@brhal No I am the furthest thing from stoic!!
So I my (4 minute long) experience with Ferber showed me what a true 10 looked like. He was crying so hard he could barely breathe and I could not handle it at all.
Never in any night of SLS did he reach that level. He yelled at me. And sad cried a lot. Especially the first two nights. Or when the position changed. But it was never as bad as it was when I left the room during Ferber. And that’s kind of what told me this was the right approach for us. I know some babies are the opposite where the crying stops sooner if parent is not there and a parent presence is escalating. So this is just what worked for us.
I definitely patted bum and rubbed back a lot during first few nights and even when my chair was across the room there were still times I went to the crib for a quick bum pat if he was really upset.
I picked him up once on night two when he kind of “fell” from sitting to laying and sacred himself.
But I will say the book was really forgiving about being flexible with that kind of stuff which I liked so I never felt like “oh I ruined it”