L’Accompagnement Somatique Relationnel

No. It is a non-medical form of support, designed to nurture your personal and relational wellbeing.

I am not a psychologist, a doctor or a psychotherapist. The services I offer are in no way a substitute for medical or psychotherapeutic advice, diagnosis, treatment or care.

At the start of each session, we always take the time to clarify what you want for yourself. Sometimes, that alone is a challenge. Either because you don't yet have the capacity to fully connect with it, or because no one has ever paid sincere attention to what you want. Or because you judge what you want, and don't dare to hope for it, for fear of being disappointed.

The work has already begun here — because all of this is already revealing the strategies you had to put in place to adapt and to grow in your environment.

Together, we bring sincere, caring attention to what emerges. Once you have more clarity about what you want for yourself, we explore what stands in the way. Sometimes it's beliefs. Sometimes it's very concrete circumstances. Sometimes it's emotions. What interests us most is how you relate to these obstacles. Because this is precisely where your potential for actualisation lies.

As our sessions unfold, the virtuous circle of Somatic Relational Support takes shape, and you gradually grow your capacity to feel, at last, the love, joy and freedom you long for in your everyday life.

I don't promise a number, because I don't know of an honest one. The work unfolds over time, usually at the pace of one session a week, or one every other week. Some people come for a few months, others for much longer.

Developmental trauma is a repeated, relational trauma, experienced by a child or adolescent whose brain is still developing.

Picture a tree. We are not talking about an axe blow to a trunk that is already formed and solid, with roots anchored deep in nourishing soil. We are talking about tiny, repeated knife cuts to a young sapling that manages to grow all the same — constantly adapting to those tiny, repeated knife cuts, in depleted soil, without sunlight, without water.

What becomes of that sapling? What does its trunk look like once it has grown into a tree? How does it fare against the elements? And how does it respond, the day it finally receives the sunshine and the rain it needs? Can it take them in — or will it all be too much at once, for a tree that has grown used to so little?

This work unfolds over time because it means unlearning 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years of conscious and non-conscious functioning — functioning that got you to where you are today, but that no longer fits your current environment, or what you long for.

That depends on you — on what you want, and what you need.

Some people book one or two sessions a week. Others, one session every other week.

A session usually lasts 50 minutes.

From our second appointment onwards, however, you can also book 75-minute sessions, for those who wish to give themselves more time and space.

When you book a slot, my calendar automatically organises itself around your booking. For that reason — and because I consider our time to be our most precious resource — I do not offer the option of cancelling a session once it is booked.

However, from our second appointment onwards, and only in exceptional circumstances, you may reschedule your session up to 72 hours before it takes place, by clicking the "Reschedule my appointment" button in your confirmation email.

Yes. The work centres on your bodily sensations and on what moves between us — and both remain fully accessible at a distance. Video calls even have an advantage: you are at home, in your own environment, and you have no journey to make right after a session.

That's what I hear most often, and it's fair.

The role of the autonomic nervous system is now well documented, and the personal development world has taken it up — with one real benefit, spreading the word widely, and one real drawback: letting people believe that regulation solves everything.

Regulating your nervous system without looking at the strategies that lead to the dysregulation is a bit like endlessly scooping water out of a bath you find too hot, without ever turning off the hot tap. You stabilise the temperature — but at what cost, and for how long?

This is precisely what NARM brings, and it is why I integrate nervous system regulation into a broader approach, informed by a fine-grained, in-depth understanding of the mechanisms of developmental trauma.

Many people, moreover, confuse regulating the nervous system with stabilising it. Most of the nervous system regulation practices you do on your own are in fact stabilisation practices. They bring your autonomic nervous system back into its window of tolerance, but they do not allow the integration of the fight and flight responses that your system once mobilised and then froze — and which lie at the very heart of the dysregulation.

You and I, together, create a relational space that supports your sense of safety. Depending on the experience of connection you have had until now, this can take more or less time.

Once you feel fully safe in our connection, the fight and flight responses that were frozen will emerge — naturally, and of their own accord. Your system is intelligent. We follow its impulses, while slowing things down and using your imagination, so that it can complete, in the here and now, the psychophysiological processes set in motion by defensive responses that were mobilised but never allowed to reach completion. This is what we do with Somatic Experiencing.

When these responses remain out of reach — or when you recognise that our connection is safe without quite being able to feel it — it means certain adaptive strategies are still at work, and are now reaching their limits. That is where NARM comes in.

Larry Heller created NARM after training practitioners in Somatic Experiencing for more than twenty years. Today, Somatic Experiencing is having its moment. Tomorrow, it will be NARM's.

Larry Heller formalised the NeuroAffective Relational Model when he became aware of the limits of Somatic Experiencing in cases of complex trauma. Even in adulthood — and until a different experience of connection has been integrated within the work — the fight and flight responses remain out of reach, because they are directed at a loved one: the attachment figure. To fight or to flee is to risk losing the bond, and that risk is too great when the person is someone you love.

What's more, even once we have detached ourselves from the figure in question, the reality is this: in order to grow up in an environment that was less than optimal, we had to develop relational adaptations that still play out today — often without our realising — and that feed the dysregulation: not daring to say no, not knowing how to identify and honour our own needs, acting impulsively or compulsively, and so on.

Somatic Experiencing scoops the water out of the bath you find too hot, but leaves the hot tap running.

NARM turns off the hot tap.

L'Accompagnement Somatique Relationnel does both: it scoops the water out of the bath you find too hot, and it turns off the hot tap.