Educational Platform on Life
Written for those working to heal developmental trauma and seeking new tools for self-awareness and growth, this book focuses on conflicts surrounding the capacity for connection.
Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others and the ensuing diminished aliveness are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model® (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that, while not ignoring a person’s past, emphasizes working in the present moment.
NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional without making the regressed, dysfunctional elements the primary theme of the therapy.
It emphasizes a person’s strengths, capacities, resources, and resiliency and is a powerful tool for working with both nervous system regulation and distortions of identity such as low self-esteem, shame, and chronic self-judgment.
Dr. Laurence Heller is the founder of the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), a specialized psychobiological approach to working with developmental trauma. Dr. Heller has been on the faculty of several major universities and has taught courses and seminars at medical schools, hospitals and pain clinics in the U.S. and Europe.
He co-founded the Gestalt Institute of Denver and later the Rocky Mountain Psychotherapy Institute where he trained hundreds of mental health professionals. In the past 25 years, he has provided thousands of case consultations for therapists in the U.S. and Europe.
“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.”
“Love that is conditional upon looks and performance is not love at all”
“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.”