Why You Hold It Together in Crisis but Fall Apart After

If you tend to be the person who gets oddly calm when things are going wrong, you might recognize yourself here. In the middle of a crisis, something in you clicks on. You’re focused, practical, and clear headed. You handle what needs to be handled. You make decisions, manage details, and keep things moving while everyone else feels overwhelmed. It can even feel familiar, like this is the part you’re actually good at.

What often feels confusing is what happens afterward. Once the situation settles and the urgency fades, your body doesn’t seem to follow along. You might feel emotionally raw, unusually irritable, or exhausted in a way that rest doesn’t seem to touch. Sometimes the reaction comes days or even weeks later, which makes it harder to understand. From the outside, it looks like the hard part is over. Inside, it feels like something finally caught up with you.

Most people interpret this as a personal failing. They wonder why they can manage the crisis so well but struggle when things are supposed to be calmer. They tell themselves they should be fine by now. When you look at this pattern through the lens of the nervous system, though, it starts to make a lot more sense.

A big part of what’s happening has to do with the difference between distress tolerance and emotional capacity, two things that often get lumped together even though they serve very different purposes. Distress tolerance is your ability to stay functional under pressure. It’s what allows you to push through fear, urgency, pain, or overwhelm long enough to deal with what’s in front of you. Emotional capacity is your ability to process what you’ve been through and return to some sense of internal steadiness afterward, without feeling flooded, shut down, or depleted.

For many people, high distress tolerance doesn’t develop in isolation. It develops in relationship. This is where the fawn response often becomes part of the picture.

The fawn response is one of the nervous system’s survival strategies, alongside fight, flight, and freeze. It tends to develop when safety depends less on escaping a situation and more on maintaining connection within it. Instead of reacting with aggression or withdrawal, the nervous system learns to appease, attune, stay agreeable, and keep things from escalating. Over time, this becomes a deeply embodied way of coping, not a conscious choice.

When distress tolerance is tied to fawning, the ability to endure stress is closely linked to staying useful, composed, and emotionally contained. You’re not just tolerating discomfort. You’re managing the emotional environment around you. You stay regulated so others can stay regulated. You hold it together because connection, stability, or approval once depended on it.

I didn’t see this as a pattern at first. I just thought it was who I was.

This helps explain why people with strong fawn responses are often excellent in crises. In the moment, they track others, anticipate needs, smooth over tension, and keep things stable while quietly absorbing the impact themselves. Their nervous system knows how to organize around what’s required. Afterward, once the relational threat has passed and there’s no longer a need to stay composed for others, the body finally releases the effort it was sustaining. That’s often when exhaustion, emotional flooding, or shutdown appear.

I hear this described often by people who are used to managing a lot. A parent stays composed through a child’s medical emergency, asking the right questions, coordinating care, reassuring everyone else in the room. In the moment, they feel focused and steady, sometimes even surprised by how well they’re coping. Weeks later, once appointments slow down and routines return, they find themselves unable to sleep, emotionally raw, or snapping over minor frustrations. They’re confused by the timing and wonder why they seem to be falling apart now, when the worst is technically over.

This is usually the point where people decide something is wrong with them, when in reality it’s often the first moment their body has felt safe enough to respond.

Outside of obvious crises, this same pattern shows up in quieter, everyday ways. It looks like being the one who stays calm during conflict but feels shaky afterward. It looks like holding space for everyone else’s emotions while not quite knowing what to do with your own. It can show up as chronic over functioning, difficulty asking for help, or a reflexive sense of responsibility for how situations and relationships feel. Often, people don’t realize how much effort this takes until their body forces a slowdown.

This is also why receiving support can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. If your nervous system learned that safety came from being capable, helpful, or easy to be around, then needing care can feel destabilizing rather than soothing. It’s not that you don’t want support. It’s that your system hasn’t yet learned what happens to connection when you stop managing everything yourself.

There’s a common belief that emotional regulation means staying calm in the middle of hard things. In practice, that’s often just stamina. Regulation also includes recovery. It includes the ability to come back into your body, feel emotions without being overwhelmed by them, and settle without needing to collapse first. When recovery is missing, stress tends to leave the system indirectly, through exhaustion, irritability, emotional flooding, or shutdown, often at times that feel inconvenient or confusing.

This is also why insight alone doesn’t usually fix the problem. Many people understand exactly what’s happening to them. They can name the pattern and even be compassionate with themselves about it. And yet the cycle continues. Nervous system responses aren’t driven primarily by logic. They shift through experiences of safety, pacing, and support. A system that learned to cope by overriding internal cues doesn’t change simply because it’s been explained.

For me, one of the bigger shifts came when I realized that being good under pressure didn’t mean I knew how to receive support afterward. I had learned how to push through, but not how to let myself be helped. Learning how to receive care, to slow down without collapsing, and to allow recovery to be part of the process was humbling and necessary. It was also something I had never been taught.

Building emotional capacity doesn’t mean becoming less capable in a crisis, and it doesn’t require giving up the strengths you’ve relied on for so long. The work here is about learning how to notice strain earlier, how to downshift more gradually instead of crashing, and how to stay present with emotional experience without suppressing it or being overtaken by it.

If you’ve built a life around being good under pressure, it makes sense that your nervous system learned to postpone its needs. Healing here isn’t about becoming less strong or less reliable. It’s about learning how to come back after you’ve held everything together, and recognizing that recovery is a skill, not a personal shortcoming.

If you tend to fall apart after the crisis, it doesn’t mean you failed. More often, it means your body waited until it felt safe enough to speak. If this landed close to home, what would it be like to let recovery matter just as much as getting through?

About the Author

Lea Morrison is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (RTC) based in Kelowna, BC, and works with clients across Canada. She’s the founder and Program Developer of Mind Your Heart Academy, co-founder of The Informed Practitioner, and author of trauma-informed resources on healing and post-traumatic growth. Lea blends counselling, somatic and energetic healing, and nervous system education to support recovery and connection - both in-person and online.