NARM
The NeuroAffective
Relational Model
developed by Dr Laurence Heller
What is developmental trauma?
To grow up and thrive as an adult, a child does not only need to be fed, housed and taken to school on time.
As human beings, we are born with certain fundamental needs.
During our first years of life, our needs can only be met in and through the connection with our attachment figures — that is, the adults who look after us.
When our needs are met by the relational environment we grow up in, our biopsychological development unfolds optimally.
We then develop certain fundamental capacities that will allow us, as adults, to navigate life with ease, experiencing connection and vitality: sensing what is going on inside us, identifying what we need, trusting others, daring to say no, loving and desiring.
Feeling good, feeling like we belong, connected to the world around us, able to face life and its challenges
These are not random experiences that some of us are entitled to and others not.
They are the normal and natural consequence, in adulthood, of an optimal biopsychological development, fostered in childhood by a relational environment able to meet our fundamental needs.
When our needs are not met by our environment — chronically, over a long period and repeatedly, whatever the reason — we must, sometimes from the very first beats of our heart, put in place cognitive, behavioural and physiological strategies in order to survive.
These strategies are neither failings nor conscious choices on our part
They are adaptations essential to our survival.
We have no choice but to adapt, biologically and psychologically, to a situation in which our fundamental needs are not met.
Not always because we had bad parents. Often because we had human parents. Imperfect, managing as adults with their own strategies — the ones they themselves had to put in place as children to survive their own unmet needs.
This is what we call developmental trauma: the biopsychological adaptation of our still-developing organism to a relational environment that, for whatever reason, is unable to meet our fundamental needs.
NARM — Larry Heller’s NeuroAffective Relational Model
Holding a doctorate in clinical psychology, Dr Laurence Heller practised for over twenty years modalities such as Gestalt, Somatic Experiencing and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
He came to realise that a significant gap remained in existing models when it came to addressing early developmental trauma.
It was from this observation that NARM — the NeuroAffective Relational Model — was born, offering a precious framework for understanding human experience.
NARM supports the resolution of developmental trauma, including when it is early: prenatal, perinatal or preverbal.
NARM identifies five core needs
As human beings, we all experience these five core needs.
The need for connection.
Being welcomed into this world.
Feeling safe and welcome in it.
Being in touch with our body and our emotions, and able to connect with others in a stable way.
The need for attunement.
Knowing what we need.
Being able to recognise it, express it, and receive what life has to offer us.
The need for trust.
Being able to rely on others.
Feeling safe enough to depend on someone — and for someone to depend on us — without that dependency becoming a transaction.
The need for autonomy.
Being able to say no.
Setting our boundaries.
Expressing what we think and what we want, without fearing the other person’s reaction.
The need for love and sexuality.
Loving with an open heart.
Feeling loved for who we are, and not for what we achieve.
Being able, as adults, to experience within one and the same relationship both the tenderness of love and the excitement of sexual desire.
During the first years of our life, these needs can only be met in and through the relationship with our attachment figures
How well they are met over the course of our development shapes our capacity, as adults, to feel good, connected, and like we belong.
🌺 N.B.: During childhood and adolescence, the need for love and sexuality refers to the need to be able to fully feel and express one’s love, and to become familiar with one’s sexuality without shame or guilt.
When one or more of our needs remain unmet, often enough and for long enough that we have to adapt to it, we develop cognitive, physiological and behavioural strategies in order to keep growing regardless.
In NARM, these strategies are simply named after the need whose lack they are trying to compensate for.
They are called survival styles.
NARM: a humanistic approach
If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t like being put in a box, and you may be wary of approaches that draw up personality profiles.
You like to be seen as you are: a human being doing their best to get through life and its challenges.
That is also how NARM sees you. It is in no way about reducing us to our relational dynamics.
It is about becoming aware of them, in connection and in the moment, so that we can gradually give ourselves the freedom to do otherwise.
Because yes, whether we like it or not, we play an active part in what happens to us today.
And that is rather good news: it means we have the power to influence the course of our life.
NARM is a humanistic approach that regards the person as what they are: a human being, not an object to be repaired.
How do we work in NARM?
NARM rests on four pillars.
What you want for yourself.
Not what you think you should want.
Not what it is reasonable to want.
What you, here and now, would like to live in your life. Even if it seems unrealistic.
Every session starts there.
This is what we call intentionality: your intention guides our work, like a compass, from beginning to end.
Curiosity.
Once you know what you want, we explore together what stands in the way — whether real facts, beliefs or emotions.
And above all, we explore how you relate to these obstacles.
Not by looking for explanations in your past, but by bringing sincere, caring curiosity to what is happening in you, here, as we talk about it: a thought that surfaces, a tightness in the throat, the urge to change the subject.
Nothing is to be corrected.
Everything is to be explored, together.
Your part.
What happened to you as a child was not your doing.
What you do with it today is.
NARM is interested in the way you continue, without meaning to, to sustain the strategies that once protected you — and in what becomes possible as soon as you bring sincere, caring curiosity to them.
What changes, as it changes.
When a strategy loosens its grip, you feel it before you understand it: a fuller breath, an emotion that passes through, a silence that is no longer awkward.
In NARM, we pause on these moments.
Not to analyse them — so that your system can integrate them, and learn that another experience is possible.
It is through these four movements that the strategies you had to put in place as a child reveal themselves.
And gradually stop deciding on your behalf.