52. Q&A: How to Self-Soothe, Understand Why You're Still Exhausted & Heal at the Right Pace 

Written By Brittany Broderick

Someone asked me recently why they can only cry when another person is holding them. Underneath that question was a quiet shame. What is wrong with me that I need somebody there for my body to finally let go?

Nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system was never designed to do this alone, and none of ours were. That question came in alongside five others this month, and I want to answer all of them the way I answer them with clients, which means going after the why rather than the surface fix.

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What it means to complete an emotion

In somatic work we talk about emotion as energy in motion. A wave with a beginning, a build, a peak, and a release. Your body already knows how to do this. Watch a toddler in a full meltdown who is laughing again five minutes later. That is a completed stress cycle, with nothing lingering and nothing stored.

Most of us lost access to that somewhere along the way, usually because as kids the wave was not allowed to finish. Someone told us to stop crying. The room was not safe enough to fall apart in. Our big feelings turned out to be too much for the people around us. So the body did something intelligent: it learned to interrupt itself halfway through. But an interrupted wave does not disappear. It gets stored, and it waits for a moment that feels safe enough to finish.

Why someone else's arms are what finally let you cry

This is co-regulation, one of the most well-documented parts of polyvagal theory. Our nervous systems read safety cues from other nervous systems. A warm tone of voice. Steady eye contact. The weight of someone's arm around us. Those cues tell your body it can let go now, that someone has you.

The goal is not to force yourself to cry alone because you have decided that is more evolved. The goal is to slowly build your capacity to be that steady presence for yourself, so that borrowing someone else's regulation becomes a choice instead of your only route. If a wave rises and no one is there, try a hand on your chest or your own arms wrapped around your body. Hum. Sigh out loud. Rock yourself. Sound moves through the vagus nerve, and it signals safety in much the same way another person's voice does.

Needing reassurance is not being dramatic

From an attachment lens, the graspy feeling has a name: protest behavior. When your attachment system picks up a threat to the bond, whether that is distance, inconsistency, or silence, it does not stay quiet. It reaches. It checks the phone. It replays the conversation. That is a nervous system that learned early on that connection could disappear without warning, and it is trying to keep that from happening again by holding on tighter.

The work is not to shame that younger part into silence. It is to build enough internal safety that it no longer has to work so hard, which usually looks like learning to soothe yourself in the gap between wanting reassurance and receiving it.

As for whether your partner is really in this with you, here is a distinction I use with clients constantly. Notice whether your activation shifts based on what they actually do. If you feel anxious specifically after they go quiet or cancel plans, that is often a real signal responding to a real pattern. If the same grasping anxiety shows up even when they are consistent and present, that is more likely an old wound getting touched by closeness itself. Real partnership does not mean the absence of activation. It means what happens afterward, whether there is repair, whether there is accountability, and whether you feel more yourself around them over time.

When you are sick, exhausted, or still tired after eight hours

When you are sick, your body is already spending enormous energy fighting something internally. It is in a threat state even with no external danger, because your nervous system does not distinguish neatly between a virus and a predator. It only knows resources are going toward survival. This is not the moment for a hard therapy session or an intense practice. Warmth, stillness, low sensory input, and letting other people take care of you if that is available. Your only job is conservation.

The tiredness that sleep does not touch is a different thing. Sometimes exhaustion is not about hours. It is about a nervous system that never fully drops into a deep parasympathetic state, even while you are unconscious. If your body has been living in chronic activation or functional freeze, where you are outwardly functioning while internally still bracing, you can sleep eight hours and wake up just as depleted. The fix is usually not more sleep. It is building small pockets of real safety during your waking hours, where your shoulders drop and your jaw unclenches and you are not managing or performing or anticipating anything. Five minutes of that a few times a day teaches your body that letting go is safe.

If your symptoms got worse, you are probably not back at the beginning

I hear a version of this constantly. Before you started this work, your nervous system likely did not have the capacity to feel much of what was happening inside you. It was too busy surviving to notice. As you build capacity and your system starts to feel safer, it becomes able to feel things it could not access before. That can feel like things are getting worse when your awareness is the thing that grew. We are not creating new pain. We are finally able to feel pain that was always there.

There is still a distinction worth making, because not all worsening is the same. Material surfacing at a pace your system can integrate is different from material surfacing faster than you can process, which can genuinely be re-traumatizing. The way to tell is whether you can come back down. In the program we track rebound time, and we watch frequency, intensity, and duration rather than the elimination of symptoms. If you get activated and find your way back to some baseline, even slowly, your system is working through something. If you stay flooded for days with no ability to land, your pacing needs to change. That is not a sign the work is wrong.

Loving someone who is headed somewhere you cannot follow

Before any tools, there is grief here, and we tend to skip past it. Watching someone you love make choices that are hurting them, knowing you cannot fix it, is a real loss. It is okay to feel that fully first.

Their dysregulation activates something in you. Fear, maybe. An old caretaking pattern. A part that learned love means fixing. Your body starts responding as though their crisis is your crisis, and that is where people lose themselves. Staying regulated here does not mean caring less. It means holding compassion in one hand and boundaries in the other at the same time. Practically, that can look like checking in with your body before a hard conversation, noticing whether you are about to speak from your grounded self or from panic, and getting comfortable with sentences like "I love you, and I can't make this choice for you." We cannot regulate someone else's nervous system by dysregulating our own.

When your life has changed but your alarm has not

You grow. You build capacity and insight and maybe new relationships and a life different from the one your nervous system was calibrated for. Then something ordinary happens, a disagreement or an unanswered text, and your whole body reacts like it is 2011 again.

Insight does not automatically recalibrate the nervous system. We can understand our patterns completely and still feel those impulses fire, because understanding lives in your thinking brain while the alarm lives somewhere much older and faster than thought. Recalibration happens through repeated experience, through procedural memory, where your body gathers enough new evidence moment by moment that the old threshold stops matching the world you live in now.

A gentle reminder

If you are in that gap where your life has changed but your reactions have not caught up, that is not failure. That is timing. You are not the same person the alarm was built for anymore. The alarm just has not gotten the memo yet. You are a new version of you, temporarily still wired like the old version, and every time you stay present through one of those false alarms, even a little, you are the one sending the update.

Pacing is the reason I built the Body-First Healing Program the way I did. Over six months we do not touch trauma work until month three, because stabilization and capacity come first.

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This blog and podcast are for educational purposes only and are not a substitute for medical care, therapy, or crisis support. Please reach out to a qualified professional for support with your specific situation.

Brittany Broderick
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51. Somatic Practice for Sleep: Why Your Body Won't Let You Rest