The Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) offers a gentle yet powerful way to transform the often-devastating ongoing adaptations, or survival strategies, that we make as children in response to experiencing developmental trauma (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)). Without dismissing the impact of past experiences, NARM holds that it is ultimately not what happened to us as children that is causing our current difficulties as adults, rather that we are often unconsciously continuing to relate to ourselves and others using these same adaptive strategies. These ways of showing up in the world and in our relationships can deeply impact our capacity to connect to ourselves and others in an authentic way, to truly know what our needs and wants are and to be able to express them appropriately in relationship. We may struggle to trust others when appropriate and to feel like we can make choices in our lives. In our most intimate relationships, we might also struggle to express a healthy sexuality with someone that we truly love.
In a NARM session, we first take some time to find an agreement about what it is you are hoping to get out of our work together – an intention that can evolve as our work progresses. We then explore the obstacles to what it is you are most wanting for yourself. This most often means enquiring with a present moment focus into how your survival strategies are operating in your life right now. As we do so, we make room for all aspects of your experience to be included: cognitions, somatic experience and emotions. In the NARM process we don’t push for aspects of experience to show up, rather we hold that our survival strategies are ultimately ways of disconnecting from what is most real in us and as we continue to take a deeper dive into them, which includes our fears around showing up authentically that ultimately often belong to our childhood, over time we naturally and spontaneously build the capacity to show up as ourselves in our lives. In NARM, we acknowledge that the fullness of our experience is our natural state, however distant that might feel to us in the present. But we also understand that to show up in this way as children might have been experienced as a threat to our existence, especially if these aspects of ourselves were either not welcomed, actively attacked or shunned.
When a child experiences their authenticity as a threat to their attachment relationships that they are completely dependent upon for survival, they make the only choice a child in this situation could realistically make – disconnecting and disavowing these parts of themselves so that they can feel some semblance of connection and safety. Children seem to know innately that it is better to believe themselves to be the bad child of good and loving parents rather than the good and lovable child of parents who don’t have the capacity to love and take care of them, or who might be neglectful and abusive towards them. Acknowledging the reality of a situation like this whilst still in it, knowing that they are powerless to affect any kind of change would mean the loss of all hope. This way of viewing ourselves keeps the hope of love alive because if we see ourselves as ‘bad’ we can improve and ‘win’ love in the future. This sense of badness gets internalised, often becoming a deeply held belief about our very essence, and forms the ongoing dynamic core of who we take ourselves to be.
As the NARM process unfolds, clients often report being able to experience themselves showing up in their lives in a more connected, grounded and regulated way in relationship to themselves and to others. This happens in each person’s own unique way and at a pace that feels right for them. During the work, past traumatic material tends to emerge spontaneously in a way that has much less risk of re-traumatisation. For example, we develop an increasing capacity to be present to and metabolise and communicate our emotions and show up more authentically in the world, where previously this might have felt too threatening. These developing capacities tend to become self-reinforcing over time.
I offer Somatic Experiencing (SE) to support recovery from many different types of shock trauma (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)), for example:
SE holds that processing shock trauma is ultimately about accessing and releasing the various manifestations of a stuck fear response, also known as survival energy. When we have experienced an event (or some kind of chronic ongoing stress as an adult) that feels ‘too much too soon too fast’ our survival mechanisms of fight/flight and freeze get mobilised to varying degrees and when we are not able to triumph over the threat at the time the survival energy stays bound up in our system and creates the symptoms of PTSD. I believe this is what the founder of SE, Peter Levine, means when he says that ‘trauma is not in the event, it is in the nervous system’.
Living with this undischarged survival energy can create a myriad of often confusing symptoms: we can feel stuck in fight and flight or freeze like states, or we can be cycling rapidly between the two. We might be using many types of coping strategies, such as addictions and compulsions, have difficulty sleeping, find ourselves angrily acting out towards others or spend a lot of time isolating ourselves. We can also experience feeling profoundly unsafe in situations where we are objectively not in danger or we may not realise that we are in danger when that is our reality. We may experience chronic pain, depression, nervous system dysregulation and feel separated (dissociated) from ourselves.
