Adulting For Parents Healing Mental Health Neurodiversity Podcasts Sensory Processing Disorder

Understanding the Science of Safety with Rebecca Kase | The Neurodiverging Podcast

On today’s episode, Danielle talks with guest Rebecca Kase about everything polyvagal theory. Developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, polyvagal theory is an important model for understanding how people regulate emotional and physical health, especially in response to stress and perceived threats, and something we refer to in coaching very often. Rebecca discusses how we can use this model to help us understand and work with our nervous systems to feel better more often.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube

Thank you to our Patrons for funding this podcast. Find out more and pledge today at patreon.com/neurodiverging.

Our sincere thanks to: Angel, Estevanny, Jacqueline, Kenna, RW Painter, Paul, Anne, Katrina, Melissa, Brianne, Mashbooq, Galactic Fay, Cee, Christina, Theresa, Megan, Shilo, Valerie, Stephanie, Margie, Bobbi Sue, David, Teresa, Laura, Allison, Andrea, Michael, Reginaluna, Gabrielle, Caroline, Ken, Arielle, Michelle, and all of our other patrons.


Show Notes:


Guest Bio: Rebecca Kase, LCSW

rebecca kase polyvagal theoryRebecca Kase is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist and yoga instructor, living in Gig Harbor, WA. She is an EMDR Consultant & Basic Trainer, and owner of Kase & CO, an EMDR Training and Consulting company. She is the author of Polyvagal informed EMDR: A Neuro-informed Approach to Healing.


About Neurodiverging

Neurodiverging is dedicated to helping neurodiverse folk find the resources we need to live better lives as individuals, and to further disability awareness and social justice efforts to improve all our lives as part of the larger, world community. If you’re interested in learning more, you can:


Transcript: Understanding the Science of Safety with Rebecca Kase 

Introduction and Overview of Polyvagal Theory

Danielle: Welcome to the podcast, Rebecca. I’m so glad you’re here today. We’re going to have such an awesome conversation.

To get us started off, would you mind just sharing a little bit about who you are and what you’re working on right now with folks?

Rebecca: Yeah, my name is Rebecca Kase and I’m a licensed clinical social worker and a trained yoga instructor. I’m also an expert in polyvagal theory.

I really focus on teaching people how to treat trauma, specifically psychotherapists. So I own a large training company called Kase and Co.and we are specialists in EMDR therapy. I published my first book this year with Norton Publishing on Polyvagal-Informed EMDR.

I love to geek out on neuroscience but in a way that helps people apply neuroscience to their day-to-day life and get out of some of the really kind of cumbersome confines of neuroscience that feels like it goes over our heads.

So I’m working on my second book right now actually that I think will come out end of 2024, early 2025, that is called The Polyvagal Solution and it will be it’s a self-help book really designed for folks to be able to apply concepts of polyvagal theory to just your day-to-day life and cope better, and I don’t mean just with stress, so I’m really excited about that and to to support folks just live better lives.

Danielle: That’s so exciting thank you and congratulations on your first book and also on the second coming out that’s such a big milestone and I would be very excited in your shoes so congrats.

Rebecca: Thank you, thank you.

Danielle: So I’d love to just dig right into Polyvagal theory. I came into this from like a liberal arts background and then was diagnosed autistic as an adult, I started hearing people sort of hint towards Polyvagal theory I think would be the way to say it, and I think maybe it’s getting into the public consciousness over time.

But the first place I bumped into it was Stephen Porges. For folks who have never heard the word polyvagal before, do you have a layman summary of what it is or what it means to people?

The autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve

Rebecca: Yeah. So, polyvagal theory developed by Stephen Porges, and he uses the language of the science of safety. Polyvagal theory in his words is the science of safety.

Okay, what does that mean? So, polyvagal theory describes the functioning of the vagus nerve, which the vagus nerve is such an important nerve when it comes to so many things in their life, including like emotional health and regulation and how you manage stress and how your body responds to threats for your safety, right?

