"Healing Developmental Trauma" by L. Heller and A. LaPierre

Bluefyre, as you used the word "dissociation", it reminds me of Dabrowski's positive disintegration. I have the book but haven't read it yet (and don't know if I'll have time to read it), so I wonder if it has something to do with all this stuff, if his book can help in this work of healing developmental trauma. (sorry for another silly question)
 
nature said:
Bluefyre, as you used the word "dissociation", it reminds me of Dabrowski's positive disintegration. I have the book but haven't read it yet (and don't know if I'll have time to read it), so I wonder if it has something to do with all this stuff, if his book can help in this work of healing developmental trauma. (sorry for another silly question)

No, I don't think that Dabrowski is really relevant here except peripherally.

It IS very important to read "Healing Developmental Trauma" because it can give you an idea of your own possible traumas as well as how we, as parents, may cause trauma to our own children even accidentally or with the best intentions.
 
Laura said:
It IS very important to read "Healing Developmental Trauma" because it can give you an idea of your own possible traumas as well as how we, as parents, may cause trauma to our own children even accidentally or with the best intentions.
Noted, because while reading another book about fear, it came to my mind some sort of realization- when I was around 15, my mother take me to see the movie Gaby, a True Story, _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaby:_A_True_Story, surely it was with her best intention, but I ended up with wrong ideas ...
 
Laura said:
nature said:
Bluefyre, as you used the word "dissociation", it reminds me of Dabrowski's positive disintegration. I have the book but haven't read it yet (and don't know if I'll have time to read it), so I wonder if it has something to do with all this stuff, if his book can help in this work of healing developmental trauma. (sorry for another silly question)

No, I don't think that Dabrowski is really relevant here except peripherally.

It IS very important to read "Healing Developmental Trauma" because it can give you an idea of your own possible traumas as well as how we, as parents, may cause trauma to our own children even accidentally or with the best intentions.

We were discussing this book and its concepts at our Skype meet up last night. I think this is really valuable information for parents of young infants and mothers to be. Regardless of not meeting the infants needs, the act of birthing itself is traumatic, and may no doubt cause some shock trauma to the newborn. Jeez, imagine then following that with jabbing the little one with vaccines almost immediately! What an ultimate betrayal of trust that would seem.

Years ago, I came across a book by Jean Liedloff called The Continuum Concept. While not intentionally seeking to write a book on parenting, it has become to be seen that way. Jean was a journalist who spent much time living with an isolated tribe in the Amazon, and the book is a result of her observations on their child rearing practices.

Here are some of her observations:

According to Jean Liedloff, the continuum concept is the idea that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings — especially babies — require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution. For an infant, these include such experiences as...

*constant physical contact with his mother (or another familiar caregiver as needed) from birth;
*sleeping in his parents' bed, in constant physical contact, until he leaves of his own volition;
*breastfeeding "on cue" — nursing in response to his own body's signals;
*being constantly carried in arms or otherwise in contact with someone, usually his mother, and allowed to observe (or nurse, or sleep) while the person carrying him goes about his or her business — until the infant begins creeping, then crawling on his own impulse, usually at six to eight months;
*having caregivers immediately respond to his signals (squirming, crying, etc.), without judgment, displeasure, or invalidation of his needs, yet showing no undue concern nor making him the constant center of attention;
*sensing (and fulfilling) his elders' expectations that he is innately social and cooperative and has strong self-preservation instincts, and that he is welcome and worthy.

In contrast, a baby subjected to modern Western childbirth and child-care practices often experiences...
*traumatic separation from his mother at birth due to medical intervention and placement in maternity wards, in physical isolation except for the sound of other crying newborns, with the majority of male babies further traumatized by medically unnecessary circumcision surgery;
*at home, sleeping alone and isolated, often after "crying himself to sleep";
*scheduled feeding, with his natural nursing impulses often ignored or "pacified";
*being excluded and separated from normal adult activities, relegated for hours on end to a nursery, crib or playpen where he is inadequately stimulated by toys and other inanimate objects;
*caregivers often ignoring, discouraging, belittling or even punishing him when he cries or otherwise signals his needs; or else responding with excessive concern and anxiety, making him the center of attention;
sensing (and conforming to) his caregivers' expectations that he is incapable of self-preservation, is innately antisocial, and cannot learn correct behavior without strict controls, threats and a variety of manipulative "parenting techniques" that undermine his exquisitely evolved learning process.

Evolution has not prepared the human infant for this kind of experience. He cannot comprehend why his desperate cries for the fulfillment of his innate expectations go unanswered, and he develops a sense of wrongness and shame about himself and his desires. If, however, his continuum expectations are fulfilled — precisely at first, with more variation possible as he matures — he will exhibit a natural state of self-assuredness, well-being and joy. Infants whose continuum needs are fulfilled during the early, in-arms phase grow up to have greater self-esteem and become more independent than those whose cries go unanswered for fear of "spoiling" them or making them too dependent.
_http://www.continuum-concept.org/cc_defined.html

I'm not saying Liedloff had the whole banana, it is an interesting read nonetheless. Looking at some of the survival strategies from Healing Developmental Trauma, it makes sense that if an infant's needs aren't met, they retreat into the shame&guilt/perfectionism cycle, and these programs are so deep! As stated above in bold, if the needs aren't met in infancy, it sets up a deep sense of shame and unworthiness, which is then masked by the pursuit of perfection. Interestingly, much of Louise Hay's stuff focuses on working with feelings of being unloved, unworthy and undeserving.
 
Grâce à Thinkingfinger je découvre cette page très intéressante, j'ai herché sur Amazone France et ai trouvé ce lien :
https://www.amazon.fr/Maladies-civilisation-Richard-Dabrowski/dp/2268000265/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517042972&sr=1-5&keywords=Dabrowski
Que pensez vous de ce livre ?... Merci pour vos informations...