SE takes a more direct approach working with the body to ultimately support the release of the stuck survival energy in a manageable way. In an SE session we generally start by finding and exploring resources in your life or finding ways to create them in the here and now. Resources are people, places, things and activities that bring a sense of, for example, aliveness, presence and safety, or at least neutrality, to our present experience. This is done in different ways, depending upon personal history, the type of trauma and how easy it is to access them. Sometimes it can feel that we don’t have access to any resources at all, but we hold that although they may be difficult to find, you most likely would not have survived without them.
As we explore resources together and learn how to track and be with the felt sense of them in the body, we start to build oases of safety in the present moment that we return to as we start to process the shock trauma. From these resourced places we start to explore the traumatic material, with a focus at the felt sense level, moving from the edges of the traumatic event(s) towards their core. In this process we develop increasing capacity to meet this material and discharge the survival energy in a manageable way.
During the discharge process we may notice effects in our body such as fizzing and tingling, temperature changes, shaking and trembling as well as spontaneous defensive movements that we could not complete at the time. We give enough time and space to these sensations and movements, bringing in grounding and resourcing techniques if required to avoid re-traumatisation. This way of working seems to ‘rewrite’ our body memory of the event(s) and we can often be left with a feeling of having triumphed over them. Our whole body-mind starts to come back into balance and PTSD symptoms decrease and dissipate.
When working with shock trauma in this way it is important to remember that we are ultimately working with the adaptations to it, most often expressed as fight/flight and/or freeze which are natural and healthy adaptations if they are short term. Working directly with our adaptations means that we don’t have to revisit and process every single traumatic event we have ever had. SE generally uses dialogue to access our somatic awareness but can also, with permission, include some supportive and containing touch interventions if needed.
“When words are not enough and when words get in the way”
Neuro Affective Touch (NAT) brings psychotherapy, touch and somatic tools together and can be especially effective in working with difficult and traumatic preverbal experiences, for example, in utero and the first 18 months of life. During this early part of our lives, we ideally take in a felt sense that we exist, are lovable and that our needs are valid, mainly through the intent offered by our caregivers via our initial ‘language’ of touch and sensation, alongside the prosody of their voices. If we didn’t have this experience, or enough of it, we can really struggle to know who we are and what we want and need at a very deep level, which can make engaging with talking based therapies, or even some kinds of purely somatic approaches, difficult.
A Neuro Affective Touch session can support you in building, from the ground up, a felt sense of yourself and your wants and needs and to find the language and capacity to express these in your life. It can offer a reparative experience of early nurture alongside building the capacity and a container to feel safe to access and process early traumatic experiences of, for example, abuse and/or neglect. This work often begins by collaborating to create a safe space together, what we call a ‘nurture surround’. In this process, you get to choose the place, for example, on the floor or the sofa, a chair or the massage table or different places at different times. Sessions are performed fully clothed. We can bring in lots of props such as blankets, bolsters and warm or cold pillows and I can offer varying combinations of dialogue, touch and somatic awareness as the process unfolds.
Because of the inclusion of touch and somatic interventions alongside our dialogue, the process offers you the opportunity to build your sense of self and belonging in this world from the ground up, rather than trying to use just words alone to access it. Our early preverbal memories are experienced and stored differently from those memories we can access more cognitively, i.e. consciously remember and talk about, so in being able to meet you at the level of your ‘first language’ can make this material more readily available to access and work with. We are often finding words for your internal experience together as we go along. A big part of this is exploring on all levels, particularly the felt sense, what your ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ are in relation to different stimuli and to have the experience of this expression being respected and honoured. Because we manage trauma by splitting apart different aspects of our being, another aspect of working with Neuro Affective Touch is the opportunity to support your body, mind and heart to become more integrated and collaborative partners with each other through a process of top down (cognitive) and bottom up (somatic) enquiry alongside the touch support.