My experience with the Safe & Sound Protocol
by Nicola-Jane le Breton
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 ease among twenty-five children, the only Australian in the room, and certain she belonged. For most of my adult life, I’ve looked back on her and wondered what happened. How did I ever do that? It seemed impossible that I could once have been so open, so confident, so at ease in a group.
Because sometime after that, she went into hiding. Childhood trauma set in, and by the time I started attending a girls’ school in Melbourne, I felt like an alien on another planet—as though everyone else had been given a script and taught the language, and I hadn’t. I could manage one or two close friendships, one-on-one, but in any group I had no idea how to behave or what to say, and I’d fade into the background. 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 became deeply ingrained, and I carried them well into adulthood.
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 longed for most—connection—was also the thing that cost me the most. I’ve tried many paths to get back to it: training as a yoga teacher, years of therapy, and practicing Focusing. The Safe & Sound Protocol turned out to be one of the simplest—and most surprising—of them all.
What the SSP Is
The Safe & Sound Protocol consists of five hours of specially filtered music, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges. While 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 sense of being at ease with other people. The music is filtered to emphasize 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 report—just one person’s story. So rather than make claims about how or why it works, I’ll simply tell you what changed for me.
How it came to be—as rest
Honestly, at first, the SSP didn’t do anything dramatic for me socially. I discovered it in 2023, while training to become 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, either during or after—a shortcut to a nap. My nervous system, usually tense, hyper, and always on the go, would soften and let go. Resting was otherwise very hard for me, and this was one of the few things that reliably helped me relax. 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 going on. I was a small child again, falling asleep at one of my parents’ parties—lulled by the gentle hum 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 duration of a track.
Coming Out of Hiding
It wasn’t until months later—I wasn’t even listening to the SSP at that point—that I sat down for a Focusing session and realized, with a jolt of joy, how much had quietly shifted. Something had changed in the way I moved through the world, especially at work. I felt a confidence I hadn’t had before, and could walk into a group and actually stay in my body, whereas before I had so often felt as if I were 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 on the sidelines, 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 conducting a one-on-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 accomplish in five or ten minutes what might otherwise take me forty-five minutes of yoga.
The Wobble, and Finding William
Then there was a break. For several months, I couldn’t access the program, and I felt myself slipping back—the part of me that had just begun to open up wasn’t stable yet, and I started to swing back and forth: 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 looked 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. After a few emails, it was clear he was genuinely caring, and I signed up for a year. Amid a demanding work project and my Focusing practitioner training, the SSP became an anchor—a self-regulation tool I turned to whenever I felt myself falling apart.
In the interest of transparency: after that first year, William offered me another year of free access to the SSP in exchange for writing this review. The experience and the views expressed here are entirely my own.
Backstage and on stage at the same time
The most recent shift came when I added the RRP—its companion protocol, which focuses not on social connection but on deep rest. On its own, the SSP had given me the ability to open a door and reach out to people; but it was the two together that gave me something more stable. 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 is evident everywhere now. I recently had a conversation with a woman who has autism and finds group settings very difficult; I recognized most of what she described, and told her that 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 statement would have been unimaginable. My husband also remarks on how different I am in social situations compared to 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 maintain my balance between withdrawing and engaging.
What it's like to listen
In practical terms, the SSP requires very little of you. You listen through over-ear headphones with any noise-canceling turned off, building up slowly—a few minutes at first, rarely more than about twenty at a time. 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 lull me to sleep the way it did in the early years. Do something quietly engaging, or nothing at all, and if you can listen with a trusted person or a pet nearby, all the better. What I came to value most was the unhurried pace of it—no rush to finish, no penalty for taking your time. On days when a few minutes were enough, they were enough.
Honest Warnings
I still, at times, feel like an alien who’s just landed from another planet—especially in new social situations that aren’t designed for genuine connection. That pattern runs deep, and I expect to keep working on it. What the SSP has done, over the years since I started in 2023, is lessen its intensity and give me real experiences of feeling comfortable in my own skin among others. It hasn’t fixed me or turned me into someone else.
The SSP is subtle, and that’s worth knowing before you start. For me, the changes only became apparent later, in how much easier a once-difficult situation had quietly become—so if you’re hoping for fireworks, you may be disappointed, whereas if you can trust in a slow process of re-patterning, you may, as I was, be surprised. It can also bring up old issues, which is why building up slowly is important, and why it helps to have support and a way of being with whatever comes up.
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, accessible 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 complement other care, not to replace it.
Would I recommend it?
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 turn me into a new person. It helped that girl from the Boulder classroom—the one who could tell a story and feel she belonged—find her way out of hiding and become, just a little more, who she already was beneath the fear.
Nicola-Jane le Breton is a writer, Focusing trainer, and practitioner based in Rockingham, Western Australia. She works as a Community Story Weaver with Befriend, helping to build more inclusive and connected communities.
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