So, those fight, flight. freeze responses are all produced by vagal functioning. So polyvagal theory is a scientific theoretical model developed by a neuroscientist, Stephen Porges, that really gives us kind of this user guide, this manual for understanding what the vagus nerve is, how it functions, and how it relates to our emotional and our physical health.

Safety cues and threat responses beyond physical danger

Danielle: Thank you so much. So that safety piece. In my work as a parent coach, when we use polyvagal theory, it’s very much to talk about the relationship between the parent and the child and co-regulation and those kinds of pieces.

But a lot of people hear safety and they think like a destructive event happening or a place of real threat, right? Real threats, physical, practical in this world kind of threat. And I wonder if you have examples of … what I’m trying to ask, I think, is can you say a little bit more about what safety means in the model? Like why are folks’ threat responses being set off by things that are not physical threats in the world?

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So we’ve all probably heard of the terms fight, flight, and freeze. And we know that those are kind of how your body and brain are programmed to respond to danger, right?

So you’re out for a walk and there’s a saber tooth tiger because you’re out on this walk like thousands of ago.

Danielle: Prehistorically.

Rebecca: Yeah, a long, long time ago. And there’s a saber tooth tiger that starts to chase you and so you go into flight mode and you run away and then maybe you have to fight back and then maybe you don’t get away from the saber tooth tiger.

So you go into a freeze and collapse where your body kind of allows you to dissociate and check out and numb out and not feel the terrible thing that may be about to happen.

So we can all see, okay, those responses would be very useful and are very useful in imminent situations where your life is on the line.

Right? Now, your body is programmed to respond to danger without your conscious awareness. And it does so with your autonomic nervous system.

So your vagus nerve, the second longest nerve in your body, it’s a bunch of nerves wrapped up into a bundle.

And when your nervous system, when your brain perceives a potential threat, something that’s dangerous, it will automatically bypass your conscious logical thinking and move you into defensive protective states.

Because thinking time is surviving time. If you had to think, oh, what is that? Is it dangerous? Is it going to hurt me?

That could be like vital seconds that you needed to flee or fight or to take action. Right? So the vagus nerve can move into action and kind of take our nervous system into those fight flights, freeze or collapse responses.

And again, it does so without your conscious logical, rational thought. So your nervous system is really good at keeping you alive as evidenced by the fact that you’re listening to this podcast right now.

So you are still living and breathing. And so it has worked at various points in your life because you’ve probably needed those responses at some point in time.

Our brains are not so great at being able to decipher the difference between rush hour traffic and the saber tooth tiger.

And so sometimes we can have some of those protective defensive responses in rush hour traffic. Somebody cuts you off and all of a sudden you’re screaming and yelling and calling them terrible names and flipping the bird, right?

And that’s a fight response that probably is not very useful in that moment, nor is it making anything better or contributing to the quality of your life.

It’s probably actually making things kind of worse than that, right? But we can get swept away in those reactions when we don’t have the ability to kind of flexibly use our vagus nerve to activate those responses or to deactivate those responses. So sometimes we need to tell our nervous system like, no, like I’m not going to go off in this way.

And so I need to use some skills to navigate my neurobiology to keep myself from going into this full blown fight mode, right?

When we have unresolved trauma in our past or when we’ve had kind of unhealthy relationships, really unsafe attachment in childhood, our nervous system didn’t get to learn those tools and techniques or it might be stuck in trauma mode.

Always reacting as just like super sensitive to anything that could be dangerous. And so it can leave us feeling really hijacked by our nervous system.

Like, “I’m constantly feeling out of control and swept away in these defensive protective responses that create a lot of suffering for me.”

“I have a lot of emotional issues or, you know, I have a lot of physical ailments and medical conditions.”

“My relationship. relationships really struggle.” Polyvagal theory helps us to understand what your nervous system needs to feel safe, and it’s not just about imminent safety, right?

It’s about like the little things that your nervous system perceives to be dangerous or safe. So an example is, for listeners, I bet some of you if you walk into a room and there’s a picture that’s like super crooked on the wall, like your brain just fixates on it and you can’t move past it and it kind of like it makes you kind of anxious and it’s distracting.

A picture on a wall is not a threat to your physical well-being, right?

But your nervous system perceives it as something that maybe it dislikes that is uncomfortable, you know clutter, disorganization, can be a cue of danger because it might say something about our environment, like there’s not safety here.

There’s not control here. You know things are kind of awry and so your nervous system responds in a certain way. So you can think about the terms danger and safety, which are used a lot in polyvagal theories, as not like these finite buckets.

I work a lot with veterans. so danger means something very specific to veterans and says to me something very specific.

So you might think of, you know, cues that feel dangerous, unpleasant, uncomfortable, concerning to your nervous system or cues that feel safe, and comfortable to your nervous system.

And when your nervous system perceives those cues, how does it respond? Does it respond by allowing you to feel kind of safe and comfortable and regulated?

Or does that crooked picture on the wall and the mess on your bookshelf cause you like, “I can’t focus, I can’t think straight, my heart is pounding, I have to get up and clean it right now.”

Danielle: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that because I think that maybe it’s a sort of spectrum right from the saber tooth tiger level of danger, a minute threat, like you said, all the way through, “This makes me feel unsafe,” with the hanging picture.

I have so many clients who come in and have come up with stories or narratives for why things are hard. The clutter is a big one. I work with ADHD and autistic people. We have lots of reasons, function reasons, society stigma reasons, support reasons for clutter, as an example.

So many clients report those exact kinds of feelings that you’re talking about of the feeling unsafe and oh I have to clean it and then sort of shame themselves for it being procrastination or laziness or lack of attention or like ability to focus on the thing that they’re supposed to be “supposed to be” doing.

And it’s really, I hope will help people but it’s also just really interesting to me to hear that framed as a potential response to a previous trauma or sort of working through that as opposed to it being all these all these self judgments we come up with around like, I’m just not clean. You know, I’m not clean enough. I’m not organized enough. I’m not trying enough. All those kinds of things that we tell ourselves. Yeah, so I really, I do really appreciate that.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s, you know, the reason that we feel the certain ways we do about things can be very complex and it’s never linear, right?

It can be about, because I had something really unsafe that happened that has this cue within it, right? A smell that takes you back to a really scary incident in your life, right?

Or it could be just how we’re wired, right? Like this is just how my nervous system functions. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it.

It’s just, my nervous system does not like this. And so how do I organize my life in a way to benefit my neurobiology?

Sometimes it’s about our attachment. It’s about what we’ve learned. It’s about culture. It’s about society. You know, and if we get too focused on, well, what’s the Why?

And like you said, now I’m going to shame myself. If we identify this as because of trauma or an adverse experience, going to therapy to work through that can really help to change that kind of activator, right? But if it’s, I don’t know, I think this is just how I’m wired and just accept, like, this is just how I’m wired. So how do I work with my neurobiology? Cause we are all kind of similar and we’re all very different too.

Danielle: You know, absolutely. And I really appreciate that idea that, you know, there are some things that we would like to change that are changeable, that we can work towards, that we can develop our skill towards.

And also some things that are probably just how it is. And, you know, there’s no real need to change it, right?

There’s, well, that’s kind of another complex thing. I was thinking about, when you were talking about the clutter example, I’ve totally glommed on to the clutter example, but also kind of to edge towards parenting.

Generational trauma and parenting styles

I, one of my parents, we were not like a super organized house going up. I have two younger siblings, both my parents were full-time working out-of-the-home people. And, you know, trying to be decent parents, but also just not around all the time just because of their work lives and the distance they had traveling, all that stuff. And so our house was not like, it wasn’t like a level of dangerous to live in. But it was also not like those houses you see on the magazines, oh, every TV show now where no one’s allowed to live in a normal house on a TV show.

It was, I hope, of a slightly cluttered, more cluttered than average kind of home. But one of my parents when they were, I don’t want to speak for them, my perception was when they were already sort of on the edge or anxious or like tilted towards that sort of like, that yellow zone of your body that like I’m about to hit, they would really hyper focus on the clutter and really start to get on everybody else who lived in the house about the clutter bothering them.

