A bottleneck in the theory of large-amplitude and multi-d viscous and relaxation shock stability is the development of nonlinear damping estimates controlling higher by lower derivatives. These have traditionally proceeded from time-evolution bounds based on Friedrichs symmetric and Kawashima or Goodman type energy estimates. Here, we propose an alternative program based on frequency-dependent pseudodifferential time-space damping estimates in the spirit of Kreiss. These are seen to be equivalent in the linear case to high-frequency spectral stability, and, just as for the constant-coefficient analysis of Kreiss, sharp in a pointwise, fixed-frequency, sense. This point of view leads to a number of simplifications and extensions using already-existing analysis. More interesting is the issue of Airy type turning points, analogous to glancing points in the constant-coefficient case, previously studied by Erpenbeck and Lafitte-Williams Zumbrun in the context of detonation.