NeuroAffective Relational Model for C-PTSD

What is NARM therapy? The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is a cutting-edge therapeutic approach designed by Dr. Laurence Heller. This form of therapy is designed to work with clients on their attachment, relational and developmental trauma. Within NARM, we will be exploring the support of our connections, and your identity as a person, we will work in the present moment, and we will regulate your nervous system. The NARM practitioner utilizes interactions between cognitive (top down) issues and the body (bottom up) to work on complex trauma narratives, otherwise referred to as survival styles that we as people learned in our upbringing that has helped us navigate our environments. By bringing our trauma to the present moment, and addressing it within the here and now, NARM trained mental health professionals are able to work with your complex trauma in a way that links your environment growing up and the trauma endured throughout as a link between where you want to be in life and your current psychological issues. According to NARM, we all have an unconscious need to connect. We need this because we have to stay connected to our caregivers when we are small in order to survive our environments. As we go through our trauma, we learn to unconsciously disconnect from our own “life force.” This leads us down a path of growing further and further away from who we authentically want to be in our lives. Through NARM, we will be able to explore what it means to be your authentic self, and what is means to be happy and connected back to yourself.

Per the NARM training institute, there are five organizing developmental themes within NARM. Those five organizing themes are connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality.

1. Connection: “we feel that we belong in the world. We are in touch with our body and our emotions and capable of consistent connection with others.

2. Attunement: Our ability to know what we need and to recognize, reach out for, and take in the abundance that life offers.

3. Trust: We have an inherent trust in ourselves and others. We feel safe enough to allow a healthy interdependence with others.

4. Autonomy: We can say no and set limits with others. We speak our mind without guilt or fear.

5. Love-Sexuality: Our heart is open, and we can integrate a loving relationship with a vital sexuality.

If any of the above themes spoke to you, please feel free to reach out to me today to learn more about the NARM approach and how it can impact your life starting today.

 NARM heavily incorporates work in real time that balances working with nervous system based and relational based orientations to best address the trauma that you have encountered in your life thus far. NARM works to involve your early childhood development as a key piece within the mind-body equation to help anchor you back to yourself in a healthy and positive way. The ability to self-regulate your body is another foundational component of NARM and will assist in the regulation of our nervous system. Within the NARM process, your identity is a focal point. How you survived your environment had tremendous impact over the person you present as today. NARM wants to deeply understand that active identity you hold and wants to assist you with finding what is truly authentic to yourself of sense, and what is present in a survival capacity that has kept you safe from trauma. When you can separate those two components, you will be able to lead a much more healthy, authentic life moving forward. The NARM model continues to expand upon our different methods of survival and explains essential capacities our systems need to achieve well-being. These capacities provided by the NARM Training Institute are below:

1. Connection: Capacity to be in touch with our body and our emotions and the capacity to be in connection with others.

2. Attunement: Capacity to attune to our needs and emotions, and to have capacity to recognize, reach out for, and take in physical and emotional nourishment.

3. Trust: Capacity for healthy dependence and interdependence.

4. Autonomy: Capacity to set appropriate boundaries, capacity to say no and set limits, and capacity to speak our minds without guilt or fear.

5. Love-Sexuality: Capacity to live with an open heart and capacity to integrate loving relationships with a vital sexuality.

Unlike many forms of therapeutic approaches, NARM is aimed at working with individual’s strengths and growth, rather than their issues and problems. Whilst those problems are still significantly important, NARM practitioners utilize our nervous systems ability to connect to the good within us and appeals to our positive aspects of self, which in turn, helps us unlearn our toxic shame-based identities of self. These shame-based identities are at the foundation of the work within a NARM framework. Shame is an all-encompassing emotion that has the power to shut you down completely. Shame will lie to you. Shame will tell you things such as, “you’re not good enough.” Toxic shame is of paramount importance to unlearn in regard to how we interact with and refer to ourselves in daily life. If shame is in the driver’s seat in your life, it will severely limit you from the things you enjoy, it will stop you from growth, and it will try and rob you of joy. NARM also focuses heavily on the concept of patterns. Patterns are of critical important when thinking about how we all organize our lives. Think of the word routine for example, how many of you have one that you stick to morning and night? This is a great example of a potential pattern that could be in your way of happiness, and it was not on your radar. What if before bed, you ruminate over the mistakes you made throughout the day and try your best to come up with every possible solution to those mistakes? You glance over at your clock or phone and its extremely late and you have already set yourself behind for the next day. This may lead to even more negative affect coming your way in the form of shame and negative self-talk, usually in the form of “should.”

Through the lens of NARM, we can all work towards establishing healthy and effective patterns that will last us a lifetime. The goal of these patterns is to attach both mind and body back to your authentic self. We can do this by unlearning and toxic shame-based lies that are trying to stick around in our system and to gradually replace them with more positive, factual and authentic identifiers of self. If your pattern was one of the five survival styles listed above; connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love sexuality, you are very much not alone. By satisfying and growing our core needs and working to rebalance our patterns, we can grow into a version of ourselves that can feel entirely transformational. To look at these concepts NARM therapists utilize both Top-down processing, which focuses on cognition and emotions you experience as the primary focus and also, bottom-up processing, which focuses on your body and your felt sense (instinctive responses).