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

There has to be a sixth star for this book! This book presents the context of developmental trauma and its ways of healing in an easily understandable way and with a language that a non-professionell can understand perfectly. This is a book written for really everyone. The clear structure, the graphics and scales add to an understanding on a very deep level. The authors present their profound knowledge and experience and connect all of that to a new method that is more than fitting for our age, because old boundaries and frameworks, that have never been appropriate in the understanding of the complexity of human being over all, fall away. Here a person is supported in becoming whole in a appreciative and loving way. I love this book, and I think, one can feel by reading it with how much love this work and method for healing developmental trauma is originated and presented. A must read!

Pure gold Stupendously readable, a book hard to put down - successfully merges the worlds of psychotherapy, neuroscience, NLP (my insight) and somatic awareness into a truly innovative 21st century healing science which describes early developmental trauma to a great extent; a subject closely affiliated to Complex-PTSD: “a psychological disorder through prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context of little or no chance of escape (entrapment) resulting in a pervasive disorganised-type attachment insecurity and distortion of one’s core identity.” C-PTSD is currently not included in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and for a number of years experts in the field of childhood trauma have suggested it may not be a useful category for diagnosis and treatment of children. Instead it is proposed Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD: van der Kolk) becomes a diagnosis for “early life developmentally adverse interpersonal trauma as a result of a significant disruption or betrayal in the relationships with primary caregivers.” The ‘R’ in the NARM method stands for ‘relational’ which points to the fact “that the most important information for the development of the brain is conveyed by the social rather than physical environment.” The dominant symptoms of traumatised children can therefore be best understood, as efforts to minimise objective threat and regulate emotional distress; and “reenactments of oppositional, rebellious, unmotivated or antisocial behaviours in adulthood” can thus be viewed through the prism of ‘trauma-related triggers’ rooted in past behaviours once meant to ensure survival and minimise attachment loss, i.e. fear of abandonment. This is charted in NARM through the concept of the ‘distress cycle’: the caregiver misattunes - child protests - child senses self as bad - misattunement continues - disconnection continues - loss of capacity to self-regulate - pride based counter-identifications develop - leading to morbid nervous system dysregulation of high arousal. NARM ultimately has been designed to help those diagnosed with developmental trauma acquire the skills of coping by mastering new connections between their experiences, emotions and physical sensations to reprogram the damage done in early childhood when a distortion of ‘proception’ - the development of experience in order to anticipate social responses - created a confused internal schemata of the affective and cognitive characteristics of primary relationships. The main tools in NARM’s locker appear to be derived from Gestalt therapy’s in-the-moment framework and the principle “that the mind forms a global whole with self-organising tendencies.” A set of five powerful neuro-affective techniques are offered consisting of containment, grounding, orienting, titration and pendulation. These can be easily recognised as having parallels in other therapeutic approaches that repair the capacity for a healthy differentiation of self and connection to others. However, it is the sub-cellular (quantum array network) bottom-up processing interventions based on the work of Levine (Somatic Experiencing) which is the game changer and creates the conditions for discharging shock states through increasing contact with the body; and successfully integrates the neuroaxonal top-down processing of enquiry into issues of shame-based identification and the uncovering of core needs and capacities. The only other book I have yet read on the same topic is Steven Kessler’s 5 Personality Patterns (see review) which also delves into the bioenergetics of Lowen (1975) - ‘The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal Problems of the Mind’. I found Heller’s approach more easily comprehensible in half the word count partly due to its overtly expressed clinical underpinnings in a technical format I happen to prefer, and in its supporting diagrams. In fact it is my truest contention the Neuro Affective Relational Touch Model could be marketed for the best seller list, possibly something akin to the once phenomenal popularity of The Roadless Traveled (1978) - such is the potential of this book “to anyone on a path of self-discovery seeking new tools for self-awareness, growth, and healing.” Finally, it must be the saddest truth of all that unless we have been vastly fortunate not to have suffered some kind of early trauma - “when in a world the vast majority of those responsible for child maltreatment are the children’s own parents” - then the tendency for many of us to grow up and repeat the sins of our perpetrators is a hidden statistic that is waiting to be acted upon, and would account for so much social disruption in literally ‘all’ walks of life.

The best book about developmental trauma and the forming of early attachment patterns I have ever read. A must read for anyone working with clients in a therapeutic space.

One excellently delineated way of analysing, structuring, understanding, and effectively treating the phenomenon of developmental trauma. NARM's strength is based in the way it connects therapeutic actions to the plastic recursive dynamics binding neurophysiological paradigms to human relationship needs. This book provides a clear, nuanced way of communicating with each other about these dynamics and about how to heal them when they're damaged..

Dieses Buch schreibt perfekt über die 5 frühkindlichen Entwicklungsstörungen, die ich bei Barbara Brennan und Patricia Whitebuffalo kennengelernt habe. Und deren Heilung ich beim Begleiten meiner Klienten helfe, zu ermöglichen. Heller verwendet jedoch nicht die ursprünglichen Namen dieser Störungen (nach Wilhelm Reich), sondern drückt seine Typologie positiv aus, nämlich, Connection, Attunement (Einstimmung), Trust(Vertrauen) , Autonomie und Liebe-Sexualität. Diese Umorientierung auf die auch positiven Möglichkeiten der Heilungsentwicklung finde ich großartig und sehr hilfreich. Auch die Beschreibung der einzelnen Charaktere, der Inhalt. ist großartig zu verstehen, sehr verständlich und umfangreich.