Something hard happened to someone I love this past weekend. I'm not going to get into what, that's not mine to tell. What is mine is what I did about thirty seconds after they told me. I started trying to fix it.
I've been calling that support for years. It's not. Why can't I calm myself down long enough to actually be with someone in it, instead of racing to make the discomfort go away? That question sat with me all week, mostly because I recorded this episode with Dr. Arielle Schwartz right in the middle of it.
Most advice about calming down treats it like a solo project, something you journal or breathe your way through alone. What I actually needed that weekend wasn't a better tool. It was to stop trying to manage someone else's feelings and just be present in them instead. Human nervous systems are built to calm down in relationship with another nervous system, not in isolation. This episode gets into why that's true, and what it actually looks like to stop trying to do this part alone.
What Is Functional Freeze?
Functional freeze is what Dr. Schwartz calls the state where you're getting everything done on the outside, holding down your job, showing up for your kids, staying on top of your life, while feeling completely shut down on the inside. It's not laziness and it's not procrastination. It's a nervous system that learned, at some point, that showing up productively was safer than showing up authentically.
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. It's one of the most common and least talked about patterns Dr. Schwartz sees in her work, and it's where this whole conversation starts.
Why You Can't Calm Yourself Down Alone
We're living through the most connected and least regulated moment in human history. Everyone has a phone full of people and almost no one has someone in the room. That gap is where a lot of quiet suffering lives.
Self-help culture has spent the last decade selling the idea that healing is a solo project, something you can journal, meditate, or discipline your way through if you just try hard enough. This episode pushes back on that directly, not to say those tools are useless, but to name what they were never designed to do alone. Your nervous system learned to regulate in relationship. It's still looking for that, even when you've built a life that makes it easy to avoid.
That's not a failure of willpower. It's how humans are built. And it's worth sitting with, because it changes what real support is actually supposed to look like.
About Dr. Arielle Schwartz
Dr. Arielle Schwartz is a clinical psychologist who has spent thirty years working in trauma treatment. She's the author of eight books on trauma recovery, including The Complex PTSD Workbook and The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook, all built around a non-pathologizing approach to healing.
She's the founder of Resilience-Informed Therapy, a model that combines EMDR, somatic psychology, relational therapy, and therapeutic yoga instead of relying on any single method. What sets her apart is her insistence that trauma symptoms aren't evidence that something is broken in you. They're adaptive responses, and her work treats them that way. You can find her full body of work at drarielschwartz.com and resilienceinformedtherapy.com.
Key Insights From Dr. Arielle Schwartz
What Functional Freeze Actually Feels Like
Functional freeze is what happens when you keep showing up for your job and your kids while feeling completely cut off underneath it. Dr. Schwartz explains it as a learned strategy, usually built early, where authentic feelings got exiled because some part of you decided the world couldn't handle them. It works, in the sense that it keeps you productive. The cost is that you start to feel like you're going through the motions of your own life.
Co-Regulation vs Self-Regulation
This is the sentence the whole episode is built around. Dr. Schwartz teaches that we don't learn to self-regulate in a vacuum, we learn it by being regulated by someone else first, whether that's a parent, a friend, or a therapist. If you never had that experience, self-regulation isn't a skill you're missing. It's a skill you were never actually taught, because it can only be taught in relationship.
The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion
Dr. Schwartz draws a distinction she learned from Dr. Stephen Porges, the researcher who developed polyvagal theory. Empathy is feeling what someone else feels, getting in the water with them. Compassion is staying on the shore, calm enough to offer them something steady to swim toward. Too much empathy without compassion means you go under with them. The people who are best at supporting others learn to move between both.
Burnout vs Trauma, and Why They Overlap
Dr. Schwartz makes the case that burnout and unprocessed trauma frequently overlap, and that burnout is sometimes the more socially acceptable label for something deeper. When an experience takes up more mental and emotional space than you have room for, whether that's one big event or years of accumulated smaller ones, it starts eating into your capacity long before you'd call it trauma.
Why Do I Push People Away?
Much of the disconnection people feel isn't actually about other people rejecting them. Dr. Schwartz calls this self-ejecting, the pattern of deciding in advance that you don't belong somewhere and quietly removing yourself before anyone gets the chance to reject you first. It's often driven by shame and by curated, perfectionist versions of ourselves that we assume everyone else is buying, while we're privately convinced no one would want the real thing.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Needing Support
Here's the part that's hard to sit with. Needing another person to help you regulate isn't weakness. It's biology. And most of us were raised in a culture that treats needing anyone as a character flaw.
So we built entire systems to avoid it. We optimized our lives for independence. We turned self-sufficiency into a personality trait we're proud of. And in the process, a lot of people quietly lost access to the one thing that actually helps, another regulated person willing to sit with them.
The harder truth underneath that one is that connection isn't always available just because you decide you want it. Dr. Schwartz's concept of self-ejecting means a lot of people are isolating themselves before anyone else gets the chance to. Undoing that isn't about trying harder to network or show up to more things. It's about becoming willing to be seen without the curated version first.
Quotes From This Episode
“Co-regulation precedes self-regulation.” — Dr. Arielle Schwartz, 17:55 This one sentence undoes a lot of what self-help culture has been selling for years.
“Too much empathy can be maladaptive.” — Dr. Arielle Schwartz, 25:47 A reframe for anyone who's ever been praised for being “too empathetic” and privately felt wrecked by it.
“Compassion is standing on the shore.” — Dr. Arielle Schwartz, 25:47 The image that makes the empathy versus compassion distinction actually click.
“We only need to hold it all together when what we're holding isn't real.” — Melissa Monte, 36:26 The line that reframes the entire episode around authenticity instead of control.
“How can I be more accessible today?” — Dr. Arielle Schwartz, 38:48 The question she asks herself daily, offered as this episode's practice.
How to Practice Co-Regulation in Real Life
Start smaller than you think. Dr. Schwartz's own challenge from this episode is a single daily question: how can I be more accessible today? Not more available to everyone, more accessible, meaning a little more willing to let people see what's actually going on underneath the version of you that has it together.
If reaching out for co-regulation feels impossible right now, she offers a practical middle step she calls putting a pin in it. When a feeling comes up and you genuinely don't have the bandwidth in that moment, you don't have to suppress it or fully process it on the spot. You can consciously agree with yourself to come back to it when you have the right time, place, and person to help you actually feel it. That's the tool I reached for that weekend, once I caught myself trying to fix instead of just being there.
And if you catch yourself over-empathizing, going under with someone else's distress instead of helping them out of it, try physically noticing the difference between feeling with someone and standing steady enough to actually help them. That shift, from the wave to the shore, is something you can practice in a single conversation.
Resources & Links From This Episode
- Dr. Arielle Schwartz's website — her books, offerings, and newsletter
- Resilience Informed Therapy — her clinical model and training resources
- In episode 460, we explored the neuroscience of brain states with Dr. Izzy Justice, a natural companion to this conversation about nervous system regulation
- In episode 464, Dr. Frank Spinelli joined us to talk about shame, which connects directly to the self-ejecting pattern Dr. Schwartz describes here
Take This Work Deeper
If this conversation made you realize how much you've been trying to regulate on your own, you'd love the Mind Love Collective. We meet monthly for themed calls where we actually get close and real about what's happening in our lives, not another webinar to half-listen to. It's the kind of community that makes co-regulation something you have access to, not just something you understand intellectually. Join us at mindlove.com/collective.
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