Understanding Trauma.
Living Connection.
Understanding Trauma.
What is NARM?
The Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) is a psychotherapeutic and process-oriented method specifically designed to treat attachment, relational, and developmental trauma. The approach integrates a resource-oriented model that focuses on experiences in the here and now.
This developmental, neuroscientifacly-based approach has emerged from psychotherapeutic orientations such as psychodynamic psychotherapy, attachment theory, Gestalt therapy, character and somatic approaches. NARM works relational in the present moment within the context of interpersonal neurobiology. This approach is resource-oriented, non-regressive, non-cathartic, and ultimately non-pathologizing.
NARM assumes that although biography is important, it is not what happened in the past that causes the symptoms people experience as adults. It is the persistence of survival strategies that were once appropriate that distort current experiences and cause symptoms. These survival strategies have lost their usefulness and lead to a constant disconnection from our authentic selves and from others.
For example, dissociation and isolation are the primary coping mechanisms for dealing with early trauma. Dissociation and isolation have literally saved people’s lives, but when these mechanisms continue into adulthood, they cause ongoing symptoms.
Laurence Heller, PhD, founder of NARM
Connection, our deepest desire and greatest fear.
It is the distortion of identity that develops in response to adaptation to early trauma and causes ongoing suffering. An example: when children grow up with unloving parents, they are unable to recognize that this is their parents’ failure. Children always experience the failure of their environment as their own failure and develop the feeling that they themselves are unlovable.
A core element of the NARM model is working with the unconscious need of the child, and later the adult, to protect the attachment and love relationship. By dissociating from developmental needs and emotions, the image of the caregiver is protected at the expense of one’s own positive self-esteem.
This has profound implications at the psychobiological, physiological, and identity levels.
The clinical NARM model provides precise and effective techniques for working with the core issues of identity distortion and physiological dysregulation, as well as a new, coherent theory for working with affects and emotions that aims to support their psychobiological completion.
Within the NARM approach, we work simultaneously with the psychology and physiology of people who have experienced developmental trauma, focusing on the interplay between identity issues and the capacity for connection and regulation.
