After discovering NARM, reading the book Healing Developmental Trauma, and doing my own work through journaling, I was ready to experience my survival styles in a controlled situation with a person trained to help me recognize my automatic responses. I found my first NARM practitioner, I’ll call her Leena, and started a life-changing journey.

What I wanted from these sessions was help with not shutting down so quickly when I felt hurt or threatened, somethign I knew I could change only in relationship to someone else. I’d bring a scenario that had caused me to shut down and talk about it while pausing every few minutes to see what my body was doing AND what Leena’s body was doing, since much of the theory is that to really rewire the limbic and peripheral nervous systems, we have to be attending honestly with the emotional and physical responses of another. What was happening with Leena’s heart rate and breathing? What about mine? Where did I feel a certain emotion in my body? How did my confession of a certain strong desire impact her? I’d learned about the back and forth bodily monitoring from the NARM book and Leena was willing to share with me her experience of being with me. This was CRUCIAL for me: I have a distorted view of how others see me, thinking they see me as “too much” or “demanding,” mostly because I hadn’t learned to speak up for myself in a neutral and clear way. In NARM, I could explore myself relative to the five survival styles (connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love/sexuality) with another human being who is trying to be as present and engaged in their body with me as they can. In a session, you frequently pause to notice what’s going on in your body and in the experience of being together in the room.

After two months of working with Leena, I wanted a quicker solution, so I quit. I see now my abrupt stop was the old survival skills kicking in. Two months was all I could take of this deep connecting. About six months later, I needed support again. I was feeling that old terror of someone being mad at me in my job, and I knew I was ready to face it in myself. Leena was full, but I found a different NARM practitioner whom I’ll call Violet. She too has been trained in both NARM and Somatic Experiencing. What I realized when we started our work was that I’d missed an important part of NARM: the survival strategies are based on core capacities essential to well-being. All these years, long before discovering NARM, I’d been trying to cure the disease, to “heal” myself, to deal with my messed-up ways of being. So I naturally interpreted what I was reading in the NARM book through this filter, seeing only the “survival strategies” and not the core capacities for living they helped protect. Now I was ready to see not only that I had survived, but that I probably had the capacity to really live, might dare to eat a peach and disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot says, without falling apart. And this, too, would require being in the room with someone (now on Zoom) and noticing how I and they respond when I attempted to live out of my fullness rather than focusing on perceived deficits. Here is the chart I had overlooked indicating what we are capable of :

From the book *Healing Developmental Trauma*, 2012, Laurence Heller, Ph.D., and Aline LaPierre, Psy.D., page 3

After many months of slowing down and learning so much with Violet, I wanted to see if I could live into my large capacity for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, even love-sexuality. So I took a risk by talking about what I wanted in the love-sexuality category. I had started the session shut-down in shame because the person I was in a very difficult relationship with was ignoring me, so I think my perceptions of Violet were distorted from the start. But I proceeded with my plan to take a risk. The more I shared about what I wanted in love, in a partner, in a sexual relationship, the more misunderstood I felt. I started getting the old feeling that my desires were too big for Violet to hold and I started to judge her as being too simple and incapable of meeting me. But instead of shrinking into my misunderstood self, I did something uncharacteristic. I told her the truth, without blaming her, about how I was feeling in the moment. Her response startled me. She stated unequivocally that she was committed to knowing me and being in this with me. She understood that I wanted to live in a general flow of connection and vitality with others, and she held our connection in those moments even as I shamed myself and blamed her. That pivotal session gave me hope that, if I kept engaging in this deep relational therapy, I could grow my capacity for the dynamic life-force in me and not be overwhelmed by it.

I have continued to stretch and change over the past six years influenced by NARM ideas, practitioners, and trainings. And there is so much more to absorb. I’m thankful that NARM works in a cyclical not linear way, meaning we’re never “done.” We don’t “arrive.” We keep living and learning and creating more capacity for connection, which was the thing we were yearning for all along.

The Tender Power of NARM, part II

The Tender Power of NARM, part I