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The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is an innovative psychotherapeutic approach working with developmental trauma. It is a powerful approach addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their long-term consequences as revealed in the ACEs Study.

Developed by Laurence Heller PhD over the course of his 45-year clinical career, it was first introduced in his book “Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image and the Capacity for Relationship”.

The workshop will provide an overview of the theoretical and clinical approach of NARM. NARM addresses relational and attachment trauma by working with early, unconscious patterns of disconnection that deeply affect our identity, emotions, physiology, behavior and relationships. Integrating a psychodynamic, humanistic and body-centered approach, NARM offers a comprehensive theoretical and clinical model for integrating top-down psychotherapy and bottom-up somatic approaches. Working in the present moment, and within a context of interpersonal neurobiology, NARM offers a new approach that is resource-oriented, non-regressive, non-cathartic, and ultimately non-pathologizing.

Topics covered

• Overview of NARM’s theoretical and clinical approach to developmental trauma
• The reciprocal relationship of nervous system dysregulation and distortion of identity
• Working relationally oriented in present time, dual awareness and the importance of somatic mindfulness
• The emergence and function of the five basic adaptive strategies
• The five adaptive survival styles
  • Their corresponding identity distortions
  • Their significance from a perspective of developmental psychology
  • How they affect adult life
• The “4 Pillars”: the clinical model
• The NARM distress and healing cycle and integrating a bottom-up (body-based) and top-down (cognitive or identity-based) therapeutic approach
• Demonstration session (s) of the approach
• Overview: The NARM Training

Target Group

Therapists working with psychological and trauma related issues interested in experiencing and gaining a deeper understanding of NARM’s conceptual and clinical approach.

Accreditation

Research consistently shows that touch is the most fundamental basis for our earliest relational experiences, the primary modality of relationship between caregiver and child, even before the capacity for language develops.

Through touch, we develop an image of our body and its boundaries, a sense of embodiment that holds all our experiences at the neurophysiological, affective, behavioral, and cognitive levels.

The importance of intentional touch for developing capacity to contain and self-regulate, for working with implicit memory and the challenges of early attachment experiences are the subject of this NARM training. Relational touch addresses emotional, interpersonal, cognitive and developmental deficits that are not accessible through verbal means alone. To support their healing, it is important to encourage the collaboration of both the body’s and the brain’s intelligence.

The training offers a clinical approach to working with the primary identity distortions, the encapsulated body-self, and the central patterns of rigidity, collapse and the associated numbness and disconnection. These are the consequences of adaptation to developmental trauma patterns which, if unresolved, become part of our identity.

Systematically decoding the somatic components of relational and emotional trauma while supporting the “working through” down to the cellular level is a powerful tool for those who want to expand their body-psychotherapeutic skills. 

NARM therapists will learn to increase their confidence in integrating body-oriented interventions and therapeutic touch into their clinical practice with greater sensitivity and ease.

Topics covered

• The primary distortions of identity and the adaptations of the encapsulated Body-Self
• Body-oriented interventions and relational (self-) touch to work simultaneously “Bottom-up” with implicit procedural behavior, posture and movement, and “Top-down” with thoughts, beliefs and trauma-based identifications
• Deepening the NARM approach of being heart-centered, genuinely interested and developing containing skills when providing relational touch

• • When, based on what intention and in what context do we touch? When and in what context not?
  • How do we explore and work with the somatic equivalents of identifications and the associated emotions like anger, grief, shame and fear (numbness, tension, collapse, high arousal, autonomic disorganization, etc.)?
  • How do we work when clients have difficulty accessing their bodies or develop symptoms when they reconnect to them?

• Intention and touch

• • Touch: an exploratory interaction and sensory dialogue
  • Touch and adult consciousness (passive, receptive, regressive or actively engaged)
  • Qualities of touch to stabilize dysregulated emotional patterns: when containing, when offering space?
  • When supporting stability, confrontation, working through, integration?
  • Addressing different systems in the body with touch: muscles, connective tissue, joints, organs, central nervous system and brain

• Life Force and self-organization

• • Matrix of health, homeostasis, containment and coherence
  • Supporting healing and integration through conscious reconnection to the life force

• Specifics of the relational matrix when providing touch

• • (Subjective, somatic) resonance, transference and countertransference dynamics
  • Physical proximity – boundaries, sensuality and sexuality

• Working with earliest adaptations to developmental trauma

• • Deepening understanding of Connection and Attunement Survival Styles

• “Feeling safe and connected”

• • Neuroception, interoception, proprioception and the implicit/procedural memory (“implicit relational knowing”)

• Refining NARM-Language 

Target Group

Certified NARM Therapists

Requirements for Certification

Participation in both modules. Additionally, 4 hours of supervision (individual and group) and 4 hours of personal teaching therapy with NARM-Touch accredited therapists (not included in the training price).

Dates

Modul 1: October 26 – October 30, 2026
Modul 2: February 10 – February 14, 2027

Cost

€ 1950,-

Location

Fletcher Erica Berg en Dal

Molenbosweg 17
6571 BA Berg en Da

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