Thanks to Thinkingfinger I found this page very interesting, I searched on Amazone France and found this link:
https://www.amazon.fr/Maladies-civilisation-Richard-Dabrowski/dp/2268000265/ref=sr_1_5? s=books&&&qid=1517042972&sr=1-5&keywords=Dabrowski
What do you think of this book? Thank you for your information...
 
Pour Jean Liedloff, j'ai trouvé toujours sur Amazon France :
https://www.amazon.fr/concept-continuum-recherche-bonheur-perdu/dp/2940500460/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517044836&sr=1-1&keywords=Jean+Liedloff

For Jean Liedloff, I always found on Amazon France:
https://www.amazon.fr/concept-continuum-recherche-bonheur-perdu/dp/2940500460/ref=sr_1_1_1_1? s=books&&qid=1517044836&sr=1-1&keywords=Jean+Liedloff
 
J'ai aussi trouvé, encore sur Amazon France pour le livre de L. Heller et A. LaPierre :
Guérir les traumatismes du développement - Restaurer l'image de soi et la relation à l'autre
https://www.amazon.fr/Gu%C3%A9rir-traumatismes-d%C3%A9veloppement-Restaurer-relation/dp/2729614982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517045126&sr=1-1&keywords=L.+Heller+et+A.+LaPierre

I also found, again on Amazon France for the book by L. Heller and A. LaPierre:
Healing Developmental Trauma - Restoring Self-Reference and Relationship to Others
https://www.amazon.fr/Gu%C3%A9rir-traumatisms-d%C3%A9development-Restore-relationship/dp/2729614982/ref=sr_1_1_1? s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517045126&sr=1-1&keywords=L. +Heller+and+A. +LaPierre
 
PERLOU said:
J'ai aussi trouvé, encore sur Amazon France pour le livre de L. Heller et A. LaPierre :
Guérir les traumatismes du développement - Restaurer l'image de soi et la relation à l'autre
https://www.amazon.fr/Gu%C3%A9rir-traumatismes-d%C3%A9veloppement-Restaurer-relation/dp/2729614982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517045126&sr=1-1&keywords=L.+Heller+et+A.+LaPierre

I also found, again on Amazon France for the book by L. Heller and A. LaPierre:
Healing Developmental Trauma - Restoring Self-Reference and Relationship to Others
https://www.amazon.fr/Gu%C3%A9rir-traumatisms-d%C3%A9development-Restore-relationship/dp/2729614982/ref=sr_1_1_1? s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517045126&sr=1-1&keywords=L. +Heller+and+A. +LaPierre

Perlou, read this one. I don't think you need to read Dabrowski right now.
 
After reading this, about infants needs, I am really glad we didn't raise our child (now toddler) my way. I was really thinking there has/had to be though love (really afraid to spoil the child), but not too much because you have to show your love and support most of the time. My wife just wouldn't hear about my child raising suggestions and went with her instincts and gave him lots of physical contact and responsiveness, breastfeeding on cue, sleeping together, and so on. I didn't force my opinion so strongly, as I often do, because of all the SOTT articles on mother-infant studies with whome I wasn't totally convinced. So far, at least.

I have just ordered the book and looking forward to it.
 
Finally finished the book. It's indeed a revelation! I immediately recognized that I adopted Connection survivial style many years ago without realizing it. Here are some quotes grouped by chapters/subchapters.

Introduction


Many systems of psychotherapy are based on the medical model of disease, and as a result they focus on psychopathology; commonly, psychotherapy investigates a person’s past and seeks to identify the dysfunctional cognitive and emotional patterns that underlie psychological problems. However, as new information emerges on how the brain and nervous system function, traditional psychological methods have come into question and the need for new clinical approaches has become increasingly clear. 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.

Healing Developmental Trauma introduces the NeuroAffective Relational Model, a somatically based psychotherapy that focuses on supporting an individual’s capacity for increasing connection and aliveness. It is a model for human growth, therapy, and healing that, while not ignoring a person’s past, more strongly emphasizes a person’s strengths, capacities, resources, and resiliency. NARM explores personal history to the degree that coping patterns learned early in life interfere with our capacity to feel connected and alive in the present moment. NARM helps build and expand upon our current capacity for connection to our body and emotions as well as to our capacity for interpersonal connection— capacities that are, as we will see, intimately related.

Five Biologically Based Core Needs

NARM recognizes five biologically based core needs that are essential to our physical and emotional well-being: the need for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality. When a biologically based core need is not met, predictable psychological and physiological symptoms result: self-regulation, sense of self, and self-esteem become compromised. 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. Being attuned to these five basic needs and capacities means that we are connected to our deepest resources and vitality. 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. 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.

Five Adaptive Survival Styles

Five adaptive survival styles are set in motion depending on how well the five biologically based core needs are met— or not met— in early life. These adaptive strategies, or survival styles, are ways of coping with the disconnection, dysregulation, disorganization, and isolation that a child experiences when core needs are not met.

As adults, the more the five adaptive survival styles dominate our lives, the more disconnected we are from our bodies, the more distorted our sense of identity becomes, and the less we are able to regulate ourselves. Though we may feel constrained by a survival style and the physiological patterns that are part of it, we are often afraid to move beyond it. When we identify with a survival style, we stay within the confines of learned and subsequently self-imposed limitations, foreclosing our capacity for connection and aliveness.

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

DEVELOPMENT OF CORE CAPACITIES
Core Needs → Attuned Caregivers → Core Capacities for Connection, Aliveness, and Creativity

FORMATION OF ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL STYLES
Core Needs → Caregiver Failures → Disconnection → Compromised Core Capacity → Adaptive Survival Style

Self and Affect Regulation

Shock and developmental trauma compromise our ability to regulate our emotions and disrupt autonomic functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sleep.

