What Is The Neuroaffective Relational Model Therapy Approach?
Imagine being a child who lives in a house where your parents are constantly fighting. You would likely learn to fear sounds that could signal anger, like heavy feet on the stairs or a door slamming. And you might even learn to stay quiet about your own needs in an effort to keep the peace.
As an adult, years later, the same child might still struggle to ask for help, trust others, or just feel safe in their adult relationships.
This example shows the way that the same patterns that keep you safe during childhood might later hurt you in life.
The Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) is a therapeutic approach that helps you move beyond these old wounds. It helps you connect with yourself and the world around you.
This helpful resource from Catalina Behavioral Health will talk about NARM therapy, what it is, and how it can reshape survival strategies so that you can fully heal from early trauma.
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What Causes Complex Trauma to Develop in Adults?
Traumatic events lead to PTSD, but when you live through a systemic, repetitive event, complex trauma happens. It’s most likely if you lived through neglect, abuse, or instability during your early years.
Since your brain is still growing and learning, adverse childhood experiences have a great impact. Developmental trauma changes how you feel about yourself and the world around you, even decades after the abuse ends.
How Childhood Trauma Can Stretch Into Adult Life
Living through developmental trauma changes how you view the world, even as an adult. You may notice that loud noises, certain emotions, or physical touch trigger you more than the average person. Your brain likely still associates them with the things that happened to you as a child, even if you aren’t consciously aware of it.
Childhood Trauma and Your Mental Health
You may not have chosen it, but you are a survivor. Unfortunately, trauma has a way of staying with you through life. You may find it harder to regulate your emotions or nervous system, even when you’re just going through day-to-day life.
These unregulated emotions come with a greater risk of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Trauma and stress also cause chronic physical issues like cardiovascular disease and autoimmune diseases.
Many people find their trauma very personal, so it’s not uncommon to think you have to deal with it alone. You also might feel disconnected from others or like they can’t possibly understand. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, and it’s the reason why reaching out to a trauma-informed care center like Catalina Behavioral Health can help.
How Upbringing Affects Developmental Themes
Dr. Laurence Heller describes the five core developmental themes: connection, attunement, autonomy, and love-sexuality. These themes are formed and reinforced during your developmental years.
As you become an adult, they continue affecting you. You may struggle to self-regulate, show intimacy, or even feel confident in who you are.
What is NARM Therapy (And How Can It Help)?
Children who experience trauma during early psychological development often develop survival styles. Think of your survival style like a coping skill. It helped you get through trauma, neglect, or abuse. For example, ignoring your own needs to keep the peace.
Even though this coping mechanism helps while you’re still living through abuse, they aren’t sustainable. They do more harm than good once you’re an adult, causing stress, anxiety, and relationship challenges.
The major benefit of the Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) of therapy is that it doesn’t focus on the past. You work with a therapist to understand those old patterns, but you focus on breaking free from them in the present. You see, those survival styles may have saved you as a child, but there’s no place for them in your current life.
Acknowledge them for protecting you, and then let them go. As you do this, NARM therapy helps you make room for healthier relationships, both with yourself and the world around you.
Who Can Benefit from NARM?
Since NARM explores personal history, this form of therapy is most beneficial for people dealing with long-lasting effects of the things they experienced in childhood.
Like somatic experiencing and gestalt therapy, NARM can offer a good approach for people who survived through neglect, abuse, or unstable caregiving environments in their developmental years. It can help with issues like:
- Shame, guilt, or chronic self-doubt stemming from childhood
- Difficulty having healthy relationships or trusting others
- Feeling disconnected from your needs, emotions, or body
- Symptoms of complex trauma, including anxiety, depression, and emotional numbness
As you recognize how old survival patterns show themselves in your present life, NARM therapy helps you break free from cycles that no longer serve you. It’s a powerful therapeutic option if you feel “stuck” in the past or like you can’t move on. The ability to move on can only come from healing developmental trauma.
Understanding the Five Adaptive Survival Styles
When children experience hardship, they develop one or more “survival strategies” (also called the five developmental life themes) to cope.
Survival styles have a purpose, but they don’t serve you in adulthood. You may struggle to form and maintain healthy relationships, have low self-esteem, or have issues with self-regulation in your daily life.
NARM therapists help you identify which of the five common survival styles you may be struggling with.
Once you start seeing how complex trauma is affecting you, it’s easier to replace these strategies with healthier ways of living and connecting to the world around you. This is where the healing process can begin.
