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 might learn certain terms and ways of consciously thinking about the act of walking. This is Self-Soothing₂.
A regular person hearing you discuss this with your fellow walking-learners in passing would certainly go: “Well no clue about all those words you’re using and concepts you’re talking about. They certainly don’t match anything I observe in myself[because he has never actually needed to observe that part of himself in such depth, never had to intentionally learn/apply Self-Soothing₁]. When I’m walking, I just put one foot in front of the other!”
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.