Connection: Our deepest desire and greatest fear
NeuroAffective Relational Model NARM is an advanced professional qualification programme for mental health professionals working with complex trauma.
It is a neurobiologically informed approach to treating relational and developmental trauma that focuses on therapeutic work with traumatic attachment patterns and the resulting long-term psychobiological symptoms and interpersonal difficulties.
Contemporary neuroscientific findings document how these early, unconscious patterns of disconnection profoundly affect identity, emotions, neurophysiology, behavior, and relationships.
Therefore, training in a therapeutic approach such as the NARM method, which focuses simultaneously on these different levels, is an invaluable therapeutic option based on current scientific knowledge about trauma, contributing to a fuller understanding of Adversity Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
The developmentally oriented and neuroscience-based model, as described in Healing Developmental Trauma by Dres. Laurence Heller & A. La Pierre is rooted in older psychotherapeutic orientations such as Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Somatic Psychotherapy, Primary Bonding or Attachment Theory, Cognitive Therapy, Gestalt Therapy and Somatic Experiencing® and links traditional psychotherapy with somatic approaches within a relational practice framework.
The NARM approach is a clinical therapy based on mindfulness, and is grounded in a phenomenological approach to issues of identity, cultivating self-awareness and relationships. Through this prism, the treatment of complex trauma becomes a means of transformation on a personal and collective level.
In recent years the role of self-regulation has become an important part of psychological thinking. The NARM approach integrates current understanding of self-regulation into clinical practice.
This non-regressive model, oriented to internal and external sources of power, helps therapists to establish connection with parts of themselves that are organized, coherent and functional.
In addition, it supports them to become aware of and organize the parts of themselves that are disorganized and dysfunctional, without making these elements the primary focus of therapy.
Main principles
The NARM approach focuses on the fundamental goals and the functional connection between biological and psychological development. Specifically:
- It incorporates a relational orientation based on the nervous system.
- It provides developmentally based clinical interventions that utilize body awareness and an orientation towards internal and external resources to enhance self-regulation in the nervous system.
- It clinically addresses the relationship between psychological problems and the body, helping clients to access the self-regulating capacity of the body and supporting the re-regulation of their nervous system.
- It uses the conscious exploration of the deeper identifications and anti-identifications that we consider our identity.
In the NARM approach, we work simultaneously with the neurophysiology and psychology of the person who has experienced developmental trauma and focus on the interplay between the issues of identity and the capacity for connection and regulation.
NARM uses four basic organisational principles:
- strengthening association and organisation
- the investigation of identity
- the therapeutic work in the present
- the regulation of the nervous system
Five Organizational Development Issues
There are five developmental themes and five related key resources that are essential for self-regulation and that affect our ability to be present to ourselves and others:
Connection: We feel we belong to the world. We are in touch with our body and our emotions and are capable of solid connection with others.
Harmonization: Our ability to know what our needs are and to recognize, seek and receive the abundance that life offers.
Trust: We have an innate trust in ourselves and others. We feel secure enough to allow for healthy interdependence with others.
Autonomy: We are able to say no and set appropriate boundaries with others. We express our opinions without guilt or fear.
Love-Sexuality: Our hearts are open and we are able to create fulfilling partner relationships by embodying vital sexual energy.
To the extent that these five basic needs are met, we experience regulation and connection. We feel safe and confident in our environment, flexible, comfortable and connected to ourselves and others. We experience a sense of regulation and expansion. When these basic needs are not met, we develop survival patterns in our attempts to manage disconnection and dysregulation.
A Fundamental Change of Orientation
While much of psychodynamic psychotherapy has been oriented towards identifying pathology and focusing on problems, NARM is a model of treatment and development that emphasizes working with existing potential and reserves as well as symptoms.
It is oriented towards resources, both internal and external, in order to support the enhancement of the capacity for self-regulation.
At the core of what appears to be a wide range of physical and emotional symptoms, most psychological and many of the physical problems appear to be due to the disorder being entrenched in one, or more, of the five organizational developmental themes related to survival patterns.
To begin with, survival patterns are adaptive and represent development, not pathology. However, because the brain looks to the past to predict the future, these patterns are stored in our nervous system and create an adaptive but false identity.
