Slowing Down to Speed Up: Using SSP Therapy to Pay Attention to Your Nervous System

Slowing Down? 

As a licensed therapist working with lots of high achievers who have high expectations for themselves, I have heard many clients ask for me to “fix” them as fast as possible. However, sometimes we need to slow down in order to speed up. I know some of you reading this are rolling your eyes and ready to click out of this blog post already! If you give me just a few minutes I want to make my case as to why this will actually accelerate your process!  

Emotional Safety (External vs. Internal) 

In most cases, we need to feel emotionally safe before we are able to heal in a sustainable sort of way. There are two kinds of emotional safety, internal and external. Let’s talk about external first. The therapeutic relationship refers to the relationship between a therapist and the client. In the research about counseling, they have found that the most significant factor for change in counseling is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. One of the factors that contribute to a good quality of the therapeutic relationship is emotional safety. If you don’t feel safe with your therapist, I’m thinking you are probably not going to be able to heal no matter how good of a technique the therapist can use with you! Can you imagine working with a therapist who you constantly don’t feel emotionally safe with? That would make healing and exploring your inner world pretty difficult! I imagine some of you have experienced this kind of a therapeutic relationship, and I’m sorry to hear that. It is a hard and often scarring experience.  

So that is an external version of feeling safe, in the relationship between you and your therapist, you feel safe. Now let’s talk about an internal feeling of safety. I think this is best explained by thinking about your own experience. I want you to imagine an average day, waking up, going to school or work, coming home at the end of the day, and then going to sleep. As you think about an average day, do you usually feel calm and emotionally safe and generally happy with the occasional ups and downs? If you do then that’s awesome! That means your nervous system is probably pretty well regulated and you experience safety on a regular basis. If you feel consistently anxious, on edge, easily irritated, depressed, frozen, shut down and stuck then you probably aren’t experiencing an internal experience of safety on a regular basis. This is due to your nervous system responding to your environment around you.  

The Nervous System? 

According to polyvagal theory (a helpful understanding of how and why your nervous system operates the way it does), your nervous system is constantly perceiving your environment and deeming the stimuli around us as either safe or not safe. If it perceives your environment to be safe you tend to stay in a place of relative calm (window of tolerance). If it perceives your environment to not be safe, then it will produce a response, a fight or flight (hyperarousal), or freeze response (hypoarousal). This is sometimes based on certain factors that aren’t always conscious decisions. This is why sometimes when you are around that one person, they just “feel off.” Your nervous system has deemed that person as not safe. Sometimes this accurate and sometimes it is not. When you are in true physical or emotional danger, this is a great system! It becomes problematic when you are truly safe and your system is still interpreting your environment as unsafe.  

So, a basic overview of the nervous system. It has 3 modes, window of tolerance (calm), hyperarousal (fight or flight), and hypoarousal (freeze). Hyperarousal and hypoarousal are not always bad though. Sometimes they are fully appropriate for the situation. And sometimes they can get mixed with the window of tolerance and produce over good things! Let me explain. So, think of a soft serve ice cream machine, it can give you either chocolate or vanilla or it can give you a delicious mixture of both! So if we can combine the window of tolerance with hyperarousal that’s when we get to play! This is often the state we are in when we play sports. Hyperarousal gets you moving and ready to accomplish things so if we can pair that with the window of tolerance where you are able to be social and connect with others we have a great mixture. And if we combine hypoarousal with the window of tolerance we get relaxing. Imagine laying on a beach somewhere or relaxing with your significant other at the end of they day. You don’t move so you are in hypoarousal by being in one spot and not moving and not exerting effort, but if it’s mixed with the window of tolerance we get another great mixture! All of the states of our nervous system have their uses. We get into problems when we get stuck in a state of hyperarousal or hypoarousal and we cannot get connected to our window of tolerance at all.  

How does this all connect to slowing down to speed up? 

Now what does all this science and emotional safety have to do with slowing down at all? I’m glad you asked! There is an exciting fairly new therapeutic modality that was invented to help the nervous system to connect to the window of tolerance on a regular basis. Now before I explain it all, imagine with me for a minute a day in your life that we talked about earlier. Imagine a day where you wake up, go to school or work, then come home and go sleep and throughout the whole day, you feel calm and relaxed. You don’t feel stuck in hyperarousal (fight or flight) or hypoarousal (freeze). You are able to respond to annoyances with a clear and level head and think about your response proactively instead of reactively. Doesn’t that sound nice?  

Introducing SSP 

Now the details of what is exciting! The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is therapeutically designed music that helps your nervous system to go into a state of calm on a consistent basis. The way it does this is by filtering the music so that your nervous system responds to it and puts you into all the different states of the nervous system; hyperarousal, hypoarousal, and the window of tolerance. By doing this the music helps your nervous system to consistently access the window of tolerance and switch in and out of hyperarousal and hypoarousal as needed.  

Now the reason I said slow down to speed up, this is a slow process that will take some time. But whatever your therapeutic goal is, this will help you get your therapeutic goals accomplished faster. If your nervous system is in a healthy state and you are able to feel emotionally safe, the therapeutic work timeline will speed up dramatically!  

Next Steps:  

Now let me be clear, for those of you who looked at this article and said I don’t want to slow down, I want to speed up more! I hope I have answered your question. I really believe in sustainably quick therapy. I offer this therapeutic music of the Safe and Sound Protocol so that I can help clients increase their speed in a sustainable way. If you still don’t believe that I want sustainably fast results, let me tell you about my EMDR therapy intensives!  

I offer EMDR therapy intensives that can accomplish months and months’ worth of progress in just a couple of days. If that sounds interesting to you please check out my blog “What If Just 3 Hours Could Change Your Life?” As a certified SSP provider and certified EMDR therapist, I really invest in thorough training for the modalities I believe in. If you’re looking for SSP or an EMDR intensive in Colorado, especially in the Lakewood or Denver metro area please reach out. I am happy to support anyone who lives in or is able to travel to Colorado even if you don’t live here! I would love to have a free phone call with you to see if we might be a good therapeutic connection. Please reach out today!  

To Contact Me About SSP Services: https://www.sacredplacecounseling.co/ssp-therapy  

To Contact Me about EMDR Intensives: https://www.sacredplacecounseling.co/emdr-therapy-intensives