Emotional Constipation, Courage, & Your Nervous System with Self-love Coach Quiggy [Facilitated Episode 34]
- The Facility Denver
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
We like to pretend health and relationships live in separate lanes: go to the doctor for your lab results, go to therapy for your marriage. In reality, they share the same nervous system highway. Your body doesn’t care whether the trigger is a moldy basement, a string of night shifts, or a simmering argument with your partner. Biologically, it’s all “threat” versus “safe.” When stress stays in charge, the midbrain takes over, digestion downshifts, blood sugar gets choppy, sleep gets weird, and your capacity for nuance shrinks. That’s not a character flaw; that’s physiology.
In this week’s episode of Facilitated, Mitchell sat down with our friend Jonathan Quigg aka "Quiggy", a self-love coach and mindfulness teacher, to talk about the overlap between stress physiology, relationships, and what it really means to feel safe in your own body. Mitchell summed up our clinical philosophy early on: “Our work is about getting to know the person with the condition much more than it’s about understanding which condition the person has. We need to diagnose the biology, not the disease.” The longer they talked, the clearer it became that this is just as true in relationships as it is in lab work.
When Culture Teaches Us to Disconnect
One of the liveliest parts of the conversation was an honest roasting of drinking culture. Denver has no shortage of breweries, late-night bars, and “we were so drunk last night” stories. It’s all framed as connection and fun, but functionally, alcohol is an anesthetic. As Mitchell put it, it lets us ignore parts of ourselves we don’t want to feel. The problem is that the same thing that numbs discomfort also numbs intimacy.
Instead of another night of loud bars and half-remembered conversations, Quiggy runs sober, movement-based events: ecstatic-style dance, “dark disco,” and group experiences designed to integrate the parts of ourselves we usually hide. No alcohol, no pressure to perform, no pretending you’re “good” when you’re actually unraveling. You show up with your big emotions, awkwardness, shame, grief—and move them through the body instead of stuffing them down. It’s a very different model of nightlife: community and regulation instead of sedation.
That matters, because nervous systems regulate through contact. Co-regulation doesn’t require perfection; it requires people in the same room willing to be honest and present. When you swap numbing for real connection, your biology finally gets a chance to downshift out of survival mode.
The Biology of Being Seen
One moment that stuck out to me when I read back through the transcript was Mitchell’s story of first meeting Quiggy. He admitted he was skeptical when he heard “self-love coach.” Then, in one session, something happened that he still remembers: “I was stopped dead in my tracks because I saw your eyes see me… it almost made me start crying.” That experience—feeling truly seen—isn’t just poetic language. It’s nervous system medicine.
Being accurately perceived and not rejected for it changes how your body organizes itself. Heart rate settles, breathing deepens, your frontal lobe comes back online, and suddenly you’re capable of a different kind of honesty, both with yourself and with the person in front of you. We talk about “diagnosing the biology, not the disease” in medicine, but the same applies relationally: can you see the human in front of you, not just the behavior that’s bothering you?
That’s where functional medicine, mindfulness, and self-love unexpectedly intersect. We’re all working, from different angles, on helping people feel safe enough to tell the truth.
Helpers Need Help Too
A big theme in this conversation was stewardship—of our own bodies, our attention, and our roles as helpers. Many of the people working in health, education, and caregiving are underslept, overworked, and swimming in fluorescent lights and pagers. Then we ask them to walk into a room and be a calm, grounding presence for other humans. The math doesn’t work.
Quiggy put it this way: to really serve from your heart’s capacity, you have to go through the self, not around it. That doesn’t mean self-absorption; it means self-responsibility. From the medical side, we see the same pattern. When we reduce care to rigid protocols, we lose the ability to actually listen—to labs, to symptoms, to the human experience in front of us. Mitchell joked about six-month supplement protocols and how, if you’re on day three with diarrhea and the instruction is “just stick to the plan,” someone has stopped thinking.
Iterative care—making a plan, watching how your body responds, adjusting—outperforms one-and-done protocols because humans are not static. Sleep, digestion, blood sugar, and breath are constantly shifting. The same is true for emotional capacity. We need room to respond to real data, not just an idealized treatment plan.
Honesty ends up being a clinical skill and a relational one. Mitchell tells patients from the beginning, “I will tell you where I’m unsure of things, and I will tell you where I’m making educated guesses.” That kind of transparency is uncomfortable in a culture that rewards certainty, but it’s deeply regulating. Your nervous system can feel when someone is faking confidence. Saying “I don’t know” with care isn’t incompetence; it’s intimacy.
Saying “I don’t know” with care isn’t incompetence; it’s intimacy.
Courage Is a Capacity, Not a Personality Type
I loved the thread where they talked about courage. We throw around words like “brave” as if some people just wake up with courage loaded into their DNA and the rest of us are out of luck. That’s not how it works.
Courage is a capacity you cultivate over time. It lives right alongside fear, not in the absence of it.
