NARM and Developmental Trauma
The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is an approach to working with developmental trauma—the ways early experiences of connection, safety, belonging, and autonomy can continue to shape how we experience ourselves and our relationships as adults.
“The spontaneous movement in all of us is toward connection and health.”
—Laurence Heller
Adaptations That Once Helped Us Survive
As children, we adapt to the relationships and environments in which we grow. When important needs for connection, safety, trust, autonomy, love, or belonging cannot be fully met, we find ways to protect ourselves and maintain the relationships on which we depend.
NARM understands these patterns not as defects, but as intelligent adaptations. A way of coping that was necessary or helpful early in life may, however, continue long after the circumstances that created it have changed.
“It is the persistence of survival styles appropriate to the past that distorts present experience and creates symptoms.”
—Laurence Heller
The work is not simply to get rid of these old strategies, but to become curious about how they continue to shape our experience in the present—and to discover whether other possibilities are now available.
How Developmental Trauma Can Show Up in Adult Life
Developmental trauma does not always look like trauma. Sometimes it appears as longstanding patterns in how we relate to ourselves and to other people.
You may find it difficult to know what you need or want. You may long for closeness while also pulling away from it, take care of others while losing contact with yourself, or struggle with shame, self-criticism, perfectionism, or the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with you. For others, the difficulty may involve trusting people, setting limits, feeling at home in the body, expressing anger, experiencing pleasure, or acting with a sense of confidence and agency.
These patterns can become so familiar that they feel like personality rather than adaptation. NARM offers a different question: What if some of the ways you learned to be in the world are not simply who you are, but ways you learned to survive and remain connected?
When Adaptation Becomes Identity
Laurence Heller captures something essential about how early experience can become organized around identity:
“A fetus/infant cannot know itself to be a good person in a bad situation.”
—Laurence Heller
A child cannot easily understand, Something is wrong with the circumstances around me. Instead, the experience may become, Something is wrong with me.
NARM helps us begin to distinguish between who we are and the strategies we learned in order to remain connected.
What NARM Therapy Is Like
NARM therapy does not require repeatedly reliving painful experiences from the past. Your history matters, but much of our attention is directed toward what is happening in the present: what you notice, what you feel, what you want, and what happens as you move toward greater choice or agency.
Rather than asking only why a pattern developed, we become curious about how it operates now. We may notice a moment when you move toward connection and then pull away, when you know what you want but immediately doubt it, or when an emotion, sensation, or impulse appears and is quickly pushed aside.
The body is part of this exploration, but it is not the only focus.
“It is connection to our body and to other people that brings healing re-regulation.”
—Laurence Heller
The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the work—a place where old patterns can become visible without being judged or forced to change. The work opens greater possibilities for connection, choice, curiosity, and agency in the life you are living now.
Who might NARM be useful for?
NARM in My Practice
NARM is one of several approaches that inform how I work. I also draw from Somatic Experiencing, Jungian psychology and dreamwork, and many years of working with the relationship between body, story, imagination, and psychological life.
These approaches do not need to be used separately. At times our work may involve noticing a sensation or impulse in the body. At other times we may become curious about a recurring relationship pattern, a dream, an image, a story you tell about yourself, or a moment when something new begins to become possible.
What connects these different ways of working is an interest in the whole person—and in helping you develop greater capacity for connection, curiosity, choice, and agency.
My NARM training includes Core Training and advanced Post-Master training, and I have been a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner since 2010.
Working Together
I offer NARM-informed psychotherapy in person in Boise and by telehealth throughout Idaho.
You do not need to know whether NARM, Somatic Experiencing, Jungian therapy, or another approach is the “right” one before contacting me. We can begin with what is bringing you to therapy and become curious together about what kind of work may be most useful.
If you are struggling with longstanding patterns in relationships, shame or self-criticism, developmental trauma, difficulty knowing what you want, or a sense of being disconnected from yourself, you are welcome to contact me to explore whether working together might be a good fit.