What is NARM?

Connection: Our Deepest Desire & Greatest Fear

“NeuroAffective Relational Model(NARM) is a cutting-edge model for addressing attachment, relational and developmental trauma, by working with the attachment patterns that cause life-long psychobiological symptoms and interpersonal difficulties. These early, unconscious patterns of disconnection deeply affect our identity, emotions, physiology, behavior and relationships. Learning how to work simultaneously with these diverse elements is a radical shift that has profound clinical implications for healing complex trauma.  As such, NARM is positioned to become an invaluable treatment option for the Trauma-Informed Care movement as we gain greater understanding of the nature of adverse childhood experience (ACEs).

This developmentally-oriented, neuroscientifically-informed model, as outlined in Dr. Laurence Heller’s book Healing Developmental Trauma, emerged out of earlier psychotherapeutic orientations including Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Attachment Theory, Cognitive Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, and Somatic Experiencing®, and bridges traditional psychotherapy with somatic approaches within a context of relational practice. NARM is a mindfulness-based clinical treatment, as its method is grounded in a phenomenological approach to addressing identity and consciousness of self – who we truly are beneath these patterned ways of relating to ourselves and the world. Seen in this way, healing complex trauma is a vehicle for transformation on a personal and collective level.

In recent years the role of self-regulation has become an important part of psychological thinking. The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM) brings the current understanding of self-regulation into clinical practice. This resource-oriented, non-regressive model emphasizes helping clients establish connection to the parts of self that are organized, coherent and functional. It helps bring into awareness and organization the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional without making the regressed, dysfunctional elements the primary theme of the therapy.

Core Principles
The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ focuses on the fundamental tasks and functional unity of biological and psychological development. The NARM model:

• • Integrates both a nervous system based and a relational orientation.

• • Brings developmentally-informed clinical interventions that use somatic mindfulness and an orientation to resources to anchor self-regulation in the nervous system.

• • Works clinically with the link between psychological issues and the body by helping access the body’s self-regulatory capacities and by supporting nervous system re-regulation.

• Uses mindful inquiry into the deeper identifications and counter-identifications that we take to be our identity.

In the NARM approach, we work simultaneously with the physiology and the psychology of individuals who have experienced developmental trauma, and focus on the interplay between issues of identity and the capacity for connection and regulation.

NARM uses four primary organizing principles:

• • Supporting connection and organization

• • Exploring identity

• • Working in present time

• • Regulating the nervous system”

Taken from NARMTRAINING.COM