Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

by Laurence Heller

The price of freedom is eternal mindfulness.

It now appears that it is a misguided assumption to think that if we know what has gone wrong in a person’s life, we will also know how to help that person resolve their difficulties. For example, we now know that when we focus on dysfunction, we risk reinforcing that dysfunction: if we focus on deficiency and pain, we are likely to get better at feeling deficiency and pain. Similarly, when we focus primarily on an individual’s past, we build skills at reflecting on the past, sometimes making personal history seem more important than present experience.

Although it may seem that humans suffer from an endless number of emotional problems and challenges, most of these can be traced to early developmental and shock trauma that compromise the development of one or more of the five core capacities.

Attempts to stop smoking or give up any sort of self-destructive addictive substance or behavior, such as drugs, alcohol, hypersexuality, overeating, or overworking, often fail because it is very difficult to give up a means of self-regulation even when it is unhealthy until it can be replaced with a better form of self-regulation.

tracking the physical, sensate, and energetic experience of emotion in the body, NARM emphasizes somatic mindfulness—the containment, deepening, and support for the biological completion of affective states. Tracking and containing emotions in this way puts us progressively more in touch with our core aliveness.

Mindfulness, in the most general of terms, means paying attention to our experience: listening to ourselves, to our thoughts, to our emotions, and to our bodily sensations. Ultimately, we learn to listen in such a way that we don’t push elements of our experience away but come to see that thoughts, emotions, and sensations come and go. The appeal of mindfulness is the freedom that we experience and the sense of flow and fluidity that comes when we are present to but not identified with our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

This is why the NARM approach has added somatic mindfulness to the practice of traditional mindfulness. The purpose of somatic mindfulness is to progressively support nervous system re-regulation by adapting techniques from Somatic Experiencing® such as grounding, orienting, titration, pendulation, and discharge that are designed to address the high arousal, collapse, and shock states that traumatized individuals experience. In NARM the practice of somatic mindfulness integrates the established ancient understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century knowledge of nervous system regulation.

Each adaptive survival style has underlying shame-based identifications that develop to make sense of early environmental failure. In addition, in reaction to underlying shame, most people also develop pride-based counter-identifications, an ego ideal that reflects how they would like to see themselves or want others to see them.

Survival styles begin as adaptive, life-saving strategies that help us in early life to manage and survive painful traumatic experiences. Paradoxically, as we become adults, these same survival strategies become the cause of ongoing nervous system dysregulation, dissociation, and self-esteem difficulties. The once-adaptive survival styles, when continued beyond their usefulness, create a distress cycle

It is our experience that, for many clients, catharsis is not helpful and can even impair the capacity to self-regulate. The more traumatized and disorganized a person’s nervous system, the more likely catharsis can be re-traumatizing.

Traumatized individuals, which includes most of us to differing degrees, need both top-down and bottom-up approaches that address nervous system imbalances as well as issues of identity.

Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.

Clients will inevitably be disappointed because the therapist cannot live up to all of their expectations, and it is important to let them know that they have a right to express their needs even if these needs cannot be met.

Human contact and warmth bring expansion and aliveness to the body. Making contact and allowing expansion to take place at its own rate begins to melt the frozenness. As shock energy is released, the frozenness progressively melts and more aliveness is possible.

Children become triangulated with warring parents. Within the family system the children are used as pawns in the struggle between the mother and father, and in divorce the children are often forced to take sides. By having to choose between one parent or the other, they are forced into a situation where they are asked to betray one part of their heart or the other.

With early trauma, there is often no explicit narrative. There is only a felt-sense experience of devastation, shame, and badness, often with no clear story. It is therefore important, with the help of the attuned presence of the therapist, to allow sufficient time for the sensations to surface and to give them sufficient time to organize into a coherent narrative.

Take some time to write down all the external resources you have had in your life. Notice what you feel emotionally and physically as you remember the people, places, activities, pets, or organizations that have supported and helped you.

As with all the adaptive survival styles, the Connection Survival Style has underlying shame-based identifications that develop in order to make sense of the distress of early environmental failure. Later in life, in reaction to the underlying distress and shame, these clients develop pride-based counter-identifications.

Agency is seeing what we do to ourselves as adults, how we have internalized and continue to re-create the environmental failures we have experienced.

Unless we can see how we turn against and abandon ourselves by rejecting our core needs and emotions, we have a tendency to feel like victims.

In summary, to reestablish agency, a NARM therapist explores with clients how they are contributing to their own suffering—how they may be consciously or unconsciously instrumental in creating their own distress as adults.

What was the it that opened in both of us at the same time, I wondered. The it that cannot be forced, that cannot be made to open except in its own time, that knows when the right sequence of subtle movements has unfolded, when the progression has reached its culmination, and suddenly, as a key turns in a lock, opens a door, dissolves a wall, sends an impulse moving through what had been rigid and immovable.

In general, it is useful when working with chronic anxiety to look for split-off anger. On the journey toward reconnection with core expression and the life force, anxiety and anger are ultimately transformed into healthy self-expression, strength, and the capacity for separation/individuation.