The Tender Power of NARM, part I
I discovered the Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) approach to working with developmental trauma a week after undergoing a full evaluation and being “diagnosed” with developmental trauma by a psychiatrist I found and paid out of pocket to see in October, 2018. I put “diagnosed” in scare quotes because developmental trauma isn’t listed in the DSM-5, so technically it’s not a disorder you can diagnose and treat. But of course, it can be diagnosed and treated. Powerfully so. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that developmental trauma isn’t an official disorder. Its neutral status has stopped me from getting locked into the diagnosis as yet another way to understand my limitations. The “developmental trauma” determination had the opposite effect on me. It told me there was nothing wrong with me, which opened the possibility of reconnecting to myself and others differently in a radically new way. In this post, I will try to explain the process I’ve been engaged in for nearly six years. My goal is to display the knitwork of the past six years the best I can, weaving in and out of technical explanation and personal experience.
NARM was developed by Dr. Laurence Heller, who I trained with and who I’ve come to greatly respect. Using both top-down (cognitive) and bottom-up (somatic) orientations, the NARM approach empowers each person to rewire themselves within a respectful, heartful therapeutic relationship. The first cognitive shift happened for me when I realized that, as for many people, my struggles were the result of an environmental failure in my earliest years. The moment I heard “environmental failure” I felt a huge relief. I could appreciate everything my mom and dad had given my sister, brother, and me. I could appreciate how much courage it took my dad at 16 and my mom at 19 to leave the worlds they’d grown up in in pursuit of a better life. The concept of environmental failure also helped me more freely admit how hard and debilitating my childhood had been, despite my parents’ best efforts. My sense of myself had been severely twisted in my attempt to preserve the tenuous attachment bond with my mom, and my nervous system formed in unhelpful ways as I was always on high alert navigating the emotional precariousness of our home. Rather than trying to understand the depths of my parents’ psychological issues, NARM took a step back and looked at the phenomena of my childhood, not the people. It does so by identifying the child’s core needs and the adaptations children develop when the core needs aren’t met. Here is the way NARM sees the impact of environmental failure on the growing child:
From the book Healing Developmental Trauma, 2012, Laurence Heller, Ph.D., and Aline LaPierre, Psy.D., p. 33
The environmental failure of my developmental years affected both my self-concept and the way my body, especially my nervous system, was developing to protect me from what felt like a terrifying life. I don’t remember the first three years, but I know from the other years that my mom had a hard time connecting. She ironed out and starved her own aliveness in potent ways. I would come to understand her behaviors — which, if diagnosed, would have been labeled “OCD” and “bulimia” — as coping strategies against her own developmental trauma. She was so afraid of doing something wrong and of not being perfect that we kids grew up on edge, trying to be perfect for her, always bracing for her to pounce in her erratic, accusing anger and for dad to back her up. If I protested, which I’m sure I did early on, I was made to feel I was out of line, being selfish. Fortunately, I was free to explore various expressions, like writing and performing plays for my family, but there was a line we couldn’t cross when asking to be heard or helped. As I grew, I stopped protesting and asking for help. I knew that my aliveness, my opinions, desires, questions, and quests, were too much for my parents.
None of this was registered as thought. It was the water I swam in. But it registered in my autonomic nervous system as freezing in fear when I thought someone, anyone, was angry at me. I had generalized the reality with my parents to my larger world. The only thing that mattered to me as a girl was making sure no one was mad at me. This hypervigilance extended through high school. I had no sense of myself, of what I liked or was good at. Even when I started Al Anon at 35 and they asked me simple questions, like my favorite music or book or movie, I had no answer. I was still frozen.
In my early adult years, fight and flight joined my freeze response. When I got married at 24, the “fight” part kicked in. I displayed a fury I had never known. I once threw a bowl against a wall, then calmly cleaned the splattered soup and broken glass. I once stood in the middle of the living room and dropped a vase on the hardwood floor. I yelled a lot. And cried. And fantasized about a different life. And was miserable nearly all the time. In my 40s and 50s, the “flee” part was dominant. I kept leaving jobs because I couldn’t bear the ways I’d failed in my work and I was sure a better position was out there somewhere. I also periodically left my friendships because I had so little sense of myself that when my beliefs or worldview would change (which happened every few years), I would drop all the people I’d been connected to through work or church or education. The accumulation of survival strategies, nervous system responses, and ideas about reality (“standing out is bad,” “speaking your mind is bad” “people are against you”) formed my “personality.” This struggle, these choices, my physical responses, my limited capacities, these were just “who I was.”
In NARM, I learned about the Five Survival Strategies. The chart above shows how the child might use the survival strategies to maintain the primary relationship to parents or caregivers, without which the child instinctively knows they won’t survive. The chart below shows how the survival styles manifest in later life.
Healing Developmental Trauma, p. 5
What a relief these charts were to me. Rather than seeing folks like me as “neurotic” or “wrong,” NARM sees us as scrappy because we didn’t totally shut down as children and adults. NARM recognizes that we did what was necessary to keep living. And then it presents the Good News: Our survival styles aren’t really us: they are our child-selves trying to stay afloat, and we can slowly grow into adults who do more than survive!
The perspectives and methods that Heller and LaPierra present for healing developmental trauma opened the door to my being able to rewire my body’s habituated survival responses and reframe how I thought about myself. The healing takes time, but NARM’s deep relational model allows for as much time as the client needs. We lead our own healing. And that has worked well for me.
