Working with Adaptations, Not Memories

The NeuroAffective Relational Model? (NARM?) emphasizes primarily working with a person's adaptations to developmental trauma and attachment injuries, and sees of secondary importance the actual trauma, itself. In this clip from the NARM Basics Training, NARM founder, Laurence Heller, PhD discusses how NARM approaches the therapeutic process differently than traditional trauma treatments.

In NARM, we move beyond focusing centrally on?what happened to you??and deeper into the question of?how did you adapt to what happened to you?. Focusing more on adaptations opens up far greater possibilities for working with complex trauma, as well as depathologizes how we view the symptoms that often accompany complex trauma.

This depathologizing of symptoms is central in NARM. It's the understanding that symptoms or problems are actually solutions a person once attempted to use to survive the trauma in their past. These same early life-saving adaptations, when we continue to use them into adulthood, become the source of the symptoms themselves. In NARM, we work with how these strategies impact a person's capacity for connection to self and others.

To learn more, watch the NARM Basics Training clip!