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My experience with the Safe & Sound Protocol

بقلم نيكولا-جين لو بريتون

There’s a girl I lost track of for nearly fifty years. She was about eight, in a classroom in Boulder, Colorado, telling the class about a dream she’d had and making everyone laugh—completely at home among twenty-five children, the only Australian in the room, and certain she belonged. For most of my adult life I’ve looked back at her and wondered what happened. How did I ever do that? It seemed impossible I could once have been so open, so confident, so easy in a group.

Because somewhere after that, she went into hiding. Childhood trauma set in, and by the time I reached a girls’ school in Melbourne I felt like an alien on another planet—as though everyone else had been handed a script and taught the language, and I hadn’t. I could manage one or two close friendships, one to one, but in any group I had no idea how to behave or what to say, and I’d go quiet at the edges. Often I felt as though I were standing ten feet behind myself, watching myself perform in a play whose lines I’d never been given. Not enough. Too weird. Not one of us. Those patterns set hard, and I carried them well into adult life.

I’ll say this plainly, because I suspect it’s familiar to many who find their way to this protocol: I’m neurodivergent, and I live with a history of complex trauma (C-PTSD) and depression rooted in those early years. For a long time, the very thing I most longed for—connection—was also the thing that cost me the most. I’ve tried many doors back toward it: training as a yoga teacher, years of therapy, and practising Focusing. The Safe & Sound Protocol turned out to be one of the simplest, and most surprising, of them.

What the SSP is

The Safe & Sound Protocol is five hours of specially filtered music, developed by the neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges. Where its companion, the Rest & Restore Protocol, works with the body’s capacity for deep rest, the SSP works with what Porges calls the ventral vagal pathway—the branch of the nervous system associated with safety, social connection, and the felt sense of being at ease with other people. The music is filtered to emphasise the frequencies of the human voice—roughly the range of someone speaking gently to you—so that, the idea goes, it signals safety to a nervous system that has learned to expect threat.

I’m not a scientist, and this isn’t a clinical write-up—just one person’s story. So rather than make claims about how or why it works, I’ll simply tell you what shifted for me.

How it arrived—as rest

Honestly, at first, the SSP did nothing dramatic for me socially. I came to it in 2023, while training as a Focusing teacher, and what kept me listening was something much simpler: it helped me rest. I’d put it on in the afternoon and simply fall asleep, during or after—a shortcut to a nap. My nervous system, usually clenched and hyped-up and go-go-go, would soften and let go. Resting was otherwise very hard for me, and this was one of the few things that reliably unclenched me. I even overdid it at first, listening for too long, until my teacher gently reminded me that less is more. For months, that was all I thought the SSP was: a beautiful way to rest.

The very first time I listened, though, the music stirred a memory that should have told me more was happening. I was a small child again, falling asleep at one of my parents’ parties—carried on the gentle purr of conversation, music and grown-up voices around me, completely safe even among people I didn’t know. It was a feeling from before my parents separated, before the trauma: the trusting body of a child who simply knew she would be okay. The SSP, somehow, gave that back to me for the length of a track.

Coming out of hiding

It was only months later—I wasn’t even listening to the SSP at that point—that I sat down for a Focusing session and realised, with a jolt of joy, how much had quietly shifted. Something had changed in how I moved through the world, especially at work. I felt a confidence I hadn’t had before, and could enter a group and actually stay in my body, where before I’d so often felt I was watching from somewhere behind myself.

When I tuned into the felt sense of it, the images came on their own. Something had stepped out from behind the curtains and onto the stage—no longer so afraid of the spotlight. Something that had been curled up and held back began to uncurl and step forward, like a part of a plant that hadn’t been able to unfold in childhood finally opening to feel the sun. After a lifetime of feeling like the misfit at the edge, I had come out of hiding.

From then on I used the SSP differently—not only to rest, but to regulate. Before teaching a class or holding a one-to-one Focusing session, I’d listen for ten or fifteen minutes, and it would both ground and open me: settle the jangle, smooth the jagged edges, and make it possible to meet another person in that calm, connected, ventral place. It could do in five or ten minutes what might otherwise take me forty-five minutes of yoga.