Autonomy Survival Style
As children, we need space to learn independence and how to care for ourselves. When caretakers discourage or punish independence, children grow up struggling with control. You might feel trapped in relationships or afraid of getting too close.
This survival style comes with problems setting boundaries and making decisions without feeling guilty. Through NARM, you’ll learn it’s safe to trust your own decisions and walk forward confidently in the decisions you make yourself. You also learn that you can do these things without harming your relationship with others.
Attunement Survival Style
Children need their caregivers to notice and meet their needs. If your needs were neglected in childhood, you might ignore what you need or even put others’ needs before your own. In adulthood, this leads to feeling disconnected from hunger, emotions, and desires.
Through NARM, you can reconnect with yourself, learn that your own needs matter, and start trusting that your needs can be met.
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Connection Survival Style
Neglect, abuse, or even loss can disrupt early relationships and make it feel like you don’t belong. Adults with a connection survival style continue to feel cut off from others. You might even feel ashamed or unworthy of love.
During NARM therapy, you’ll start to rebuild a sense of self and form deeper, healthier connections. You feel confident in who you are and don’t feel like you have to hide it.
Trust Survival Style
When you can’t rely on the people around you as a child, you may feel you’re not truly safe. A lack of trust and confidence in others can carry into adult relationships. You’ll have a hard time opening up or feeling secure. NARM therapy provides a safe space where you can slowly relearn trust. Relationships start to feel less threatening and more supportive.
Love-Sexuality Survival Style
When love, boundaries, and affection are confused in childhood, it creates challenges with intimacy later in life. Adults might feel split between wanting to be close to others and feeling unsafe with it.
When working with a skilled therapist, NARM helps you explore these themes and separate love from fear. It helps you reclaim a healthy sense of sexuality and self-worth.
Healing Developmental Trauma Through Clinical Practice
Experienced NARM practitioners prioritize trauma-informed care that takes your personal history into account while exploring the coping mechanisms used during early childhood. It’s done in a gentle way that prevents retraumatization.
Rather than revisiting the details of painful memories, NARM focuses on recognizing survival patterns, feelings, and bodily responses in the present moment. Then, you learn to release these patterns by using mindful awareness and other coping strategies.
The reality is that survival strategies have served their purpose, and now, they are holding you back. As you put what you’ve learned into practice, it becomes easier to choose what serves you in the present moment. You’ll feel calmer, more resilient, and better able to connect with yourself and others.
NARM and Other Therapies for Complex PTSD
The neuroaffective relational model (NARM) is just one approach used to treat complex and developmental trauma. At Catalina Behavioral Health, we understand that the path to healing is sometimes as unique as the early trauma that led to the adaptive survival styles you’re struggling with.
Healing looks different for everyone, which is why we offer multiple evidence-based therapies that can be used alone or as part of a customized treatment plan. In addition to these different individual-based therapies, we also offer group and family therapy for a more community-based approach to healing.
EMDR Therapy
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is usually recommended for people struggling with painful, repressed memories or post-traumatic stress. It relieves the physical and emotional symptoms common in these cases.
During EMDR, you’ll work with a therapist using external stimuli to gently reprocess certain memories. By reprocessing them, you start reducing the emotional intensity tied to your experiences.
Somatic and Mind-Body Approaches
Trauma is stored in the body too, not just the brain. Many clients at Catalina benefit from our somatic therapies that promote reconnection with their bodies.
Using mindfulness, breathwork, and other body-based practices, you’ll learn emotional regulation and resilience. You start gaining greater control, even in moments when you’re triggered by past trauma.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
For children, teens, and adults, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) helps process difficult experiences. Cognitive therapy helps you identify unhelpful thought patterns, then replace them with healthier ones. As you learn to manage anxiety, guilt, shame, and other symptoms that many people who have PTSD live with, you’ll be able to break free from the past.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
People who go through adverse childhood experiences may deal with emotions that feel overwhelming or impossible to manage.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) teaches practical skills that help with mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. The tools you learn make it easier to handle intense emotions without feeling out of control or reverting to harmful behaviors.
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Find Individualized Care to Heal from Trauma at Catalina
Healing from complex trauma won’t happen overnight, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, especially if you have the right help.
At Catalina Behavioral Health, we use NARM and other proven therapies to help clients move beyond survival mode.
No matter what your past looks like, you deserve to live a life of connection, safety, and growth.
Call us confidentially to find options and support for healing from developmental trauma today.