Bringing Self-Regulation into Clinical Practice

Analyzing problems and focusing primarily on what has gone wrong in a person’s life does not necessarily support self-regulation, and in some cases, increases dysregulation.

Distortions of the Life Force (see image "Distortions of the Life Force")

Core Energy/ Life Force: The first level of the chart represents undifferentiated core energy or life force.

Healthy Differentiation of the Life Force: The second level maps the 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. When the core expressions of the life force are not supported, when they are inadequately responded to or blocked from expression, sympathetic activation in the nervous system increases.

Sympathetically Dominant Symptoms: When core needs are not met, movement toward the sympathetically driven distortions of the life force begin. The response is initially one of protest that, when not responded to, develops into anger. Anger is a life-supportive response intended to impact an unsupportive environment...

Symptoms of undischarged sympathetic activation develop, leaving children, and later adults in states of high arousal, anxiety, and irritability, prone to temper outbursts, fearfulness, and even panic attacks.

Parasympathetically Dominant Symptoms: When aggression, anger, and other forms of protest are ineffective, not possible, or dangerous, children adapt. At a certain point, if the lack of attunement persists, the chronic sympathetic arousal overloads the nervous system; children adapt through resignation, shutting down the angry protest as well as the need itself, and move into the parasympathetically dominant freeze response. This shut-down does not resolve the basic problem but effectively numbs children to their needs and emotions.

Working Therapeutically with Distortions of the Life Force

As rage, anger, and then healthy aggression are progressively integrated, anxiety, depression, and other symptoms recede. As the developmentally unmet core needs are recognized, connection to the life force is progressively strengthened. The work of integrating all emotions plays a significant role in supporting reconnection to the life force.

Trauma, because of the associated nervous system hyperarousal and the resulting systemic dysregulation, keeps us from being present in our bodies. The tendency for traumatized individuals is to disconnect from the body by becoming overly cognitive or by numbing bodily experience, or both. When there is high arousal and dysregulation, it is painful to be in our bodies.

Shame-Based Identifications and Pride-Based Counter-Identifications (see attached image)

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. The pride-based counter-identifications, traditionally thought of as defenses, are an attempt to turn shame into virtue, but paradoxically, the more energy a person invests in the pride-based counter-identifications, the stronger the shame-based identifications become.

NARM holds that both the shame-based identifications and the pride-based counter-identifications, while often feeling quite real, are illusions. The pride-based counter-identifications, sometimes dismissed as defensiveness, resistance, and denial, function to protect against the painful shame-based identifications that result from developmental trauma and represent their own kind of illusion. There is a danger in challenging only the protective pride-based counter-identifications, the so-called defenses, without simultaneously working through the shame-based deeper identifications, which otherwise might be reinforced.

The Distress Cycle (see attached image)

To understand how a distress cycle is set in motion, it is important first to comprehend how information flows both top-down and bottom-up in the nervous system. The term top-down refers to how cognitive structures of the brain impact the emotional and instinctive systems of the body. The term bottom-up refers to how regulation in the nervous system impacts cognitions. Top-down, our thoughts, judgments, and identifications affect how we feel and impact the nervous system’s capacity for regulation. Bottom-up, regulation/ dysregulation in our nervous system affects our emotions and thoughts.

Bottom-up mechanisms are involuntary, most often unconscious, and related to the physical effects of environmental stimuli upon the body. In contrast, top-down mechanisms can be voluntary, conscious [this is similar to Samenow's approach to correct thinking errors only and to ignore bottom-up/somatic factors], and pertain to how memory, motivational relevance, emotion, attention, and imagery shape perception. Top-down therapeutic approaches focus on the cortical functions of cognition. Bottom-up therapeutic approaches focus on the body, the felt-sense, and the instinctive responses as they are mediated through the brain stem and move upward to impact the limbic and cortical areas of the brain. Continuous loops of information travel from the body to the brain and from the brain to the body. Similar loops of information move among cognitive, emotional, and instinctive structures within the brain. (see attached image "Top-Down and Bottom-Up Information Flow")

Bottom-up, trauma creates nervous system dysregulation. When people experience trauma, they feel bad; children, in particular think they are bad when they feel bad. Chronic bottom-up dysregulation and distress lead to negative identifications, beliefs, and judgments about ourselves. These negative identifications, beliefs, and judgments in turn trigger more nervous system dysregulation, and a distress cycle is created.

The NARM Healing Cycle (see attached image)

Most therapeutic and personal growth traditions tend to focus on either top-down or bottom-up aspects of the circular flow of information, working either from the body to the brain or from the brain to the body; as a result, they do not address the self-perpetuating aspects of the information loop and, by not doing so, often miss the pernicious links that keep the distress cycle in operation. NARM integrates both top-down and bottom-up orientations, explicitly working with the information flow in both directions. This disrupts the self-perpetuating closed loops of distress and supports the shift to a healing cycle.

NARM views the mindful bottom-up experience of the body as the foundation of the healing process. The body is our connection to reality, the platform from which NARM works. By paying attention to the body, we are more easily able to recognize the truths and fictions of our personal narrative. As shock states held in the nervous system are discharged, we come into more contact with our body. A positive cycle is established in which the more self-regulated we become, the more we are in touch with our body, and the more in touch with our body we are, the greater our capacity for self-regulation. At the same time that NARM is grounded, bottom-up, in somatic mindfulness, it uses the mindful awareness of survival styles to bring a process of top-down inquiry to our sense of self which includes our fixed beliefs (identifications and counter-identifications), our self-hatred, self-rejection, and judgments. NARM also uses inquiry to help dissolve the fixed, narrow ideas about others and the world that limit our life. Since many of our identifications develop in the first five years of life, distortions in identity keep us seeing ourselves and the world from a child’s perspective.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapies

The focus is less on why people are the way they are and more on how their survival style distorts their experience and their life in the present. Avoiding the trap of making the past more important than the present, NARM uses a dual awareness that is anchored in the present moment while exploring cognitive, emotional, and physiological patterns that began in the past.

