It’s All Connected
Internalizing safety, being regulated, connecting to others, experiencing inner calm and feeling centered are all a part of being well.  This is why cognitive and behavioral interventions that don’t treat the mind and body as connected can fall short in facilitating change beyond surface behaviors.  Families with autistic children and those with complex PTSD know all too well the limitations about therapies that target thinking and word choice.  You can’t think your way to feeling safe.  It is an autonomic state.  Since our physiological state affects our thinking, behavior and emotions, top-down interventions are sometimes experienced as putting the cart before the horse.

The thinking part of our brain just doesn’t operate effectively when we don’t feel safe inside.  Being in a state of threat limits the usefulness and generalization of scripts and strategies if our body is anticipating danger, perceived or otherwise.

Central to your feeling of safety is your autonomic nervous system in which your vagus nerve plays a key role in the pathways that connect the body and the brain through our motor and sensory pathways.  When we are well regulated, our bodies respond to environmental cues with just the right amount of motor response to be effective.   The SSP protocol directly targets this nerve in the simplest way possible. 

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)
According to the Polyvagal Theory, your ability to access cues of safety in your environment and your perception of possible threat affect your internalized sense of safety.  This shifts you into various states of vulnerability.  Because survival and being safe are the body’s top priority, shifting into states of threat, real or otherwise, come at the expense of other functions such as digestion, socializing and problem-solving, to name a few.  Actual danger isn’t the only trigger of a defensive state.  Illness, stress, abuse, trauma or neglect can throw us into an ANS survival response.

How Chronic Defensive States Show Up
A dysregulated nervous system, especially in the case of complex PTSD can present as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, GI issues or sleep disorders, to mention the more common.  In children, particularly in the case of autism, this can look like aggression, upset or selective eating, not to mention delayed milestones. In fact, children with autism are sometimes misdiagnosed as oppositional, borderline, manic or even schizophrenic when they are actually suffering from sensory overload and chronic stress.

Because our ANS operates below our conscious awareness, interventions that target our functioning outside of our thinking capacity can be more effective in helping us build resilience and attain a more sustained state of regulation.