SSP: Safe and Sound Protocol Archives - Move2Connect Primitive Reflex Integration

Safe and Sound Protocol Side Effects vs ANS Processing – Reframing our perspective

During discovery calls, I am often asked about adverse Safe and Sound Protocol side effects. I sometimes hear from clients who have been through the process before with another provider, and who “suffered”, or about people who have scared themselves by reports of side effects from online forums and blog posts.

I would like to explain a little bit about what it all means, and why understanding the impact of the Safe and Sound Protocol is extremely important.

Safe and Sound Protocol side effects

When we work with the SSP, we need to work with an individual’s nervous system. This means watching very carefully for signs that the autonomic nervous system is processing. NOT for “signs of dysregulation”, which is a term that people tend to over-use in an SSP context, in my opinion. If we notice “dysregulation”, we’ve gone way too quickly for the nervous system to keep up with.

Look at the Safe and Sound Protocol as marathon training: could you run a marathon in 2 hours in 3 months time? Most people couldn’t. Most people would need to train for months (or years), and would complete in at least 5-6 hours. If most people tried to rush into running a marathon in a couple of weeks and with minimal training, they’d more than likely need to receive medical attention.

Safe and Sound Protocol “Side Effects”

Safe and Sound Protocol Side Effects vs ANS Processing

Early on in my experience as an SSP provider, probably about a year in, I decided to do a self-experiment and deliberately over-listen to SSP to see what would happen. I listened to the whole five hours in a weekend! The result was incredibly interesting and has given me a profound understanding of how the Safe and Sound Protocol works. The result of 2.5 hours of listening per day – in which I deliberately ignored cues of panic, mobilisation and collapse – was that I experienced severe vertigo, severe jet lag-like fatigue, an inability to organise my thoughts or move forward (like wading through glue), and heavily disrupted sleep interspersed with nightmares.

My discomfort continued for about 2 days, and then settled and gradually disappeared. However, I did not benefit at all from that particular round of SSP, whereas I’d always experienced beautiful shifts in the past from working at the speed of my nervous system. By this, I mean I always responded to my autonomic cues, and titrated the SSP accordingly. This doesn’t mean “x minutes per day” – it means yesterday I listened to 10 minutes but then found I couldn’t get to sleep… so today, I’m going to take a break and let my system settle. Tomorrow, I may listem, or I may not, depending on whether my system tells me it’s safe to continue listening or not.

Whenever I’ve done another round of the Safe and Sound Protocol since, I’ve noticed signs that my nervous system needs to settle more easily. I’ve experienced misophonia and tinnitus temporarily too on occasion, but both settle within a few days – although I do have the knowledge to be able to help my body process using somatic techniques, so this is something I am able to help my clients with if any processing becomes uncomfortable after listening.

Another “side effect” I’ve experienced more recently is a sore neck and shoulder, which suddenly appeared half way through a Zoom session with a client.

My neck and shoulder pain started after I snowboarded down a sand dune in North East Brazil back in 2003, and fell off at high speed! However, whenever I’ve been stressed or overloaded, my shoulder pain has always re-emerged. Normally, it takes ibuprofen and a couple of visits to an osteopath to sort it out. However, this time, I suddenly had the reaslisation that I was half way through hour 2 of the SSP and that while I am completely un-stressed at the moment, my body was trying to tell me to keep myself safe.

As soon as I’d realised this was the case and acknowledged it, the pain started to dissipate, and the following day, I woke up and it was no longer there. I found this enlightening, and similar effects have been reported by several clients in the past.

I ask my clients to watch out for a number of very obvious signs of autonomic shifts. The rule of thumb is to put anything out of the ordinary down to the Safe and Sound Protocol rather than assuming SSP has nothing to do with it.

Open communication with a provider is of paramount importance. Agreeing how you’ll work together and how you’ll communicate is key, as well as keeping in close contact throughout the process. Do NOT go AWOL and seethe silently about side effects – you have engaged your provider to keep you safe and they have a duty of care toward you!

The bottom line is not to fear this processing. It needs to happen, but it needs to happen safely and with understanding and connection.

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The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

The Safe and Sound Protocol – SSP for neurodivergent families: Why Move2Connect offers a family package

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

You have probably found this blog post because you’re researching the SSP (Safe and Sound Protocol) for your child.

The Safe and Sound Protocol (in its standard format) is a five-hour listening therapy, which works directly with the autonomic nervous system to make the a person feel safe in the world by tuning up their autonomic function, which in turn improves social engagement. It does this by passively stimulating the vagus nerve by means of specially filtered music. It is the only auditory programme to work directly with the autonomic nervous system, and is now used widely by all sorts of healthcare and mental health professionals with a variety of conditions caused by mis-firing autonomic nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol was first launched as a way to help autistic children improve social engagement. It has been acknowledged since that the reason this is so effective is because it’s working with the trauma inherent in autism – in other words, the stress caused by being forced to function in an environment that is not accepting of autism.

