, when we got our hot tub in January, it was, by far, the biggest, deepest water experience she had ever had. 

The way she approached this new, big experience reminded me of one of the most important lessons adults from adverse beginnings typically have to learn and relearn: the value of titrating your experience. 

What does titrating your experience mean?

Titration is a term that I use all the time in my therapy work.

It’s a term borrowed from chemistry and the hard sciences which, effectively, means adding small, measurable quantities of a substance to another substance in precise ways to achieve the desired results. 

(Do you remember those pipettes and burettes and small experiments from our high school chemistry days? That was the act of performing a chemical titration.)

The way I interpret this term in the psychotherapeutic context means: 

“When we titrate our experience we take action in small, monitored ways to adjust the amount of stimulation we introduce to our nervous system, proceeding in manageable ways to help keep ourselves in a state of emotional safety and equilibrium.”

It’s one of the most important things we can do for ourselves as adults recovering from challenging early childhoods.

What does titrating your experience look like?

So, what does titrating your experience actually look like?

Well, take for instance my daughter’s relationship to her “green hot tub tubby” (what she so endearingly calls it).

It’s the biggest body of water she’s been in since she was born and she was initially very cautious about getting in at all. 

But she allowed us to lift her body into the tub the first time we used it and she was comfortable standing up in it as long as she could hold onto one of us while doing so.

But put her face in the water? Absolutely not. 

At least not on that first day. 

It was too much for her to tolerate and she arched and craned her little body and crawled on top of us to make sure the water didn’t hit her chin and face.

But over the last six weeks, I’ve noticed her “titrating her experience” and experimenting with putting her face in the water.