Somatic Psychotherapies

From a NARM perspective, intensely cathartic affective interventions can have the unintended effect of causing increased fragmentation and re-traumatization. Focusing on the pain, emptiness, or rage caused by early loss, neglect, or trauma does not in itself lead to healing. The orientation in the NARM approach is to use mindful awareness to help the client tolerate strong emotion, neither acting it out against the environment nor directing it against the self. Rather than being discharged through catharsis, powerful emotional and energetic states are contained so that they can be integrated and transformed into an increased capacity for connection. Mindfully staying present to and containing intense affect increases nervous system resiliency and supports the development of emotional depth.

Cognitive Therapy

NARM presents a broader clinical application of mindfulness than is found in cognitive therapy by separating the story related to the distress states from the physiological distress itself. As the nervous system becomes more regulated, many cognitive distortions drop away. Elements of cognitive therapy are useful in working with the top-down aspects of the distress cycle, but particularly when working with someone who has experienced early trauma, it is essential to work with the distress cycle both top-down and bottom-up.

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.

A Unified Systemic Model

The NARM approach to growth and therapy is an antidote to deterministic approaches and maintains that the past does not determine the present. It is the persistence of adaptive survival styles along with the related nervous system disorganization and distortions of identity that negatively affect our present experience. Understanding adaptive survival styles provides practical tools and techniques to address these distortions of identity and nervous system dysregulation. Being present and regulated in our bodies helps us become aware of and disidentify from the many inaccurate ideas and judgments that we have about ourselves, other people, and the world.

The Five Adaptive Survival Styles
Overview

Identity and Identifications

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.

What we take to be our identity is better described as the shame- and pride-based identifications of our survival styles. As children, we learn to live within the limitations imposed by our environment. However, as adults these initially adaptive limitations become self-imposed prisons. What in children was adaptive in adults becomes maladaptive. It is the persistence of survival styles appropriate to the past, continuing beyond when they are needed, that distorts present experience and creates symptoms. Survival styles, after having outlived their usefulness, function to maintain ongoing disconnection.

Every identification we hold about ourselves disconnects us from the fluidity of our core nature. Our identifications— that is, all the fixed beliefs we take to be our true self— along with the associated patterns of nervous systems dysregulation separate us from ourselves and the experience of being present and engaged. As much as we may feel constrained by our survival styles, we are afraid to, or do not know how to, move beyond them.

Looking at human development through the lens of developmental and relational trauma gives us an understanding of the five basic patterns of physiological dysregulation and their accompanying identity distortions. It is helpful to recognize these five basic physiological and identity patterns in order to make sense of what otherwise can seem to be a confusing broad spectrum of symptoms:

• Connection: A survival style develops around the need for contact and the fear of it.
• Attunement: A survival style develops around the conflict between having personal needs and the rejection of them. • Trust: A survival style develops around both the longing for and the fear of healthy trust and interdependence.
• Autonomy: A survival style develops around both the desire for and the fear of setting limits and expressing independence.
• Love-Sexuality: A survival style develops around wanting to love and be loved and the fear of vulnerability. It also develops around the splitting of love and sexuality.

Connection

The Connection Survival Style is developmentally the first of the five adaptive survival styles. This style develops as a result of early shock and attachment trauma. When early life experience has been traumatic, the trauma lives on in the form of ongoing systemic high-arousal states. Unresolved high arousal becomes the source of a relentless, nameless dread, a continuous sense of impending doom that never resolves. Adults who develop the Connection Survival Style experience the lifelong difficulty of managing the physiological dysregulation of these high levels of arousal as well as the resulting psychological distortions of identity. They function by using dissociation to disconnect from the distress in their body. As a result, the child and later the adult are left with systemic dysregulation and a narrowed range of resiliency that leaves them vulnerable to later traumas.

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.

The Spiritualizing Subtype

These subtypes are prone to spiritualizing their experience. As a result of either early shock or relational trauma, they did not feel welcomed into the world and grew up believing that the world is a cold, loveless place. Because other humans are often experienced as threats, many individuals with this subtype search for spiritual connection, are more comfortable in nature and with animals, and feel more connected to God than to other human beings.

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. They are also unable to filter environmental stimuli— they are sensitive to light, sound, pollution, electromagnetic waves, touch, etc.; therefore they often struggle with environmental sensitivities.

Growth strategies for the connection survival style

This survival style’s deepest longing for connection is also its deepest fear. The therapeutic key is to explore this profound internal conflict as it expresses in the moment-by-moment process of therapy and how it plays out in these clients’ symptoms and lives. There is a functional unity between the difficulty of feeling body and emotions and the impaired capacity to make interpersonal connection. Clients with a Connection Survival Style know that at a deep level their survival strategy is not really serving them, but it is frightening to live without it.

Individuals with the Connection Survival Style began life experiencing rejection and isolation; in turn they have become self-isolating, rejecting of self and of others. It is an important development in their growth process when they become aware of the disparity between what they tell themselves— that they are lonely and want contact— and their emotional reality— that they avoid contact because contact feels threatening.

Attunement

Individuals with the Attunement Survival Style have difficulty attuning to their own needs; knowing, allowing, and expressing their needs is associated with humiliation, loss, and fear of rejection.

Because of the lack of environmental attunement, individuals with this survival style do not learn to attune to their own needs, emotions, and body and become so adapted to scarcity that later in life, they are unable to recognize and express their own needs or allow fulfillment. For people with this survival style, there is a conflict between, on one hand, the expression of the need for physical or emotional nourishment, and the expectation of disappointment on the other. Depending on the timing and severity of the attachment and nurturing difficulties, two different subtypes develop with two different strategies for managing the experience of deprivation: the inhibited subtype and the unsatisfied subtype. Both subtypes live with a feeling of emptiness and deprivation, but they have different strategies for coping with that experience.