For context, I have been working with the SSP pretty much since it was first available in the UK, and have probably worked with more clients than anyone else here – with a myriad of presentations and a beautiful rainbow of different nervous systems.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for neurodivergent families

The Safe and Sound Protocol used to be provided by means of an MP3 player, which I would use in-clinic. I would also sometimes rent these MP3 players out to clients once they had been through a rigorous screening session in clinic. There were huge challenges in using physical equipment, in that either clients had to attend scheduled sessions, OR schedule a rental period. Most of the time, this worked well, but occasionally, more sensitive clients needed more time or needed to miss scheduled sessions. This made providing the SSP – and using the SSP as a client – costly and a logistical nightmare.

However, from March 2020, SSP providers had to adopt a different way of working due to lockdowns and our lack of understanding of COVID19 at the time.

The licensing organisation, Unyte, released a digital version of the SSP via an app. This enabled discussion on the safest way to work with clients remotely with the SSP.

It is important to recognise that the Safe and Sound Protocol in itself is not a therapy – it is a TOOL used by therapists, and we all do it slightly differently. Some hand-hold, some budget providers only give access to the tool and let their clients get on with it – not really advisable, but it happens – caveat emptor.

My opinion, having run a clinic for neurodivergent children and adults for the last 8 years, is that it is important to engage with the Safe and Sound Protocol (and my other work) in an environment that feels safe. For most people, home is a safe space – so this makes engaging with the SSP in the comfort of your own home appealing, convenient and most effective.

Even more effective is ensuring that a child’s needs during the SSP are fully met – and the best way to do this is for a parent to go through the process themselves first.

My approach is to train parents first. They then go through the Safe and Sound Protocol themselves, and learn to understand their bodies’ cues and their own nervous systems. After that, they take their own children through the SSP, as those who understand their children better than anyone else, as well as through the eyes of someone who has completed the Safe and Sound Protocol in their own way.

When I first started working with primitive reflexes with my own child, over a decade ago, I remember our therapist telling me that parents of children with retained reflexes always benefit from going through the process themselves too. At first, I thought this was a potential money-spinner and ignored the advice. However, the more I read about primitive reflexes and the more fascinated I became, the more I realised that it was something I needed to experience – if only to understand the changes we were seeing on a daily basis in my child.

I decided to take that time out for myself – I went along, was fully assessed and did exercises daily in order to experience what my child experienced. And I changed – enormously – for the better. The experience dramatically improved my social anxiety, as well as my ability to connect so much better with my child, which is completely key to seeing positive results. A prescriptive “working on” approach when working with neuroplasticity therapies is not as effective as a “working with” approach.

The same happened when I trained in the SSP. Of course, I used it on myself before using with my children. And of course, I had the same excitement and impatience as my clients often have when they first approach me! At first, all I noticed was calm and spontaneous joy – and later came the realisation that my connection with my children, patience and ability to co-regulate effectively had all improved so dramatically that my children had CHANGED – without my children even going through the SSP themselves.

By the time it was their turn, the outcome was so noticeable that I remember being stopped at school pick-up time by the teacher, who wanted to know what we had done as there was such a marked change in my child’s focus and attention.

For example, if a parent’s motive for using the SSP is to “fix” their child, it’s unlikely they’ll notice as much of a benefit as if they work with themselves first and then with their child. When children have undesirable “reactions” to the Safe and Sound Protocol, it is because a child’s primitive brain is feeling under attack – the SSP can make this more sensitive.

Working with the Safe and Sound Protocol is like buying a beautiful piece of well-loved antique furniture – a table, for example, complete with blobs of paint and scratches, applying paint stripper and giving it a good rub down:

If you then nurture and look after that piece of furniture, perhaps applying a coat of varnish or wax and protecting it with coasters when you put a mug of tea down on it, it will gleam in it’s new setting (equating to co-regulation and providing cues of safety). If you, however, don’t look after it and stick hot mugs of tea down, or allow the children to draw on it with sharp, scratchy pencils, it’s going to quickly return to the way it was before you did all that work.

I specialise in working with the Safe and Sound Protocol with neurodivergent families. For this reason, my pricing includes a parent and child and full coaching in polyvagal theory and how to use the Safe and Sound Protocol for YOUR FAMILY. This looks completely different for each family. For example, the SSP for PDA involves ensuring that a child understands that this is going to work for them on THEIR terms – not mine. Another good reason for parents to go first!

If you would like to understand how the SSP could work for your family, please book a discovery call.

ATNR:Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex FPR: Fear Paralysis Reflex Moro reflex Spinal Galant Reflex SSP: Safe and Sound Protocol STNR: Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex

Retained Reflexes in Adults: Could you be compensating for primitive reflexes?

