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 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.

By 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.

somatic mindfulness resulting in biological completion of affective states

various expressions of core needs and healthy aliveness. The life force is the energy that fuels healthy aggression, strength, self-expression, separation/individuation, fight-flight, passion, and sexuality.

Anger is a life-supportive response intended to impact an unsupportive environment.

integrating all emotions plays a significant role in supporting reconnection to the life force. When working with emotions, NARM therapists keep the following question in mind: what is the implicit intention of the emotion? Helping clients understand and integrate the core intention of their emotions leads to greater biological and emotional completion, which in turn leads to more connection to the life force. By supporting a process of containment and deepening of affects, greater emotional range and increasing self-regulation become possible.

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.

MINDFULNESS flow fluidity that comes with awareness of but not identifying with thoughts, affects and somatic states

The tendency for traumatized individuals is to disconnect from the body by becoming overly cognitive or by numbing bodily experience, or both.

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.

second aspect of mindfulness used in NARM involves bringing our adaptive survival styles and the organizing principle of each style into mindful awareness. Awareness of survival styles usually begins after a certain capacity for self-regulation has been established. As a person becomes more regulated and embodied and as internal distress states diminish, the capacity for self-awareness becomes stronger. Integrating somatic mindfulness with the mindful awareness of survival styles allows us to work with a person’s life story from a perspective that is deeper and broader than the narrative itself.

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.

both illusions

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 (Figure I.4).