The model
What is NARM?
NARM — the NeuroAffective Relational Model — is an integrative therapy model developed by Dr. Laurence Heller, designed specifically for working with developmental trauma: what arises when our core needs for connection, safety and attunement could not be met while growing up.
"The coping strategies that initially helped us survive as children over the years become rigid beliefs about who we are and what the world is like."Laurence Heller
Developmental trauma is rarely about single dramatic events. More often it is about patterns — emotional distance, insufficient attunement, demands, neglect — that led us to push away parts of ourselves in order to fit in and survive. NARM works both top-down (with the mind) and bottom-up (with the body and nervous system), always anchored in the present moment and in relationship.
The approach
Four pillars
Clarifying intention
What do you want for yourself? Your intention is the red thread of every session, making the work a collaboration — not something done to you, but with you.
Exploratory questions
Open, curious questions that help you connect with what is going on inside — beyond the well-rehearsed stories.
Reinforcing agency
Gently discovering your own part in your patterns is not blame — it is the key to freedom. What I have a part in, I can also change.
Reflecting shifts
When something releases — a deeper breath, a wave of emotion, more aliveness in the body — we pay attention to it, so the nervous system can relearn.
Five themes
Survival styles — lenses, not labels
NARM describes five basic adaptive patterns, linked to five core needs. They are not diagnoses or personality types — most of us recognise ourselves in several — but lenses that help us see how we learned to survive.
Connection
The need to exist and belong in the world. The adaptation: withdrawing — from others, from the body, from feelings.
Attunement
The need to have needs and be met in them. The adaptation: tuning in to everyone else's needs and forgetting your own.
Trust
The need to depend on others without being betrayed. The adaptation: control, and never showing vulnerability.
Autonomy
The need to say no and set boundaries without losing love. The adaptation: pleasing others and keeping the protest inside.
Love & sexuality
The need to love with an open heart and be accepted as you are. The adaptation: performing and perfecting instead of opening up.