Very frequently people contact me looking for SSP to help with a particular area of concern. Sometimes they are hoping for help with anxiety. Other times it may be misophonia. Or it may be that they have chronic digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Someone else may be hoping for help with arthritis pain, another person with fibromyalgia. And someone else may be hoping that their bladder incontinence improves with SSP, or their long covid symptoms.
I try to be sure that people understand that SSP is not a treatment or therapy for any one specific condition.
And also that, while most SSP clients in my practice do notice some areas of improvement within the first few days or weeks of doing SSP, it can take between 2-7 weeks after the completion of all five hours of SSP Core, for all of the changes to unfold and for the nervous system to settle into its new patterns.
Otherwise they believe that SSP "hasn't worked" for them if that particular area didn't appear to respond.
What SSP does rather than treat any one condition is that it sends cues of safety to the nervous system.
It is really difficult to heal any particular physical or emotionally related concern while feeling unsafe.
When we feel unsafe in the world - dealing with chronic anxiety or stress, it sends our nervous system into a more primitive state where its focus is upon survival.
When our heart rate is frequently elevated because we have ongoing stress, our commute is difficult, there is upsetting news in another part of the world, etc... our amygdala assumes that there may be a predator close by.
Our physiology can then get stuck in a pattern where the amygdala is constantly scanning for danger. Hypervigilance comes into our body so we suddenly may find ourselves unable to filter out certain types of sounds, or misreading social cues thinking people are upset with us when they are not, or we may have more chronic pain because our body is more constricted, waiting for the attack that may be about to occur.
Our digestion becomes hindered - when physiology senses danger it's focus will not be upon digestion and in extreme cases may even be trying to make itself "lighter" in order to escape a potential predator by having loss of appetite or evacuating food as quickly as we take it in.
The shape of some parts of the ear actually change when we feel unsafe so we actually hear sounds differently than we do when we feel safe - the pitch of those sounds may be different and they may sound louder to us than they actually are. Our physiology is making sure we don't miss a thing that may be important information in how we can protect ourselves.
By sending cues of safety to the nervous system, the Safe & Sound Protocol (SSP) gradually coaxes our physiology towards recognizing safety in the present day.
When we feel safer, an extremely long list of concerns has the potential to improve, completely effortlessly.
That the improvements show up so effortlessly is one of the reasons that it isn't unusual for someone going through the SSP process to not even notice the changes that are appearing, at first.
Whenever someone tells me they aren't sure if they are seeing any improvements with SSP I send them this list of areas to watch, and to ask those around them for feedback in case there is something they have missed.
Most often when people get back to me they are able to tell me a few to several things - sometimes the list is quite long - that have improved rather a lot.
If someone has certain areas that they were hoping to see respond to SSP and they didn't improve, virtually always if they are willing to repeat SSP two or more months later, they are likely to see additional improvements show up then, as well as a deepening of prior improvements.
Even people who notice nothing at all on a first round of SSP will most often have quite dramatic improvements appear if they are willing to try it again.
Sometimes our physiology needs certain building blocks in place before other areas can be addressed.
A lovely thing about SSP, however, is that most often it isn't just one or two areas that respond on any particular round of SSP.
Most often we see a number of areas respond - sometimes quite dramatically - within just one round of SSP.
At SSP Yoda & Associates we offer a very significant discount on subsequent rounds of SSP when the same person's first round was done with us. Usually there is less demand upon our time in monitoring the process as people have a better idea what to watch for, and how things may unfold so there is a lot less teaching involved.
How my associates and I take people through the SSP process is often quite different from how other providers do. Often a lot of our work when someone comes to us having done SSP with a different provider previously can involve helping them to unlearn what they had thought was right before - but either they didn't have improvements or the process became too turbulent - so this is why the discount is only available to those who did a first round with us.
We also are happy to provide family discounts for those clients who have multiple family members doing SSP within roughly the same timeframe.