The Inhibited Subtype

When attachment and nurturing losses are early and/ or more severe, the tendency is to foreclose the awareness of one’s needs. The shame-based identification of these individuals is that needs are bad and wrong and that they are not entitled to have their needs fulfilled. These individuals often develop a counter-identification that is based on being proud of how little they need and how much they can do without. The extreme example of this strategy is anorexia.


The Unsatisfied Subtype

When the attachment and nurturing disruption is later or less severe, the unsatisfied type develops a tendency to be left with a chronic sense of feeling unfulfilled. In contrast to the inhibited type who will not express needs, the unsatisfied type can be very demanding of people in their lives while living with the continual feeling that there is never enough.

Becoming caretakers is the coping mechanism both subtypes have in common. Caretaking is a pride-based strategy that allows them to see themselves as being without needs: “I don’t have needs; everyone needs me.”

Trust

Individuals with the Trust Survival Style seek power and control. They tend to be competitive and believe that “getting to the top” will satisfy their needs. They can be empire builders in both a positive and a negative sense. On the healthier end of the spectrum, Trust types can be visionaries and dynamic leaders; on the more pathological end of the spectrum they can be manipulative and ruthless in achieving their ends. Learning to trust is the missing or compromised core resource for this adaptive survival style.

The Trust Survival Style begins when children receive ego gratification for fulfilling their parents’ ambitions. The parents of the Trust type may be giving, but they are controlling and undermining at the same time. They do for the child, acting “as if” they are supportive. They act as if they care, but in reality they use the child for their own gratification. One example is the “stage mom” who, out of her own frustrated desire to be famous, drives her daughter to fulfill her failed ambitions. Another is the “football father” who pushes his son to fulfill his dreams of athletic glory. Children will protect the attachment relationship with their parents by adopting the false self that their parents require. Having to choose between their own authenticity and the parents’ demands puts these children in an impossible bind. In the process, children of such parents fail to develop an authentic self.

Each child is forced into a role that fulfills the parents’ needs, whether confidante, sports star, or perfect showpiece. Parents simultaneously “build up” their children’s egos while undermining their authentic needs. Children are rewarded for assuming the role desired by the parents.

There are two basic strategies that individuals with the Trust Survival Style use in their struggle to exercise their power: they become seductive and manipulative, or they become overpowering.

The Seductive Subtype

Individuals with the Trust seductive subtype use an “as if” strategy. They act as if they care, as if they are present to others, as if they love. They are experts at reading what people need. The “as if” quality is reflected in their chameleon-like ability to be all things to all people. Many people are taken in and believe the “as if” presentation of individuals with this survival subtype, but at some point realize they are being used and betrayed by them. Seductive subtypes know what people want to hear and say it convincingly. They have an uncanny knack for knowing people’s vulnerabilities and can make them feel as if they are the center of the universe.

The Overpowering Subtype

The overpowering subtype develops as a result of the extreme helplessness these individuals have experienced in situations of abuse and horror. As children, their smallness, vulnerability, and dependency were used against them, and their vulnerability became intolerable. At some point, as they grow older, they make the decision to “turn the tables.” They react to their parents’ abuse by saying, “Never again! From now on, I’m the one in control.” They take control and become the abusers.

Individuals with the Trust Survival Style are very concerned with their image. They tell themselves that as long as they maintain a good front, as long as no one knows what is really going on inside, they are safe.

Individuals with the seductive subtype are good at making the proper impression, selling themselves, and influencing and motivating people. They have learned to control people by promising them what they want, pledging to serve them and take care of them. Many religious leaders and politicians fall into this category. They give the appearance of commitment to others and/ or to a cause, but their commitment is not genuine.

They believe they are special and feel they have a mission in life that sets them apart from other people. Overpowering subtypes exercise their power openly. This is seen in two ways: some individuals are powerful because of their strong physique and/ or expertise with weapons or martial arts, whereas others use money, political connections, and influence to amass power and build empires.

Individuals with the Trust Survival Style use denial to negate the reality of their life experience. They maintain their denial by disconnecting from their bodily experience. Since being in touch with their body puts them in touch with the pretense and falsehood of their life, they displace their energy upward into the mind and substitute reason and rationalization for body awareness. They believe that thinking makes it so.

Autonomy

Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style have had to face the dilemma of choosing between themselves or their parents. To submit to their parents leaves them feeling invaded, controlled, and crushed. On the other hand, their loving feelings and the need to maintain the attachment relationship keep them from overtly challenging parents. Faced with the impossible choice of trying to maintain the integrity of the self while keeping the love of the parents leaves them in a no-win situation. These children adapt to this dilemma by overtly submitting to parental power while secretly holding out. To do this, these children develop a powerful, though often covert, will.

In adults who have developed this adaptive survival style, self-assertion and overt expressions of independence and autonomy are experienced as dangerous and to be avoided. The major fears that fuel this survival adaptation are the fears of being criticized, rejected, and abandoned.

Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style are placaters and are afraid to expose their true feelings. Instead, they play the role of the “good boy” or the “nice girl” because they feel that since playing this role won their parents’ “love,” it will win other people’s love as well. A key statement for this adaptive survival style is, “If I show you how I really feel, you won’t love me— you’ll leave me.”

In personal relationships, these individuals allow frustrations to build without addressing them until they reach a point where they can no longer tolerate the accumulated resentments. They usually have escape strategies that allow them to leave relationships without confrontation: they withdraw without explanation, or they make their partner miserable so that the partner rejects them. This rejection by the other allows them to achieve “freedom” without the guilt of saying no, while at the same time reaping the secondary benefit of being the “innocent” injured party.

Externally oriented, they are extremely sensitive to what they perceive as others’ expectations of them and experience these expectations, in intimate relationships and work situations, as pressures to perform.

