WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, psychologist, fellow long hauler and your Long COVID coach. And welcome to another Wellness Wednesday. Today I wanted to talk a little more about the Safe and Sound Protocol. And this time I wanted to talk about things to look out for if you are working with a different practitioner, not with me, not with someone in my practice. Obviously, you are more than welcome to work with another practitioner. And with the millions of people with Long COVID in the world, we can't possibly see everybody here, we would love it if we could, we would also love to work with you. And many people have found practitioners locally and unfortunately, some of them have had somewhat difficult experiences and oftentimes, they email me about that. And this week, I've had a few more of those emails than usual.

So I just wanted to talk a little bit about what to look out for and some important things to take into consideration. So first of all, I'm a clinical psychologist, I trained in the UK, in order to call yourself a clinical psychologist in the UK, you need to have gone to a particular type of clinical training at the PhD level, a program that's approved by the BPS, and then you need to apply to the Health Professionals Council, meet certain criteria, and then you can call yourself a clinical psychologist. In the US, it's fairly similar, the term is licensed psychologist and again, you have to have taken a certain graduate degree at the PhD level, and then applied to your licensing board, which is very stringent. And when I first applied in the US for New York, I was not, it took me a long time to get accepted. But long way of saying that, to call yourself a clinical psychologist, the term and the profession is heavily monitored. And yes, of course, within that profession, there will be people who are not very good. But by and large, because of the heavy monitoring, it's all somewhat of the same caliber.

Now the Safe and Sound Protocol, you don't have to be a clinical psychologist to become certified. In fact, you don't have to be a licensed therapist to become certified. You can be an acupuncturist, you can be a massage therapist, you can be a certified yoga teacher. Now, there's nothing wrong about these professions. And I don't mean to imply anything disparaging. But what I mean to illustrate is that, in order to become certified as an SSP provider, you need to take a training, which requires watching a video, and then you're certified. And as long as you're one of the listed professions that's permitted, there isn't really terribly much quality control of providers. And that makes it tricky for those of us who have very sensitive nervous systems. If you're a regular Joe, and you don't have a sensitive nervous system, then that's fine you can work with any practitioner. But we need to keep certain things in mind about the way in which the SSP is delivered, because again that is also not monitored, it's up to each individual practitioner, in order to make sure we keep ourselves safe and don't have an awful experience.

The SSP is a very powerful tool, it can make us be in a wonderful state where we can begin to recover, it can also make us much worse. And I definitely don't want that for you. For example, you definitely need to do the SSP very, very, very slowly. It is a 5-hour intervention, but we do it at about five minutes at a time, very slowly checking your nervous system before, checking your nervous system after, doing some co-regulation doing some Polyvagal exercises, in order that we can see how your body's responding. And so that we can drip feed and titrate at a speed that you don't get overwhelmed with horrific symptoms, or you don't have horrible fatigue and then crash. And the way that we deliver it in the group program, it takes about three months. If you do it individually with me or one of my practitioners, it may take a little bit longer than that because we can titrate it even more carefully to your nervous system. But anybody who is telling you, "Oh yeah, let's do it 30 minutes a time. Let's do it 15 minutes at a time you'll be done in a couple of weeks". Oh my goodness, that is not going to be fun. You are going to crash you're going to feel awful and at best you're going to have a wild ride.

So please, please, please find somebody who understands that Long COVID means very sensitive nervous system and more than likely trauma history and that we have to go very slowly a couple of minutes at a time. The other really, really, really, really important thing is co-regulation. And this means that you are doing your listening in a session with a practitioner. Now, we use the phrase face-to-face. and I know that's confusing in this post pandemic world. But what it means is that you need to be able to see somebody's full face. And they need to be anchored in ventral and warm and smiling. So that whatever your nervous system is experiencing, when you open your eyes from the listening, that they're smiling, warm, supportive, lovely. Now the way that we do that, and most practitioners in the US are still doing that is via Zoom. And the wonderful thing about Zoom is that all you see is the face. So you open your eyes, and there is a lovely smiling face, and you get that lovely, probably lovely warm, soothing voice. Super, super important that as you're administering the SSP, you're getting that co-regulation at the same time.

And also, the other thing to keep in mind about that is if you are in a country where people have gone back to in-person working, this is not something that can be delivered with a mask on because you need to see the person's face to get that lovely co-regulation. And I know many parts of the world are pretending that COVID has gone away and the reinfection risk is zero. But we all know that that isn't true. And so if you're getting it from a live practitioner, the risk of reinfection goes up. If you get reinfected while you're doing it, then it sort of wipes out the lovely benefits to your nervous system of doing it. So make sure your practitioner is gonna go really, really slowly, make sure they're going to be on a Zoom call with you for at least hours one and hours three. And possibly even more if you know that you're very sensitive and have a strong trauma history. So that you can get that kind co-regulation. If any clinician says to you, "Yes, we give you access to the app, here's my phone number, you can call if you need to", that will not be an appropriate delivery for us long haulers.

Now, there may be many other applications in which that is an appropriate delivery. There are many occupational therapists working with kids. And that's a great way to do it because the kiddos are at home with the parents and the parents provide co-regulation. But for us, and our complicated situation, most of us don't have co-reg at home, most of us are not living with a lovely warm therapist who is anchored in ventral and can give us that co-reg. And so we do need it from a practitioner, ideally on the Zoom screen, because then the body is going to feel doubly safe. Even if our heads were saying "I'm not going to get COVID". Our bodies are saying "Yeah, you are gonna get COVID". And not that I want to feed into that fear. But we want to meet our nervous systems where they are and help with that.

So those two things I just wanted to explain a little bit more detail about. It does take about three months to administer the SSP if you're doing it appropriately in that way. So again, to clarify, this is not a quick fix. This is an investment in the beginning of your recovery.

However, I did also want to share I have started doing the Safe and Sound Protocol again. Having finished it originally in December of last year, it is recommended to repeat periodically, and I'm coming up on a year. So I just started a little bit of listening this week. And it is so fascinating to see the impact when you're starting from a different baseline. First couple of times I listened I noticed that my body battery on my Garmin (I know most of you have Garmins and are paying attention to body battery or similar on your iWatch) increased dramatically overnight, which is very different than when I did it the first time around. First time around, it actually decreased and kind of bottomed out for a while and then very slowly came back up again a few weeks later.

So that's an interesting change. However, I'm also noticing some lovely bouts of nausea in the morning the last few days, which are very reminiscent of when I was super symptomatic a year ago or before. And this is often what happens with the SSP that from the beginning, we may get some of the lovely positive benefits right away and we certainly will get them by a couple of weeks in and we'll also get some of the weird stuff because the autonomic nervous system is changing and it's involved in this process, and part of that is going to throw up a few things. So I was just about to go out for my run/walk when the nausea came on Wednesday morning. And I thought, "Oh-oh, I know what this is". So I skipped my listening that day. And today I am going to do the same, because we want to let our nervous systems adjust. And just go very slowly, because what's the rush?

So I hope I've given you some important food for thought there if you are considering the Safe and Sound Protocol for your recovery journey. We have our next group starting November 22nd. I think as of right now, we have one spot available in that group, too. And by the time you get this video on Wednesday, I'm not sure if that will be the same but if you are interested, as always, there's a link to book a call with me and we take rolling entry for groups. Each group starts towards the end of the month. So if you don't make November, there'll be one in December and if you want to work individually with someone we can do that anytime. I hope you have a tolerable week and look forward to seeing you again soon on Wellness Wednesday. Take care.