And as a kid, I kind of internalize that as, oh, when this parent gets upset about that. I also now have to hyper focus on the clutter because if I don’t, we’ll get more yelling, we’ll get more like just, just grumpy like, you know, when your parents in a bad mood, even if they’re not physically abusive, it like, it gets the whole family sort of agitated and up.

And then when I moved out of home and like started my own life and then eventually had kids, I found myself really wrangling with this like, Oh, I don’t actually know what I think about clutter.

Because all of my associations with clutter are about what the parents thought about clutter.

And maybe it wasn’t even clutter. From my perspective, it was just the thing that tipped them. It wasn’t like the root thing. So I don’t even know if they actually cared about the clutter or what, but it was really interesting to me as kind of like roughly neutral example of how the way you’re parented sort of filters down through to how you’re parenting.

And like, then when I was anxious, I would get focused on the clutter. Then I was like, wait, I don’t even care about the clutter.

Like, it means nothing to me. So why is this happening? And I’ve had that whole story. It’s just to say that I’ve had, as I’ve tried to raise my kids and come to grips with my own brain and their brains, really had to like sit and do this work of like, what are the things that I was taught, or that I have a physical emotional reaction to that are actually important to me and my personal values?

And then what are these things that I sort of absorbed, or like, you know, where I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this like clutter thing was a traumatic event that happened to me, maybe a very small t, like over time, you know, but it’s not like a car accident or an episode of violence or something, you know, when you think of those big T Traumas.

And then to think about all the clients I work with and everybody else in the world who’s experiencing these huge Traumas, especially in the current political environment, and how that affects parenting down the line.

So I know I didn’t really give you a prompt there, so much as talking. But yeah, I would love if we could just talk a little bit about, what do you notice as a professional in this space about this sort of generational trauma, and how Polyvagal Theory plays into it? Or anything else that came up for you when I was in that little story there?

Rebecca: Yeah, well, our brains are really tasked with always trying to make predictions about our future and that’s how we stay alive.

And so with its, know, I’m trying to predict that this is unsafe, you know, I’m not going to pick up that snake because it could be unsafe, your brain is making a prediction, or if it’s your brain has learned over multiple repetitions that clutter is associated with heightened levels of emotional discomforts.

We don’t even have to put labels on what it was. Like whether or not it was traumatic, it was for your body and your brain.

Clutter is a cue that’s associated with heightened levels of emotional discomfort. And we don’t want to be uncomfortable as human beings, right?

We want to be comfortable, which is where we feel safe. And so we learn that clutter is associated with this outcome and the way that I can predictively try and change that outcome and stay in a more balanced regulated state is to do these and these behaviors.

That’s how we develop these kind of patterns of how we behave and how we respond to things that activate us or trigger us.

It’s all about, your brain is just trying to make predictions to keep you as safe and regulated as possible.

And so when it comes to generational trauma, I think that’s a great example of generational trauma or maybe we could say generational discomfort, how we kind of argue to our children and reparent that and reparent that.

And I think that the real key is to start to get really curious about what’s happening inside of me right now.

So right there, Danielle, you know, I was really impressed with your ability to just like notice the pattern. I noticed that I’m having this response and I don’t know if that’s how I actually feel about this. That’s because your autonomic nervous system just behaves in an automatic way. So you can think of autonomic nervous system, automatic nervous system.

It just responds. That doesn’t mean that you’re always out of control of it. You have to learn how to use some skills to kind of slow down the otherwise automatic process.

Get curious and evaluating, say, huh, the way I’m behaving, the predictions my brain is making, are those accurate today?

That was true then, but now I’m an adult. I have my own parenting style, have my own children. I can create a new narrative.

Is this the narrative that I want to create as the parent to my children? And so that moment of discernment that comes with curiosity and the ability to observe like, what do we want?

It’s just one way to slow it down and then get curious about, oh, where might this come from?