As Quiggy said, “If you don’t have fear, it’s not courage—it’s recklessness.” Biological fear, limbic system activation, adrenaline, that buzzy edge in your body, is real information. The work is not to erase fear, but to be in relationship with it long enough to choose your response instead of being dragged by it.
Practically, that means putting yourself in rooms where the kind of courage you want is already alive. Reading stories that model it. Taking small, slightly uncomfortable steps that stretch your nervous system without obliterating it. From a functional medicine perspective, this is no different than progressive overload in strength training or slowly building tolerance to cold exposure. You’re expanding the window of what your nervous system can experience without flipping into shutdown or chaos.
Emotional Constipation and the RAIN Method
One of the most useful tools Quiggy shared is the RAIN method: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. It’s a structured way to bring mindfulness down out of the clouds and into your actual body.
Recognize what’s happening: tight chest, lump in throat, jaw clenched, urge to bolt, urge to fix.
Allow it to be there without immediately numbing, arguing with it, or spiritual-bypassing your way around it.
Investigate with curiosity: what does this remind me of, what story am I telling, what does this part of me believe?
Nurture the part that’s activated instead of attacking it for existing.
One detail I loved: “The body doesn’t know if it’s your mom touching you and holding you or if it’s your own hand… it will release oxytocin either way.” Putting your hand on your own cheek or chest with real warmth isn’t just a “self-care moment”... it’s a hormone signal that says, “You’re not alone. I’m here.”
This is the opposite of what most of us learned. Many people internalized early on that big feelings are “too much,” “dramatic,” or dangerous. The way Quiggy framed it was blunt and accurate: we’re emotionally constipated. If you learn as a kid that “pooping” emotionally—crying, raging, grieving—gets you shamed or punished, you stop doing it. Imagine not having a bowel movement for thirty years. That’s what a lot of nervous systems are carrying. Emotional constipation is such a great analogy!
RAIN is basically nervous system fiber. It helps unclog the pipes in a compassionate way so emotions can move instead of getting stored as chronic tension, fatigue, or reactivity.
Codependency as a Nervous System Strategy
Toward the end of the episode, they dove into codependency and did a nice job of de-sensationalizing it. Codependency is not a moral failing or an identity; it’s a pattern of nervous system strategies that show up under threat.
When we feel unsafe, many of us slide into familiar moves: fawning, clinging, withdrawing, chasing, over-functioning, under-functioning. Some people anxiously pursue, others shut down and avoid, often in the same relationship at different times. None of that makes you “bad.” It just means your system is trying to protect you with the tools it has.
The cultural myth is that a “healthy relationship” is 50/50. As Quiggy pointed out, that falls apart the moment life happens: “How does a 50-50 relationship work when your partner is at 20%?” If one person gets in a car accident, loses a parent, or walks through their own health crisis, their capacity is going to drop. A more realistic aim is two people working toward 100/100—each responsible for their own regulation, support network, and basic self-trust—so that when one dips to 20%, the combined system still has something to work with.
This is where functional medicine and relational work meet again. The more you can hold yourself (through sleep, food, movement, breath, nervous system tools, therapy, community) the less you unconsciously demand that your partner regulate you for you. Relationships become less about extraction (“I need you to fill the holes in me”) and more about generosity (“I’m working on my own stuff so I can meet you here fully”).
Intimacy, Safety, and the Art of Listening
If I had to boil this entire conversation down into a few sentences, it would be this: intimacy is honesty, safety is biology, and healing is the art of listening well enough to act.
Functional medicine does that by listening to labs, symptoms, and lived experience, then iterating. Mindfulness does that by listening to thoughts, sensations, and patterns, then bringing awareness and compassion. Relationship work does that by listening to yourself and another person in real time and choosing something different than the old script.
None of this requires perfection. It does require a willingness to stay in the room—with your body, your emotions, your history, and the people you care about—long enough to actually hear what’s being said.
And from there, choice becomes possible again.
Intimacy is honesty, safety is biology, and healing is the art of listening well enough to act.
>> Connect with Quiggy on Instagram @quiggcultivation Don't miss his upcoming FREE workshop UNFUCKABLE WITH SELF-TRUST: how to attract a purposeful partnership in 6 months or less. A 2-day virtual experience December 9 + December 10, 2025 [details here].Check out his content including Youtube, Podcast, Mindfulness Events, and Book your own Curiousity Call with Coach Quiggy HERE.
If you prefer content in audio format, check out Facilitated Episode 34 | Self-Love, Biology, And The Body’s Truth for a candid discussion between Functional Medicine Practitioner Dr. Mitchell Rasmussen and Mindfulness-based Self-Love Coach QUIGGY | Listen here
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If you’re curious about functional medicine and how it could work for you, we’d love to help. Book an initial consultation with our Denver-based clinic (we see patients locally and via telehealth) and take the first step toward a health journey that doesn’t stop with you.
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