Parental pressures are internalized as high expectations of themselves. Individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style are extremely judgmental of themselves. They are ruled by “shoulds” and strive endlessly to become who they think they “should” be.

The tendency to brood and ruminate is typical of this survival style. These individuals ruminate after personal encounters, berating themselves about whether they did or said the right thing, chastising themselves for any “mistakes” they feel they made in the interaction, wondering if they said the right thing or hurt the person’s feelings.

In the therapeutic process with individuals with the Autonomy Survival Style, it is important to keep in mind how paralyzed they feel as a result of their own internal contradictions. Not realizing how much pressure they put on themselves or how they constantly judge themselves, they experience their internal struggle as resulting from external circumstances. Growth takes place when they become aware that the pressures they experience are primarily the result of their own internal demands.

Love and sexuality


Individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style are highly energetic, attractive, and successful. They are the doers and the winners of the world, the sports heroes, cheerleaders, top actors and actresses, the people who often become the icons of our collective consciousness. However, regardless of how attractive or accomplished they appear, they rarely live up to their own high expectations: on one hand, they seem full of confidence but on the other, they feel they are only as good as their last performance. Since they base their self-worth on looks and performance, their self-esteem is conditional; underneath their beautiful exterior they feel highly flawed.

When individuals experience misattunement to their love and sexuality needs at this stage, one of two subtypes develop— the romantic subtype or the sexual subtype— each favoring one aspect of the love-sexuality split.

The Romantic Subtype

These individuals romanticize love and marriage. They are openhearted but often disconnected from their sexuality and may even be terrified of it; they have difficulty integrating a vital sexuality into their love relationships. In the early stages of a relationship, they can feel more sexual, but as the relationship deepens, their sexual feelings diminish.

The Sexual Subtype

Individuals with the sexual subtype have a tendency toward seductive behavior as a way to make themselves desirable. They seek out and use attractive partners to bolster their own self-esteem and measure sexual satisfaction by the frequency, rather than by the depth, of their experience.

A general characteristic of individuals with this survival style is a tendency to do rather than to feel; they distrust emotions. The constant focus on doing helps them stay out of touch with their feelings. They distrust emotions because emotions put them in touch with a level of vulnerability they prefer to avoid. They often consider emotions to be a sign of weakness and can be insensitive to both their own and others’ tender feelings.

Physiology and Trauma

The nervous system is shaped by experience— either pruned or reinforced in response to safety and stress. When stress levels are consistently high, neural pathways connecting the limbic system to the cortex are pruned, while other circuits that are more adaptive to distressing interactions, are formed and strengthened. As a result, the neural landscape becomes vulnerable to emotional and social dysregulation. Adults whose brain and nervous system were patterned by distress at the beginning of life often feel helpless in the face of their symptoms; they do not have the neural circuits to imagine a different way of being.

Through a process known as reentry, the brain weaves together the information entering in different regions to create a full picture of what is happening. For example, information entering the visual cortex (dark, red) is automatically connected to information in the auditory cortex (loud, sudden) and vice versa: what we see influences what we hear, and what we hear influences what we see. The attention we give to qualia and our brain’s capacity to blend them together comprise our perception of reality. It is believed that reentry could be the unique, single-most-important feature of higher brain organization, the vital component of integrated, complex cognitive tasks.

Under normal circumstances, all the aspects of an experience come together into one coherent whole. One of the markers of trauma is the failure to integrate the sensory imprints associated with an event into a coherent whole— a failure of the reentry function. When reentrant interactions are blocked, as they often are with trauma, unprocessed sensory information remains in disconnected fragments.

Additionally there is now evidence that when at an early age, individuals become locked in the frozen, parasympathetically dominant state of conservation-withdrawal, the capacity for DNA repair is negatively affected and the vulnerability to illness is increased.

Explicit and Implicit Memory

We do not have to be conscious of a memory in order for it to actively influence our thinking, feeling, and behavior. Our long-term memory is divided into two main branches: explicit, or consciously processed memory, and implicit, or unconsciously processed memory.

The implicit branch stores information that is out of our conscious awareness and verbal experience. Consequently, even though it constantly influences our current functioning, it does not feel like memory to us. It feels more like who we are. Stored in implicit memory are the memory of shapes and forms; the bodily memory of motor skills, habits, and routines; and the memory of our emotional and relational responses. Because implicit memory is non-conceptual and nonlinguistic, it is difficult to investigate its content with verbal methods.

Shock Trauma versus Developmental Trauma

Shock trauma— the impact of acute, devastating incidents that leave an individual frozen in fear and frozen in time— is clinically recognized and treated under the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In single-event shock trauma, the defensive-orienting response is overwhelmed, completion of fight-flight is not possible, and individuals stay stuck in an incomplete defensive-orienting response. The goal of therapy is to help individuals come out of freeze and complete the fight-flight responses.

Developmental trauma may well be one of the most important public health issues in the world today. It is estimated that in the United States alone it affects nearly three million children yearly. Because PTSD does not factor in developmental issues, and because developmental trauma is not a recognized diagnosis, children are often misdiagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder.


The earlier the trauma, the more global the impact on the physiology and psychology.

Individuals who are unable to integrate their traumatic experiences often lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences, and their development stops at a certain point. The psychological consequence of trauma is the breakdown of the adaptive processes that normally lead to the maintenance of an integrated coherent, continuous, and unified sense of self.

The Beginning of Our Identity, Understanding the Connection Survival Style

The conscious and unconscious shame-based identifications that result from early trauma center around feelings of not belonging, of feeling unwelcomed, rejected, unlovable, bad, wrong, and even sometimes alien or not quite human. Individuals with the Connection Survival Style experience themselves as outsiders, disconnected from themselves and other human beings. Not able to see that the traumatic experiences that shaped their identity are due to environmental failures that were beyond their control, individuals with this adaptive survival style view themselves as the source of the pain they feel.