What could this be about? And is that actually useful right? Now, because your vagus nerve is, you know, taking that predictive information, it’s causing like a flood of anxiety for you in that moment, it sounds like.

So there’s this sympathetic activation moving into fight or flights, right? So I have to clean, I have to get like mobilized and do these things.

But if you slow down and you say, hmm, is this accurate? Is this the behavior I need? Then you get to work with top-down processes using your cognitive brain to discern the data available to you in the moment and then use skills to say, you know what, I don’t need that response, which then allows you to help govern your vagus nerve and stay, stop that automatic response.

Now, it’s not always that simple. And usually we have to practice that over and over and over again, because we build new neural pathways.

And the more you practice something like that of slowing down, being curious, discerning, and using skills to change your automatic response, you’re building new neural pathways.

But it takes repetition. And so eventually you can get out of, clutter is not a cue of potential distress for me. Clutter is, I’m actually fine with it until it reaches this level maybe or maybe you know there’s some people who find comfort in clutter and having one of those super organized houses like they’re saying is actually maybe a cue of danger, like this feels so organized I’m afraid to touch anything.

I can’t really feel like I can be myself. My husband has ADHD and he has clutter blindness and so we have to work together on that because for me at a certain point, clutter does become like a cue for me and I start to get anxious and so I just have to communicate that to him.

But I’m not also on the other side where everything needs to be immaculately clean and organized. And so there in our relationship we found ways over years – didn’t happen in the beginning – of how to communicate. Like, this is what’s happening for my nervous system and then we can show up for each other and support each other’s neurobiology. I’m not gonna ask to change his clutter blindness. He’s not going to ask me to get comfortable with, you know, what he is comfortable with with clutter. We find a way to meet in the middle.

Danielle: Yeah. Yeah, I have two other household members who are clutter blind in that they just step, like they can’t see it. It’s just not present to them. And then me and one other person are sort of like clutter neutral, I would say. I can see it. We can, it affects us in a way. I really had to do the work though of getting towards neutral because I was so – you used the word hijacked earlier in the conversation, and that’s really what it felt like. I am not in control of this nervous system. It is going down the highway without me, right?

And sort of figuring out, well, how do I kind of compassionately and calmly and over time sort of like get back in the cab. I’ve lost my metaphor a bit, but it’s been a really interesting process for me.

Regulating the nervous system through self-care basics

A lot of the parents that I work with come in and are almost always referred to therapy, even if we continue to try to work with coaching, because they are clearly, from my perspective anyway, really stuck in kind of a threat response state, where kiddo has big behaviors, meltdowns, is throwing, is biting, is yelling, is, you know, these kinds of things, and that the amount of care and management of the child’s behavior that the parent has performed has sort of created this intense stress.

And many parents are then diagnosed with PTSD, some or not. And so they come in and they’re already so stuck in say, freeze or sometimes – quite often it’s that sort of immobilized state, that making changes to how they’re parenting with a parent coaching plan isn’t really going to work because the parent is so stuck that you know, just as a coach, you can tell like we need to try therapy or try some other kinds of support systems before we can have long-term success of the parenting plan.

So for folks who are in there in that kind of state, are there things – obviously we want to encourage them to seek out a therapist that they jive with and that they can get help with – but are there things that they can be thinking about or working on to start to get their nervous system more towards what I would say like the green state right? Like, to engage the parasympathetic more? How do you handle that with folks who are really stuck? And I know you’ve worked most likely with a lot of PTSD survivors or folks with a diagnosis.

Rebecca: Yeah. I think depending on kind of where you are in your level of arousal, let’s say, you know, sometimes we are in that like you were saying, like, I’m in this yellow zone, like I’m not great.

Like things are not perfect. I’m, I’m feeling some distress. I feel challenged, but I haven’t surpassed the threshold.

When we go into that red zone, when we surpass that threshold, you know, really what’s happening is our prefrontal cortex is going offline.

Our amygdala is more sensitive. Our hippocampus is not able to do what it needs to do, which is to help us kind of appraise a situation and sort those stress responses.

