🟡 The NARM® process
Healing Complex Trauma
Find Connection and Safety with the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM)
Do you feel a deep sense of disconnection, even when you're with others? Do you struggle with life-long symptoms and interpersonal difficulties that seem rooted in your past?
The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM)
Dr. Laurence Heller
NARM
The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), developed by Dr. Laurence Heller, is a modern clinical approach designed to address and heal the deep, unconscious patterns caused by complex trauma, attachment, relational, and developmental trauma. This includes the long-term impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). These patterns of disconnection deeply affect your sense of self, your emotions, your body, your behavior, and your relationships.
How NARM Works?
A Strength-Based Approach
NARM is a resource-oriented, non-regressive model. This means that therapy does not focus on dwelling on past traumas or dysfunctional elements. Instead, it works by:
Focusing on Your Strengths
It emphasizes reconnecting with the parts of your Self that are already organized, coherent, and functional. This helps bring awareness and organization to the parts of your Self that feel disorganized or stuck.
Integrating Mind and Body
NARM integrates interventions that use body-mind mindfulness and an orientation to resources to help you anchor self-regulation in your nervous system. This helps you learn to manage overwhelming emotions and feel safer and more settled in your body.
Working in the Present
The model is guided by principles that focus on supporting your internal organization, exploring identity, and working in the present time to regulate the nervous system.
The 5 Areas NARM Helps You Heal
NARM focuses on improving five essential developmental themes that are crucial for self-regulation and being present to yourself and others. When these basic needs were unmet in childhood, survival adaptations developed to manage disconnection and dysregulation. NARM helps you reclaim these capacities:
Connection
Feeling like you belong in the world, being in touch with your body and emotions, and being capable of consistent connection with others.
Attunement
Knowing what you need and being able to recognize, reach out for, and take in the good things that life offers.
Trust
Cultivating an inherent trust in yourself and others, and feeling safe enough to allow for a healthy interdependence in relationships.
Autonomy
Having the ability to say "no," set limits, and speak your mind without guilt or fear.
Love-Sexuality
Integrating an open heart with a vital sexuality to experience loving relationships.
Your Inherent Impulse Toward Health
The core belief in NARM is that an inherent, spontaneous movement exists in all people toward connection and health. No matter how isolated or traumatized you have become, there is a deep, organismic impulse—like a plant moving toward the sun—driving you toward healing. This life force is the fuel of The NeuroAffective Relational Model™.
Ready to begin?
You’re welcome to reach out to explore whether NARM is right for you.