Their efforts to understand and come to terms with their deep-seated physiological and emotional distress often leave them filled with shame and self-hatred. Individuals with less obvious features of this survival style may not consciously realize that they experience a diminished capacity for joy, expansion, and intimate relationship.

Since the hippocampus is responsible for discrete memory, when trauma occurs early in the development of the neocortex and before the hippocampus comes online, many individuals show symptoms of developmental posttraumatic stress yet have no conscious memories of traumatic events. Early trauma is held implicitly in the body and brain, resulting in a systemic dysregulation that is confusing for people who exhibit symptoms of traumas they cannot remember. It is equally confusing for the clinicians who want to help them.

It is a paradigm shift to think of dissociation as a bodily process; in NARM dissociation is seen as more physiological than psychological. The process of living fully in the body is functionally the same as being fully present in the moment. The body lives only in the present moment. In the mind, we can remember the past or think about the future, but we can be in the present moment only by being fully connected to the body. The more disconnected we are from our body, the less we are in the present moment.

Having undergone the earliest and most difficult traumas, individuals with the Connection Survival Style tend to be less in their body and therefore less in the present moment. Because of their early trauma, dissociation is often the only state individuals with the Connection Survival Style have ever known.

NARM views dissociation on a continuum ranging from numbing to splitting to fragmentation. Just as a coyote with its leg caught in a trap chews it off in order to escape, in attempting to manage early trauma, the organism gives up its unity in order to save itself. Numbing, splitting, and fragmentation create disorganization on all levels of experience. Unmanageable levels of overload that overwhelm the organism’s capacity to process are experienced as distress, and when distress becomes unbearable, the organism manages first by numbing, then by splitting, and finally by fragmenting. These life-saving dissociative processes exact a terrible cost.

The Physiology of Projection

Commonly, projection is viewed as a psychological process and considered a “primitive” defense mechanism. In NARM, projection and the role of the eyes in the projection process are understood from the perspective of the functional unity between a person’s psychology and physiology. Most therapists are surprised to discover that projection, which is normally considered a psychological defense mechanism, is a physiologically based process that has profound psychological implications. Hans Selye and his groundbreaking research on the stress response documented that with high levels of psychological stress, there is a narrowing of the visual field: tunnel vision is part of a survival response that provides focus when life is threatened. Individuals with the Connection Survival Style, having lived with an almost continual experience of threat, have chronic narrowing and other distortions of the visual field.

When we are not present to who or what is directly in our vision, we live in fantasy. For example, if a child is bitten by a dog, all dogs may become trauma triggers. If the adult that child becomes sees all dogs as dangerous, that individual is not using his or her eyes. He or she is not able to distinguish in the present moment which dogs are dangerous and which dogs are not. The ideal of seeing the world accurately is related to the process of being present, in the moment and in the body.

Moving Toward Resolution, Connecting with Self and Others


Primary and Default Emotions Primary emotions lead toward integration while default emotions keep individuals stuck in a groove that does not lead to increased integration, coherence, or greater connection to their core life force. Most people have a tendency toward a particular default emotion. ["chief feature in Gurdjieff's terms?"] The more habitual and automatic the emotion, the more likely it is to be a default emotion. It is not that default emotions are “bad,” but when they are part of a well-worn groove of automatic responses, these emotions keep the survival style in place and do not facilitate reconnection and growth.

We all know individuals who, regardless of what they may actually be feeling, turn to anger. Their primary emotion may be sadness, hurt, vulnerability, or even a more primary unresolved anger, but what they are aware of in themselves and what they show the world is an ungrounded, disconnected anger, which they tend to act out. For them, anger has become a default emotion. For others, anger may be the primary emotion, but regardless of what they are feeling, they default to sadness.

Despite their dissociated, depleted, and undercharged appearance, clients with the Connection Survival Style are energetically highly overcharged at the core; their entire nervous system has been flooded with shock energy. Their dissociation and disconnected lifestyle are attempts to manage this intense activation.

Identifications and Counter-Identifications

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. A large part of what we take to be our identity consists of these shame-based identifications as well as the pride-based counter-identifications. Shame-based identifications, which we often believe to be the truth about ourselves, can be conscious or unconscious. The more energy individuals invest in the pride-based counter-identifications, the more strongly the underlying shame-based identifications are reinforced.

The principle of disidentification is a core element of the NARM approach. Disidentification helps clients see through the fiction of both the shame- and pride-based identifications of their survival style. As they progressively disidentify from the limiting elements of what they have come to believe is their identity, clients consistently report feeling more at ease and more connected. Since every distorted identification is reflected in the body in the form of tension and collapse, when identifications dissolve, clients consistently describe themselves as feeling lighter, as having a sense of more internal space.

Identifying Fixed and Rigid Beliefs

One component of the disidentification process involves developing mindful awareness of the fixed and rigid beliefs we hold about ourselves and about the world. As part of the disidentification process, NARM encourages clients to hold lightly, and to be curious about, the fixed beliefs they have about themselves or the world. Curiosity and inquiry are part of the disidentification process. Curiosity implies a not knowing; through a mindful disidentification process NARM helps clients move from the frozenness of fixed beliefs to flow, from narrowness and contraction to expansion. We challenge fixed beliefs and identifications by encouraging clients to look at themselves from a fresh perspective.

Distortions in Time

Developmental and shock trauma trap our consciousness and our life force, effectively keeping part of us stuck in past time. In cases of developmental trauma, we continue to see the world through the eyes of a child. When we filter the present moment through past experience, we live through our memories, identifications, and old object relations.

