Healing Developmental Trauma Quotes

“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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Love that is conditional upon looks and performance is not love at all”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“It may come as a surprise that living life in a full and expanded way is one of the most difficult challenges we face as human beings.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“To make sense of the pain of their lives, they often become spiritual seekers trying to convince themselves that someone loves them; if people do not, then God must. These individuals are often extremely sensitive in both positive and negative ways. Having never embodied, they have access to energetic levels of information to which less traumatized people are not as sensitive; they can be quite psychic and energetically attuned to people, animals, and the environment and can feel confluent and invaded by other people’s emotions.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“The price of freedom is eternal mindfulness. This is a book about restoring connection. It is the experience of being in connection that fulfills the longing we have to feel fully alive. An impaired capacity for connection to self and others, and the ensuing diminished aliveness, are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems. Unfortunately, we are often unaware of the internal roadblocks that keep us from experiencing the connection and aliveness we yearn for. These roadblocks develop in reaction to developmental and shock trauma and the related nervous system dysregulation, disruptions in attachment, and distortions of identity. The goal of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is to work with these dysregulations, disruptions, and distortions while never losing sight of supporting the development of a healthy capacity for connection and aliveness. In this book we address conflicts around the capacity for connection and explore how deeper connection and aliveness can be supported in the process of healing developmental trauma.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL STYLE CORE DIFFICULTIES The Connection Survival Style Disconnected from physical and emotional self
Difficulty relating to others The Attunement Survival Style Difficulty knowing what we need
Feeling our needs do not deserve to be met The Trust Survival Style Feeling we cannot depend on anyone but ourselves
Feeling we have to always be in control The Autonomy Survival Style Feeling burdened and pressured
Difficulty setting limits and saying no directly The Love-Sexuality Survival Style Difficulty integrating heart and sexuality
Self-esteem based on looks and performance”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“For example, when children do not get the connection they need, they grow up both seeking and fearing connection. When children do not get their needs met, they do not learn to recognize what they need, are unable to express their needs, and often feel undeserving of having their needs met.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Attempts to stop smoking or give up any sort of self-destructive addictive 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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“These individuals need to see that as long as they continue to choose to please others at their own expense, they will be trapped. They need to discover how they try to control other people’s responses by being the “good boy” or “nice girl” for them. They need to find the courage to give up that control by being frank and honest with people and allowing them to respond as they will.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Individuals with this survival style will not allow themselves to be emotionally close to anyone because closeness stirs up feelings of dependency and triggers the fear of being controlled, as they were in early life. They will stay in a relationship as long as they feel that they are in control and can successfully dominate their partner. To this end they often choose Attunement types as partners: Attunement types are caretakers who are happy to serve while Trust types are more than happy to be served.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Deprivation and attachment difficulties signal the baby’s brain and nervous system to implement life-protecting strategies. Depending on the severity and the duration of the nurturing disruptions, there is a progressive loss of the ability to attune to and express one’s needs. Along with the loss of attunement comes increasing autonomic dysregulation:”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“grieving is an important element in the reconnection process. Grief is how human beings come to terms with irrevocable loss.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“The Polyvagal Theory is particularly useful to help us understand the Connection Survival Style. When there is early trauma, the older dorsal vagal defensive strategies of immobilization dominate, leading to freeze, collapse, and ultimately to dissociation. As a result, the ventral vagus fails to adequately develop and social development is impaired. Consequently, traumatized infants favor freeze and withdrawal over social engagement as a way of managing states of arousal. This pattern has lifelong implications. On the physiological level, since the vagus nerve innervates the larynx, pharynx, heart, lungs, and the enteric nervous system (gut), the impact of early trauma on these organ systems leads to a variety of physical symptoms. On the psychological and behavioral level, the capacity for social engagement is severely compromised, leading to self-isolation and withdrawal from contact with others, as well as to the many psychological symptoms”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“As the child grows older, obtaining love from the parents becomes linked to pleasing them, so that love is associated with duty, burden, and bondage. For many with this survival style, obtaining love becomes inextricably tied with the necessity to please, often at the expense of their own integrity and autonomy.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Projective identification takes place when individuals project their unwanted internal states and emotions on another, causing that person to resonate with those negative states as if they were their own. The person who receives the projection does not realize that he or she is internalizing split-off negative states that “belong” to another. Trust types use projective identification masterfully: they maintain their larger-than-life image by making others feel small, their need to be in control by making others feel out of control, their need to feel smart by making others feel dumb, and their need to feel powerful by making others feel powerless.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Trust individuals can work tirelessly to meet their goals of success and power, fearing that if they are not successful they will end up, as one client put it, “in the gutter.” Working to succeed compensates for the powerlessness and lack of control of their early life. The fear of ending up destitute and alone is a projection into the future of the helplessness they experienced as children. Underneath the image of power, they feel powerless, and since they cannot depend on others, they also feel totally alone.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Children parent their parents. When a parent is chronically depressive, anxious, or chaotic, the roles are reversed and the child ends up parenting the inadequate parent. Parentification also takes place when a child becomes the parent’s confidante or best friend: a Hollywood actress, who is a single mother, referring to her ten-year-old daughter in an interview said, “I share everything with my daughter … she is my best friend.” This kind of parentification of children is so common that its destructiveness is not recognized.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“As a result of the earliest trauma, individuals with the Connection Survival Style have disconnected from their bodies, from themselves, and from relationship. Connection types have two seemingly different coping styles or subtypes: the thinking and the spiritualizing subtypes.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Regardless of age, Connection types, at some level, often feel like frightened children in an adult world. Because of their inadequate sense of self, they often try to anchor themselves in their roles as scientist, judge, doctor, father, mother, etc.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“The Thinking Subtype As a result of early trauma thinking subtypes have retreated to the life of the mind and choose theoretical and technical professions that do not require significant human interaction. These individuals tend to be more comfortable behind a computer, in their laboratory, or in their garage workshops where they can putter undisturbed. They can be brilliant thinkers but tend to use their intelligence to maintain significant emotional distance.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“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. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world, together with the physiological patterns associated with these beliefs, crystallize into a familiar sense of who we are. This is what we come to view as our identity.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“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.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“In the case of the earliest Connection Survival Style, for example, focusing on changing distorted cognitions is particularly difficult because with early trauma, the cortex is not yet fully developed, and it is mostly the underlying bottom-up nervous system and affective imbalances that drive the cognitive distortions.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“They both believed that the therapist’s job was to break through a patient’s character armor—the psychological and somatic defenses—in order to release the painful emotions held in the body. Bioenergetics, for example, recognizes that deep emotion, conscious or unconscious, is held physically. It encourages clients to express their emotions through kicking, hitting, biting, and yelling, with the goal of discharging these powerful affects and in the hope that doing so will lead to greater emotional freedom and health. Reich’s and Lowen’s unique contribution was to recognize that defenses were held not only in the mind but also in the body’s nervous system, musculature, and organs. This significant breakthrough was ahead of its time and anticipated many current developments in the neurological and biological sciences.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“Anger is a life-supportive response intended to impact an unsupportive environment. For”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“To the degree that the internal capacity to attend to our own core needs develops, we experience self-regulation, internal organization, expansion, connection, and aliveness, all attributes of physiological and psychological well-being. Supporting the healthy development of the core capacities is central to the NARM approach.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

“To the degree that our biologically based core needs are met early in life, we develop core capacities that allow us to recognize and meet these needs as adults (Table I.1). Being attuned to these five basic needs and capacities means that we are connected to our deepest resources and vitality.”
― Laurence Heller, Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship