The Difference Between Soothing and Avoiding

Why real relief starts with moving toward, not away

There's a version of feeling better that doesn't last. Most people know it — the drink that takes the edge off, the scroll that fills the silence, the workout that burns through the anxiety without quite resolving it. The relief is real. It works, for a while. And then the same thing is there again, waiting.

This isn't a moral observation. It's a practical one. Some of what we reach for when we're overwhelmed moves us away from what we're feeling. And some of it moves us toward it. Those are different acts, even when they look similar from the outside, and they tend to produce different results.

What soothing actually is

Soothing is not the absence of feeling. It's a response to the nervous system — meeting it where it is and giving it what it actually needs in that moment. But that requires knowing where it is first.

This is where presence comes in. A brief, honest inventory of what's actually happening right now. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? What is my body doing?

Those three layers — thought, emotion, body sensation — are always carrying information. And taking even a moment to register them, to let reality be what it is before trying to shift it, is the difference between responding to your experience and managing it from a distance.

Real soothing starts there. Not with the solution, but with the contact.

Moving toward versus moving away

The distinction I find most useful is this: soothing, at its root, is always an act of moving toward. Avoiding is always, even initially, an act of moving away.

Both can reduce discomfort in the short term. But they're doing fundamentally different things. One is completing a loop — acknowledging what's present, responding to it, allowing the nervous system to register that it's been met. The other is interrupting the loop, which provides relief without resolution and tends to require repetition.

This isn't an argument against comfort or rest or any of the ordinary things people do to cope with difficulty. It's an observation about direction. The question worth asking is not whether something makes you feel better, but whether it's moving you toward your experience or away from it.

Presence doesn't make it easy

It's worth being honest here: knowing you need to move toward something doesn't make it easy to do. When the nervous system is genuinely struggling — when the weight of what's happening feels like too much to sit with — presence can feel like the last thing available. The pull toward relief, toward anything that interrupts the discomfort, is real and understandable.

What presence offers isn't a guaranteed path to the right response. It's a chance at one. A brief moment of honest contact with what's actually there — even if what's there is painful, even if it's confusing, even if there's no clear answer — creates at least the possibility of responding to what's real rather than reacting to what's feared. That's not nothing. In hard moments, it's often everything.

Why EMDR always starts with presence

One of the things I find most grounding about EMDR as a framework is that it never skips this step. Before any processing begins, there's always a careful, multi-layered orientation to what's actually present — thoughts, emotions, body sensations. What are you noticing right now? Where do you feel it? What's the quality of it?

This isn't preamble. It's the foundation. You can't process what you haven't first acknowledged. And you can't soothe what you haven't first allowed yourself to feel.

The same principle applies outside of a therapy session, in the ordinary moments when something is pressing and the instinct is to reach for relief. A breath. A check-in. A moment of honest contact with what's actually there. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to feel good. It just has to be real.

From there, the nervous system often knows what it needs. And what it needs tends to be simpler, and more available, than what we reach for when we're trying to move away.

What this has to do with healing

The reason this matters beyond daily stress management is that the same pattern — moving away from experience rather than toward it — is often at the root of why people arrive at therapy feeling stuck.

Not because they haven't tried. But because the strategies that have kept them functional have also kept them at a slight remove from their own inner life. And healing, in my experience, requires closing that distance. Not all at once, and not without support. But consistently, and in the direction of contact rather than away from it.

That's what EMDR asks of people. Not to feel everything at once, not to be overwhelmed, but to be willing to be present with what's there — and to trust that presence itself is the beginning of something moving.