Dilettante

I learned about one-page games, that's value right there! \hj

The crutches would be Self-Soothing₂ in my map. Walking is Self-Soothing₁. You're already walking fine, so you don't need the crutches. What you're not noticing is the internal process of orchestrating the walking. You've well abstracted it away. Other people have to unfold that entire dimension which to you is just a point. In programming terms, you're already running a firmware driver that other people need to write from scratch, which does a million things for you with just one function call. You're only seeing "walk()", while others are looking at the documentation and using trial-and-error to write the underlying library.

That sounds like everything went well enough for you in your formative phase that you indeed possess the skill of Self-Soothing₁ and are triggering That Internal Thing automatically and naturally. It's the kind of mental stuff you take for granted if it works properly and are only forced to notice and actively think about when it's broken.
Imagine having to learn to walk for the first time as a fully-formed adult. It'd be a pretty difficult and complicated affair to learn all the subtle movement/feedback patterns etc. If you had outside instruction, you mig... (read more)

I think we've got a pretty clear case of "Self-Soothing₁ vs Self-Soothing₂" here:

What I and the article are referencing is That Internal Thing that takes place when being soothed down from your Big Emotions, self-triggered as immediately and mentally as possible; While what your sources describe are techniques for people who did not acquire this as a natural skill from their caretakers when they were little, aimed at triggering That Internal Thing.

I propose differentiating between A: "The skill/event of [internally] self-soothing" and B: "Self-soothing tec... (read more)

I think in this context(and in my general idea of the term), self-soothing refers less to an outside thing to do, and rather an internal skill, a "mental action", of soothing one's own "Big Emotions" down from a state of overwhelm into one where you're able to actually think about what is happening and how to solve it, or if it needs solving at all or you're just having an emotional overraction to a trigger. Like a parent calming down(soothing) a child who is having a crying or anger outburst, except you're both the child and the parent.

Candlelit baths may... (read more)

Tony Robbins mentions this in the context of NLP, and I've also heard of it from trauma therapy/processing.

You could raise or lower emotional intensity by increasing or decreasing the color saturation or volume of a thought, for example. You could also do something more active, like pulling it towards yourself like the payload of a slingshot, and then fire it off, far away so it "disappears into the distance".

I guess at some point we just land back at the concept of a well-tended Mind Palace(or Garden, etc).