I often use my own experiences as a private pilot to explain compensation to new clients who want to know about retained reflexes in adults – the concept of working extra hard as a result of retained primitive reflexes due to a not quite “typically”-wired brain:

I was an average child who grew up in the 1970s. I played outdoors in all weathers, possibly a lot more than the children of today – skipping, French elastic, climbing frames, gymnastics, tree-climbing, getting muddy etc.

I was talking in full sentences when I was a year old, could read my name at 15 months and was reading when I was tiny (not sure how old). I remember being shocked that children had to read out loud when I started in Reception, though – I’d been reading in my head for ages before that. I didn’t really crawl – I went straight to walking at about 15 months. I can remember trying and failing to crawl – because I have a ridiculously early memory. I was also EXCESSIVELY shy. I found nursery school just too noisy and scary and remember hiding until I was picked up the ONE time that my mother left me at a big nursery school. I ended up going to a small playgroup at someone’s house, and have very fond memories of it, even now – even though I was only about three years old when I started going there.

Oh… also, nobody ever believes quite how early my memories go back. You won’t either, so I’m not going to tell you. But it’s not normal to remember anything from the first few months of life, and yet I do.

At school, I learnt to write easily. I wasn’t brilliant at maths, but not everyone is, right? My forte was always language and music. Well, I now think I may well be dyscalculaic, and I know that I have slower than average processing speed. I found times tables horrific to learn, and would always be last to finish in maths tests. I also found swimming front crawl particularly difficult, and found sitting comfortably still all day at school a challenge!

Retained reflexes in adults

So, when I started training in primitive reflex integration, seven years ago, I was slightly shocked to discover that I am not “neurotypical”. Walking at 15 months, skipping crawling, being excessively shy, not being able to master that cross-lateral front crawl movement and being as atrocious at maths as me is not “normal” development. But who cares? I have been successful in life! I did really well in my previous career. I can also fly light aircraft, so surely my brain must be functioning reasonably well? And yes, it is…

But… when I went on a course on the effect of retained primitive reflexes on reading and writing a few years back, I discovered to my great surprise that I had not developed a head-righting reflex! This is an adult postural reflex, which should start to emerge at around 3 months of age, and its absence causes vestibular issues, and makes reading – in particular copying from a board – and maintaining attention particularly difficult.

To test, you get a person to sit look at an object a few metres away. You then move their shoulders from side to side, and watch what the head does. If the reflex is present (as it should be), the eyes will remain level with the horizon. If it has not emerged, the head will follow the rest of the body.

The trainer showed us some isometric pressures that can be applied to help develop the head-righting reflex, and, as if by magic, within minutes mine started to emerge! I remember hearing gasps from the other course participants.

Out of interest, I went flying in a two-seater plane a couple of weeks later and did a few steep turns to see whether anything had changed. Well… normally, steep turns had the effect of making me feel disoriented and I would always lose hundreds of feet, no matter how many times I practiced and no matter how much I concentrated. However, with a head-righting reflex in place, my eyes stayed on the horizon and I maintained height for the first time since I started flying in 2003! I no longer felt disoriented either.

I often see private pilots in the early stages of training saying that they feel sick, and receiving advice on motion sickness bands, ginger etc – I often wonder whether they have a head-righting reflex or whether I could help them with it.

I’ve also brought this adult postural reflex online in several children and adults that I’ve worked with – it’s always a thrill. If it doesn’t happen immediately, something else is blocking it, however.

I digress….

The point of this post is to show that almost all of us are walking around compensating for difficulties that we are unaware of. To us, these difficulties are the norm, but they need not be! If a child is struggling with confidence, attention or the three Rs, it is well worth taking a look to see whether their reflex profile might be causing them to compensate.

So what can we do about it?

Primitive Reflexes

As a neuro-developmental therapist, I test for active baby reflexes, and help people to gradually mature these reflexes, using a combination of gentle foetal/newborn baby movements and pressures. Until you have experienced this for yourself, it is very hard to explain how it feels to suddenly have a challenge you have been used to for your entire life suddenly removed.

In my case, while my brain has indeed always allowed me to cope very well in the world and achieve things like learning to speak multiple foreign languages with ease, play the violin and fly light aircraft, things still could have been easier for me if I’d had integrated reflexes earlier.

Integrating primitive reflexes simply means that connections from the brainstem to higher levels of the brain will work more efficiently and not take the long way around all the time.

I now find that I can do things that I used to struggle with far more effortlessly – for example,

Getting butterflies before a stressful meeting: gone
Ability to listen and concentrate: vastly improved
Processing speed: vastly improved
Auditory processing: vastly improved
Ability to express myself clearly under stress: vastly improved
Procrastination: greatly reduced – especially when it comes to writing a blog post or completing a daunting form

If you would like to find out how reflex integration might help you, please do get in touch or book an appointment

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