The wobble, and finding William

Then came a gap. For some months I couldn’t access the program, and I felt myself slipping back—the newly uncurled part of me wasn’t steady yet, and I began oscillating: open and confident in a group one day, then thrown back into the old discomfort the next, not knowing my lines again. I missed it. I went looking for a way to keep going that I could actually afford, read through forums and other people’s experiences, and that’s how I found William Bolle—a psychologist in the Netherlands. A few emails in, it was clear he was genuinely caring, and I signed up for a year. Through a demanding work project and my Focusing practitioner training, the SSP became an anchor—a regulation tool I reached for whenever I felt myself coming undone.

In the interest of transparency: after that first year, William offered me a further year’s free access to the SSP in exchange for writing this review. The experience and the views here are entirely my own.

Backstage and front stage at once

The most recent shift came when I added the RRP—its companion protocol, which works not with social connection but with deep rest. On its own, the SSP had given me the ability to open a door and step toward people; but it was the two together that gave me something steadier. I picture it now as a bubble I can sit inside that opens and closes at will—the RRP a shell I can rest within, the SSP the door I can open onto the world. It’s like being backstage and front of house at the same time, and—just as importantly—knowing when it’s time to draw the front-stage self back behind the curtain again. (I’ve written about the RRP, and the deep rest it brought, in a companion review.)

That balance shows up everywhere now. I had a conversation recently with a woman who has autism and finds group settings very hard; I recognised most of what she described, and told her I’m neurodivergent too. “But you don’t seem that way at all,” she said. “You’re so socially engaged.” A few years ago that sentence would have been unimaginable. My husband, too, remarks on how different I am in company from the person I used to be. These days I use the SSP only once or twice a fortnight, but it remains a key part of how I hold my balance between withdrawing and engaging.

What the listening is like

In practical terms, the SSP asks very little of you. You listen through over-ear headphones with any noise-cancelling switched off, building up slowly—a few minutes at first, rarely more than about twenty in a sitting. The official guidance is to sit rather than lie down, so you don’t drift off; I confess I lie down, because it feels more restful to me, and these days it doesn’t tip me into sleep the way it did in the early years. Do something quietly absorbing, or nothing at all, and if you can listen with a safe person or a pet nearby, all the better. What I came to value most was the unhurried shape of it—no race to finish, no penalty for going slowly. On days when a few minutes were enough, they were enough.

Honest cautions

I still, at times, feel like an alien freshly landed from another planet—especially in new social situations that aren’t built for real connection. That pattern runs deep, and I expect to keep working with it. What the SSP has done, over the years since I began in 2023, is lighten its intensity and give me real experiences of feeling comfortable in my own skin among others. It hasn’t fixed me or made me someone else.

The SSP is subtle, and that’s worth knowing going in. For me the changes revealed themselves only later, in how much easier a once-difficult situation had quietly become—so if you’re hoping for fireworks you may be disappointed, while if you can trust a slow re-patterning you may, as I was, be surprised. It can also stir up old material, which is why building slowly matters, and why it helps to have support and a way of being with whatever surfaces.

For me that companion practice is Focusing—a gentle, embodied way of turning toward my inner experience with curiosity rather than trying to fix it—and I wouldn’t have wanted to do this without it. William’s steady, reachable guidance made the difference between a process I could trust and one I might have rushed. And it’s worth remembering that the SSP is a listening program, not a medical treatment—something to sit alongside other care, not to replace it.

هل أوصي به؟

I would—honestly, and with care. I can’t promise it will do for you what it did for me, and I’d be wary of anyone who told you otherwise. What I can tell you is that the SSP helped a lifelong outsider come back into the room: to stay in her own body among others, to step out from behind the curtains, to let connection in without it costing her everything. It didn’t make me someone new. It helped that girl from the Boulder classroom—the one who could tell a story and feel she belonged—find her way back out of hiding, and become, a little more, who she already was beneath the fear.

نيكولا-جين لو بريتون كاتبة ومدربة وممارسة في مجال «التركيز» (Focusing)، وتقيم في روكينغهام، غرب أستراليا. تعمل كـ«نساجة قصص مجتمعية» مع منظمة «بيفريند» (Befriend)، حيث تساعد في بناء مجتمعات أكثر شمولية وترابطًا.