- The Safe and Sound Protocol is a listening therapy
that has 20 years of research behind it
and lots of clinical experience to show that it's
particularly beneficial for people with trauma backgrounds,
autism spectrum disorders, other developmental disorders,
and any situation where social anxiety
or relationship problems are causing the person
to feel anxiety
or they're not learning as well as they should be.
It trains the ears to perceive the human voice
the way they are supposed to.
It is a one hour, five days in a row listening intervention.
And I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about it
in this video.
My name is Nicole Hargreaves.
I'm from Abundant Life Natural Health.
I am a trained SSP provider,
and I've been using this programme in my clinic
for some months now, with really good results.
So what it is is a set of noise-canceling headphones
that come attached to an MP3 player
with altered music in it,
and that music is designed to emphasise
the frequencies that we find in human voices
that encourage what we call the social engagement system.
The social engagement system is one of three
physiological states that we can be in as humans.
So social engagement is when we're sitting around
having lovely interactions
with our friends and family members,
and it supports facial expressions
because the nerves that control social engagement
innovate the face.
It controls vocal tone.
It has some control over digestion because
as humans we like to get together over coffee and cake.
And when we're social engaged, we digest well.
And most importantly, it has
control over the ears,
and the ears are able to
regulate how we perceive people's vocal tone.
And in many people with developmental disorders
and trauma backgrounds, that perceiving of the vocal tone
has been altered,
and that can create a bit of viscous circle
where the ears don't perceive the tone properly,
and so the nervous system gets messages
to be feeling tense and uptight.
So the other two physiological states we can be in
are fight or flight where there is danger,
or a shutdown situation where we actually feel
that there is a life threat.
And if someone has every been in what they perceive
as a life-threatening situation,
then the body can tend to want to go back to that
shutdown and not engage socially as well as it could.
Also, if they've had a lot of danger or a lot of anxiety,
fight or flight can be emphasised,
and that can result in hyperactivity
or aggressive tendencies,
or just feelings of anxiety, heart racing,
and mental anxiety.
And the SSP
is using the ears
to turn the social engagement system back on,
which helps bring people out of fight or flight
and out of shutdown.
Now we're never in fight or flight or shutdown all the time,
but some people are there too much of the time.
And we want to be socially engaged most of the time
because when we're hearing people properly,
when we're understanding their friendly tone of voice,
when we're perceiving their friendly facial expressions,
that's when we learn because we feel safe,
we feel like we're not busy being vigilant
for dangers in the environment, we're not anxious,
and that enables us digest better,
which enables us to grow better and to be healthier.
So, the SSP engages the social engagement system
by training the middle ear muscles
to tighten up the ear drum,
which enable us to perceive high frequencies better
than we can with a slack ear drum,
and that ear drum can become slack because of
chronic ear infections,
or one particularly bad ear infection,
or because the brain had sent it messages
from being in fight or flight or shutdown messages to say,
"You better get nice and slack
"so you can pick up threatening sounds in the environment."
The nature of the music in the SSP
changes that programming,
and it forces the ears to tighten up
and listen to the nice high frequencies in the music.
What this does is it opens up the body for
social engagement in the future.
So we don't necessarily see immediate changes after the SSP,
although we often do.
But over the course of the next five, or six, or more weeks,
the person has had five or six weeks
where they're perceiving sound properly,
they're perceiving human voice properly.
They're feeling loved because
they are hearing the soothing tones
and seeing the facial expressions better.
And so that has a compounding positive effect
on the initial results from the SSP,
and it is really important if you do the programme
to follow it up with other therapies or interactions
that promote that feeling of safety,
and it's really important to avoid
dangers and life-threatening situations for obvious reasons,
as well as because it will negate the effects of the SSP
if it's too soon after the intervention in particular.
So, we want to follow it up with loving interactions,
first and foremost,
and you can use other listening therapies
or applied behaviour analysis,
whatever your flavour of therapy works for you
if you're doing such things
particularly with children with developmental disorders.
But you can also follow it up with
cheap things you can do at home,
playing a wind instrument, singing,
especially singing in a choir,
breathing exercises.
And so,
this therapy really opens you up
to get better results from what you're doing already,
and that includes school and work
and in your regular interactions.
As I said before, it's one hour,
completed five days in a row for children,
slightly longer for adults.
Anybody is eligible to do it
if they are over the age of two and under the age of 13.
Over the age of 13, we do suggest that it's not suitable
for everybody to do,
and that is because over a certain age,
it's potentially been quite a long time
since you have been socially engaged well,
and it can be quite hard for the nervous system
to get back into the social engaged state,
and it require some support.
If you have a loving supportive person with you
or a trained therapist to do it with you,
then any adult can do it or adolescent.
However, if you're on your own
and you don't have support,
it's not always appropriate for an adult
or someone over the age of 13 to do it,
which is why at Abundant Life
we have a prescreening interview
where you can ask all your questions.
We can tell you how you may need to modify your environment
or the programme itself to work best for you,
and where we can determine that it is suitable for you.
If we determine you're suitable,
you can hire it for seven or 10 days.
Adults needs to hire for 10 days
because they do need to take a little longer over it.
Children can usually do it in the five days in a row,
and the seven days just gives you time
to get it to and from us.
We are hoping to have a supervised
in-clinic SSP experience available
perhaps late 2019 with a trained practitioner.
But for the moment, it is only available for home hire.
If you like some more information,
please go to my website, which is www.an,
that's A-N, anabundantlife.com.au.
We have all the information there
about hire fees and how to get in touch,
and there's a form you can fill in
to send us a message
and we'll get back to you to arrange that time
for that pre-interview appointment.
Hire includes support from a trained practitioner
at any time while you have the machine
and for six or so weeks afterwards.
Most people find that they do get benefits
from the first round of the SSP.
It can be beneficial to repeat it
two to three months afterwards,
especially if you had progress
and then you progress kind of fell back a little bit.
I've never heard of anyone doing it more than four times.
The average seems to be two or three.
You're going to have to do it more times
if you have a more severe impairment,
especially if you've unable to follow up the therapy
with other practises to reinforce the social engagement.
So it is important to try and find
those activities that you can do.
Please feel free to get in touch
if you have any more questions.
This had been a fairly brief explanation of the programme.
I hope to do another video which goes
more in depth into the science behind the SSP,
and how it works, and how it trains the ears.
We're also going to a video
on what my experience was like doing it.
I've had really good benefits,
and I'm so glad I did it,
and it was certainly very interesting.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.