NARM stands for the NeuroAffective Relational Model, developed by Dr. Laurence Heller. It's an approach built specifically for developmental trauma — the kind that comes from chronic unmet needs in childhood rather than a single overwhelming event. If childhood trauma is, at its core, a disconnection from yourself, NARM is the work of reconnection.
What drew me to it is what it doesn't do. It doesn't ask you to relive your worst memories in detail. It doesn't dig endlessly through the past looking for something to blame. It works in the present, with who you are now and how the old adaptations are still running.
NARM isn't about going back to the wound. It's about coming forward into yourself.
The core idea
Remember the central adaptation of childhood trauma: to stay connected to the people we needed, we disconnected from parts of ourselves. NARM takes that seriously as the thing to work with. Those survival strategies — pleasing, achieving, withdrawing, caretaking — were intelligent solutions. We don't rip them away. We get curious about them, thank them, and find out whether they still serve the life you're actually living.
As that happens, something quietly returns: your connection to yourself. Your access to your own feelings, needs, and — this is the big one — your agency.
Agency is the heart of it
So much of childhood trauma is about choices that were made for you, or feelings you weren't allowed to have. The disconnection took your sense of authorship with it. NARM is, more than anything, about reclaiming that — the felt sense that you get to choose your life and stand behind your choices.
Two questions I come back to, in session and in my own life, do a lot of this work:
- "What do you notice now?" — a way of gently checking how connected or disconnected you are in this exact moment. Not to fix anything. Just to notice.
- "Are there places or things that make you feel alive lately?" — a compass back toward yourself, toward the things that actually move you rather than the things you learned to perform.
We never judge the disconnection. It kept you safe. We just get curious about it — and curiosity, it turns out, is where reconnection begins.
What it feels like in practice
Slower than you'd expect. We track what's happening in your body and your attention in real time. We notice when you leave yourself — when you jump to managing me, or explaining, or going numb — and we name it without judgment. Over time, you build the capacity to stay with yourself a little longer, to feel a little more, to want things out loud.
It's not dramatic. It's a steady, relational re-learning of something that got organized away a long time ago: that you're allowed to be here, as yourself.
If you recognize yourself in this — fluent in everyone else, a bit of a stranger to your own wants — that's not a verdict. It's a starting point. Reconnection is absolutely possible, and it tends to happen at the pace of trust.