So if you know that your neurobiology is not going to help you with more top down approaches like ration and reasoning and logic and thinking your way through it, then you have to go to bottom up approaches, which would be like trying to find respite, like getting respite for yourself, even if it’s 30 minutes, an hour, or a chunk of hours or maybe even a whole day, for your nervous system to get a break from it.

Privilege and income and resources and things like that all factor into it. But if you can find even a short little respite so that your nervous system is first, away from what it’s proceeding to be the danger cue.

Like it’s really hard to try and come back from that red zone if your nervous system is like, but there’s a saber tooth tiger in the room.

I’m not going to come out of the red zone, right? Even if the saber tooth tiger is your child and you’re like, this is not a saber tooth tiger, your nervous system is like, no, it is my biggest stress that I have.

So if you can find some place to take a break and get out of the kind of pool of stress for a moment and try and do some real body-based things to regulate.

The foundation of a lot of regulation is going to come from… Some movements, going for a walk, practicing breath work.

I know that some people are like, you therapists, you always talk about breathing. But the reason we talk about breathing so much is because your breath is directly connected to your vagus nerve.

And so when you’re taking short, shallow breaths, you are actually increasing your level of stress in your body. When you take really long, kind of intentional inhales and even longer exhales, you help to work with your vagus nerve to increase parasympathetic engagement.

It’s just like how you are neurobiologically wired. And then the other really important things are sleep and nutrition. We can do all of the coping skills out there, but if you’re not getting quality sleep, which I know is very hard when you’re a new parent, if you have, you know, little kids, if you have a newborn, it’s just gonna be rough for a little bit.

But, you know, getting quality sleep, if you’re not sleeping enough, no coping skill is going to work. No medication is going to work.

No therapy will work. Your body needs sleep to function and for any of the things you’re trying to do to kind of change your situation to actually work.

And then what you’re what you’re ingesting, what kind of food are you putting into your body? Are you getting enough nutrients?

I’m not saying are you eating healthy or unhealthy food? It’s all food. It’s just about the quality of food.

And are you getting enough protein, for example? Are you hydrated? If you’re not getting enough protein and if you’re not getting sleep, no intervention is going to work.

I can just promise you that. It’s kind of like trying to, you know, I’m going to put sugar in the gas tank and hope I can get to the grocery store.

Like there’s just no world currently, or no engine anyway, right? So, you know, if you’re in that extreme red state and you’ve been there for a while, your body and your brain are saying, I am taxed.

And so you have to go back to basics.

Danielle: Thank you. That’s really helpful and I’m sure will help a lot of folks in the audience.

I nursed for a really long time and then my second child, we could not get her to go even through the night in the five hour range. my co-parent was with her but I just slept in the basement and it took three months of me sleeping in the basement before she would sleep in five hours in row and I still remember like the two weeks after that, like when I first started sleeping in the basement, it was a very stressful time.

It was like, I felt very lost as a mother like I’m doing a bad job, all that stuff you tell yourself when your kids are little.

And the first two weeks of sleep, I felt like an entirely new person. All of my, not like all my stressors were gone.

Like we still had a lot of challenges happening in the family in multiple directions, but I think my baseline was just so much higher.

And that was really the first time as an adult that I like realized how much sleep matters. Because like, you know, you’re told all this, you know, I went to college, read books.

Like was, I think relatively well-educated on basic, you know, but it just made such a difference. yeah, and I have parents who haven’t slept for nine years because they’re, you know, they have multiple autistic children or ADHD children or other children with, you know, kind of insomnia range issues.

Rebecca: Yeah, that support network comes back again. So yeah, I mean, somebody, some entrepreneur somewhere should start some sleep lab for parents who are chronically sleep deprived that comes with some really high level child care at a very affordable price and just like a really quiet room, like you just go sleep.

Danielle: That would be amazing.

Rebecca: Yeah. If the entrepreneur is listening to this, well, start that.

Danielle: Please start. I would refer so many folks to you. And I was talking to a client recently who was saying that although that they were very happy to have respite care, that when they left their kiddo to go for their four hour respite chunk, they were still so stressed about how the kiddo would be behaving with the care, even though they trusted the carer.

And that when they knew that when they got home, there was going to be a huge meltdown from kiddo for having been because they could do as much prep as was as they possibly could with kiddo.

But she was just still in a state of distress when the parent left, who is their primary caretaker, and Mom just seemed like she was in red when she was with kiddo full time, but then the respite only brought her down to yellow and I was like, well, maybe that yellow is still a little bit better?

But I know just the amount of stress some of these folks are dealing with is intense.

Applying Polyvagal Theory to relationships and communication

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I think one piece and I know it’s so hard and actually kind of goes against how you’re biologically wired as a parent, but to see my child’s nervous system as influenced by mine, but it is not the same, one and the same as mine. And so I think it comes down a little bit to mindset and kind of how you coach yourself through those times.

So I’m making a choice to get respite. And am I going to use the four hours for actual respite for myself or am I going to use it to just work myself up more?

And I know it’s hard. Like I’m not saying that in a judgment away. It’s not just like, Oh, let me just say this thing to yourself and tada.

But it’s about trying to change how you’re perceiving the experience and giving yourself permission to actually take advantage of the four hours of respite so that the meltdown is going to happen no matter what, right?That’s why you have respite in the first place.

So the meltdowns happen. So can you use those four hours so that you can get through the meltdowns as, you know, as, I don’t think something is the right word, but as fast as you can.

And you know, what, what kind of nervous system do you want to take into those meltdowns? A meltdown, you know, a nervous system that’s really taxed, you’re probably going to be less likely to like respond in a compassionate and kind of way and quicker to kind of get aggravated and frustrated, right, which is just going to make the meltdown worse probably.

Or can I use the four hours to give myself a little bit more resources so that when the meltdown happens again, which I will bet my life on, it will happen, I’m a little bit more, I’m a little bit more prepared possibly to navigate it as best I can.

The Safe and Sound Protocol for calming the nervous system

Since we’re talking about polyvagal theory and just for your audience, I think it’s important also for everybody to know about a protocol that Stephen Porges developed called the Safe and Sound Protocol.

And the Safe and Sound Protocol is a listening protocol. So it, your vagus nerve is connected to your inner ear.

And so your nervous system is very sensitive to sound. And this is something that we especially know for folks who are on the spectrum.

They tend to be, they can have greater sound sensitivities. And we can also use sound to help regulate our neurobiology.

Stephen Porges just developed a protocol called the Safe and Sound Protocol, which is a listening protocol you listen to music.

And it has been really growing with its supportive research of not only being able to increase that connection to parasympathetic, to that rest and digest, like that calm place in your nervous system.

But it also has been shown, I just read a research article in the last two months, I think, for folks on the spectrum who listen to the Safe and Sound Protocol, it measured their sensitivity to various sensory stimuli pre- and post-listening. And their sensitivities across the board went down after they listened.

You can search for a safe and sound protocol practitioner, and that may be a resource for you as parents, and could also be a resource for kiddos to just help reduce some of that kind of agitation that comes from just a dysregulated nervous system.

Danielle: Well, thank you so much for that, Rebecca. I really, really, really appreciate you being here today. And just want to thank you on behalf of everybody who’s listening.

Before we sign off, can you let us know a little bit about where folks can find you in your books so they can learn more about what you’re doing?

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. So if you are in the mental health field, if you are searching for me as a psychotherapist, you can find me at kaseandco.com. That’s the name of my training company. We provide trauma training and EMDR training for mental health professionals, therapists.

If you want to just check me out, I also have my own personal website at RebeccaKase.com where you can find some of the other podcasts I have spoken on, some of the articles that I’ve been featured in and I’ve written and certainly lots of information about the book as it gets ready to be released sometime 24-25.

Danielle: Thank you so much. really appreciate you being here today.

Rebecca: Thank you. Thank you. I’m so glad to be here. Thank you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recommended Articles