It is precisely this consolidation of survival patterns that were helpful and protective in the past that distorts the present experience and creates the symptoms. Survival patterns, no longer functional, cause a constant disconnection from our authentic self and from others.
The NARM approach focuses not so much on the reasons why a person is shaped the way he or she is shaped, but on the way in which his or her survival pattern distorts his or her present experience.
Understanding how these patterns began to develop can be useful for the person in treatment, but it is useful primarily to the extent that these patterns affect their present experience.
The Post Process
Every therapeutic tradition has an implicit metaprocess, which teaches the healers to focus their attention on some elements of their experience and ignore others.
When therapies focus on deficiency, pain, and dysfunction, therapists learn to orient themselves to deficiency, pain, and dysfunction. Focusing on past difficulties does not significantly reduce dysfunction, nor does it support self-regulation.
The metaprocess in the NARM approach is mindful self-awareness in the present moment. The therapist is invited to actively participate in a fundamental exploratory process:
“What are the patterns that prevent me from being present to myself and others in this moment in my life?”
This question is explored in relation to the following levels of experience: cognitive, emotional, sensory-physical (experienced sensation). The NARM approach explores personal history to the extent that patterns from the past interfere with the individual being in touch with self and others in the present.
Thus, it incorporates an active exploration of the therapist’s relational and survival patterns, building on his/her strengths and helping him/her to experience a sense of self-efficacy in life’s difficulties.
The metaprocess in NARM involves two aspects of mindfulness:
- somatic mindfulness and
- a conscious awareness of the organisational principles of adaptive survival patterns.
Αξιοποιώντας μια διττή επίγνωση που είναι θεμελιωμένη στην παρούσα στιγμή, το άτομο αρχίζει να συνειδητοποιεί τα γνωστικά, συναισθηματικά και σωματικά του πρότυπα που ξεκίνησαν στο παρελθόν χωρίς να παγιδεύεται στην άποψη ότι το παρελθόν είναι πιο σημαντικό από το παρόν.
Η θεραπευτική εργασία στην προσέγγιση NARM ενισχύει προοδευτικά τη σύνδεση με τον εαυτό στην παρούσα στιγμή. Η παρακολούθηση της διαδικασίας σύνδεσης-αποσύνδεσης και ρύθμισης-δυσρύθμισης στο παρόν βοηθά τους θεραπευόμενους να συνδεθούν με την αίσθηση της αυτενέργειας, μειώνοντας παράλληλα την αίσθηση ότι είναι θύματα της παιδικής τους ηλικίας.
Οι τεχνικές που προσανατολίζονται στους πόρους και επεξεργάζονται τις ανεπαίσθητες αλλαγές του νευρικού συστήματος είναι ιδιαίτερα αποτελεσματικές. Η θεραπευτική εργασία με το νευρικό σύστημα είναι θεμελιώδους σημασίας για την αναχαίτιση των προβλεπτικών τάσεων του εγκεφάλου.
Η σύνδεση με το σώμα μας και με τους άλλους είναι που οδηγεί στη θεραπευτική επαναρύθμιση. Η χρήση τεχνικών που υποστηρίζουν την αυξημένη σύνδεση με τον εαυτό και τους άλλους έχει καθοριστική σημασία για την υποστήριξη της αποτελεσματικής επαναρύθμισης.
The Upward and Downward Approach
There are continuous loops of information that are transmitted from the body to the brain upwards and from the brain to the body downwards. Similar loops exist between the lower and upper brain structures, i.e. between the brain stem, the limbic system and the neocortex.
Both the downward and upward approaches are used in the NARM model. Downward approaches emphasise cognitive functions and emotions, while upward approaches, on the other hand, focus on the body, experienced sensation and instinctive responses, as they are mediated from the brainstem to the higher levels of brain organisation. Both of these orientations broaden therapeutic options considerably.
The Healing Work with the Life Force
We all move spontaneously towards connection and health. No matter how withdrawn or isolated we are, or how severe the trauma we have experienced, at the deepest level, there is in each of us a push towards connection and healing, just as a plant moves spontaneously towards sunlight. This organismic impulse is the “fuel” of the NARM approach.
Source text retrieval: https://www.narm.gr/what-is-narm