Healing the Distortions of the Life Force - A Systemic Approach

On the surface, a person who has experienced shock trauma can present similarly to someone who is struggling with developmental trauma. Both individuals may be anxious, depressed, dissociated, self-isolating, and suffer from diverse physical symptoms. The process for working with developmental trauma, however, is quite different from working with shock trauma. In cases of shock trauma we work primarily from the bottom up, focusing on the completion of the fight-flight response in a process called biological completion. As clients experience biological completion and the survival energies of fight-flight are integrated, anxiety decreases, the nervous system re-regulates, and autonomic symptoms recede.

From a practical clinical perspective, we are making an important distinction between shock trauma and developmental/ relational trauma, but it should be noted that shock trauma experienced as an adult commonly brings earlier developmental traumas to the surface. It is rare that we are able simply to address shock trauma without encountering developmental issues. As a result, it is often necessary to work with both shock and developmental trauma at the same time.

For a person whose symptoms are primarily the result of developmental/ relational trauma, a new paradigm is necessary. The sources, causes, and resolution of this kind of trauma are more complex. In cases of developmental trauma, although individuals are reintegrating survival energies, they are also dealing with more than the completion of fight-flight responses; they are struggling with intrapsychic conflict. With developmental trauma, NARM works concurrently with both top-down and bottom-up dynamics that are fundamental to the healing process. Top-down, we address identity distortions resulting from shame-based identifications and pride-based counter-identifications. Bottom-up, we work with nervous system dysregulation. We continually keep in mind the distress cycle, which involves the interplay of top-down and bottom-up dynamics. (see attached image "The Distress Cycle")
 

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I just bought the book.

I have my sister in mind who has cut me out of her life because I commented on the way she treats her son (not even nearly saying I've got all the answers) and now I have lost contact with my nephew as well and caused problems with everyone in the family. My sister has big issues with her childhood and suffers anxiety, anger management problems, inability to cope with stress or difficult situations, has problems relating to anyone in a meaningful way and seems very out of her body distracting herself with anything and everything. I had the same childhood but am not as affected yet still have some problems with disconnection from self and struggle maintaining relationships on a level anything below superficial, people find me quite intense and often don't know how to deal with what I want to talk about. We are similar in ways yet I'm very emotionally driven, say how I'm feeling and thinking and much more gentle and open minded, where she is almost completely cut off and expresses everything with anger or dissociation.


I really look forward to reading this book. I probably can't help my sister but I can help myself, my own kids, and at least understand big sis better. I am sure I'll have some rough times when I am faced with what I've done wrong as a parent to my own kids yet again (reading the narcissistic family was very confronting and upsetting, but I learnt so much from that book alone that it has opened up doorways and patched some of the path my eldest daughter struggles along)

Should arrive on my front step with a week. Can't wait!
 
Merci Laura, je viens de passer commande de ce livre que vous me conseillez, je le recevrai demain avant 20 h... Hâte de le lire...
Merci Altair pour ton long mais intéressant partage...
Hâte de commencer la lecture...
Je crois qu'il va falloir du courage pour le lire surtout voir les erreurs que j'ai pu commettre avec ma fille Nadège 44 ans qui a coupé les ponts avec moi...

Thank you Laura, I have just ordered this book that you advise me, I will receive it tomorrow before 8 pm... Can't wait to read it...
Thank you Altair for your long but interesting sharing...
Can't wait to start reading...
I think it will take courage to read it, especially to see the mistakes I made with my 44-year-old daughter Nadège, who cut off my ties with me...
 
PERLOU said:
Merci Laura, je viens de passer commande de ce livre que vous me conseillez, je le recevrai demain avant 20 h... Hâte de le lire...
Merci Altair pour ton long mais intéressant partage...
Hâte de commencer la lecture...
Je crois qu'il va falloir du courage pour le lire surtout voir les erreurs que j'ai pu commettre avec ma fille Nadège 44 ans qui a coupé les ponts avec moi...

Thank you Laura, I have just ordered this book that you advise me, I will receive it tomorrow before 8 pm... Can't wait to read it...
Thank you Altair for your long but interesting sharing...
Can't wait to start reading...
I think it will take courage to read it, especially to see the mistakes I made with my 44-year-old daughter Nadège, who cut off my ties with me...

I'm eagerly awaiting the book, so thank you Altair for the excerpts in the meantime. I can honestly spot programs in myself from all the 5 survival strategies, so I can only surmise that I'm in need of total dismantling & rebuilding from the ground up & vice versa. :/

I agree PERLOU that this is going to be a tough read with regards to errors we may have made as parents. All I can say, is be forgiving to yourself! I'm sorry to hear that you & your daughter are estranged, the network is always here for you if you ever want to start a post about it.
 
Arwenn said:
I'm eagerly awaiting the book, so thank you Altair for the excerpts in the meantime. I can honestly spot programs in myself from all the 5 survival strategies, so I can only surmise that I'm in need of total dismantling & rebuilding from the ground up & vice versa. :/

Or, simply the knowledge and awareness from the reading assignments PLUS the NeurOptimal neurofeedback brain training.
 
I'm eagerly awaiting the book, so thank you Altair for the excerpts in the meantime. I can honestly spot programs in myself from all the 5 survival strategies, so I can only surmise that I'm in need of total dismantling & rebuilding from the ground up & vice versa. :/

Interestingly, from what I have read of the book so far, I seem to have a few from the connection and some from the autonomy, so I was thinking along similar lines as you Arwenn.


Or, simply the knowledge and awareness from the reading assignments PLUS the NeurOptimal neurofeedback brain training.

Thanks Laura, I have found a NeurOptimal practitioner in my city, so that looks like the next logic step to take.

We were discussing on the Aus Skype meet up last week about how often you need to do it, and how long in between visits is optimal. It seems that people seem to be going on a weekly basis, but due to cost, this may not be viable for me for a little while, every 2 weeks maybe, but more likely monthly. Would it be better to wait (and save up) and do a bunch of them closer together?
 
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