Description
An essential piece of trauma literature, this “well-organized, valuable book” draws from somatic-based psychotherapy and neuroscience to offer “clear guidance” for coping with complex PTSD (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger)
Although it may seem that people suffer from an endless number of emotional problems and challenges, Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre maintain that most of these can be traced to five biologically based organizing principles: the need for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality. They describe how early trauma impairs the capacity for connection to self and others and how the ensuing diminished aliveness is the hidden dimension that underlies most psychological and many physiological problems.
Heller and LaPierre introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model® (NARM), a method that integrates bottom-up and top-down approaches to regulate the nervous system and resolve distortions of identity such as low self-esteem, shame, and chronic self-judgment that are the outcome of developmental and relational trauma. While not ignoring a person’s past, NARM emphasizes working in the present moment to focus on clients’ strengths, resources, and resiliency in order to integrate the experience of connection that sustains our physiology, psychology, and capacity for relationship.
Insight1001 (verified owner) –
Briefly put, this is one of the most important and profound works in the whole trauma literature. The authors’ thesis holds that developmental trauma is very different than PTSD. Developmental trauma is radically far-reaching and colors the entire life of those affected by it. The athorrs outline five different adaptive survival styles used by infants to cope with trauma. The five styles are chronological in order. The first, connective survival style, is the earliest and most impactful. It takes place between birth and about a year. Where the child receives inadequate nurturing or abuse, this style becomes dominant. Other styles come in different times and have their own but less catastrophic impact. In the connection survival style the child adapts by disconnecting from his(or her) physical and emotional self. As a result, the child experiences great difficulty in relating to others and is often isolated without knowing how to address the problem.
The other survival styles flow in later stages of infant development progression : attachment (difficulty knowing what we need and feeling that our needs deserve do not deserve to be met), trust (feeling that one cannot depend on anyone but themselves and feeling a need to be in control), autonomy (feeling burdened and pressured with difficulty setting limits and saying no directly), and love-sexuality (difficulty integrating heart and sexuality).
The book focuses almost exclusively on the connective survival style. The two authors spend a great deal of time describing the conditions that cause this style and the difficulty that those who use it have with even recognizing it. They also spend several chapters outlining how to address the connective survival style therapeutically. In fact, those chapters are a superior description of how to operate therapeutically. Anyone in a helping profession could profit by reading them.
Yours truly is one of the connective survival products. Reading the book felt like seeing myself for the first time and knowing why I was this way. The book well shows the disastrous consequences for a combination of abuse and neglect. I’m not sure what to do with all this yet but do something I will.
Anne J. Gibson (verified owner) –
I was recently diagnosed with C-PTSD. It came as a terrible shock! I didn’t understand what that meant! This book helped me understand and be compassionate towards myself. It is an amazing read! Clearly written, compassionate and thorough. It brought into focus so much of what I had been living with but never imagined there was an understanding of, never mind a solution. I have a trauma therapist who is great but couldn’t possibly answer all the questions I had. I couldn’t articulate even what I was thinking or feeling. I took this book to her and she loved it. Now, our sessions are so much more informed and effective. Just having the WORDS to use have given me great relief, hope and acceptance. I re-read sections when I get confused and overwhelmed and this book gives me the awareness and permission to speak the unspeakable. What a god-sent! My “reality” now has a voice! Thank you!
Lucy Nelson (verified owner) –
I stumbled upon this book through a friend who is a therapist. When I heard the words “developmental trauma”, something rang true. I have been through about 7 years of therapy, feeling like no diagnosis or treatment modality has fit me best or helped me much. My current therapist practices somatic experiencing, which this book references often. As soon as I started this book I was amazed to see myself described, in detail, like never before. I finally felt like I’d found a manual on myself. Not only that, but a treatment plan! It took me a few weeks to finish the book, and I feel like in that time I’ve suddenly learned how to track my emotions and experience my nervous system reintegrating and settling down. My plan now is to read it again with a notebook at my side to take notes. This is a rather clinical text – it’s very detailed and involved, which is wonderfully thorough, but I know that I missed important points while trying to absorb something else. So I will read it again and again. I feel like I’ve found a manual that will give me my life, for the first time ever.
Kathryn Neale (verified owner) –
As a parent and professional dealing with children and adults suffering from the morbidities of developmental and shock trauma, I am encouraged that Heller and LaPierre have published this book broadly, rather than solely academically, to disseminate their Neuro-Affective Relational Model (N.A.R.M) of therapy which identifies five core capacities and their respective adaptive survival strategies compromised by developmental and shock trauma. This is very important work. While not exclusively about the sequelae of prematurity, our society has been happy to legislate mandatory resuscitation for fetuses showing any sign of life (BAIPA) and employ medical technology to save “miracle” babies during their birthing process and neonatal course, but slow to recognize and even slower to address the impact and life long suffering caused by the multi-factorial and chronic neuro-biological health issues which accompany developmental and shock trauma. It seems that someone finally “groks” that neither the cognitive/dialectical top down approach nor the somatic/bioenergetic bottom up approach can work alone, but rather must needs be sensitively and carefully, on a moment-to-moment basis, pendulated” and “titrated” depending on the state of being of the specific client. We can now honor those young adults and children whom we, as a society, have legislated into life by providing a realistic and pragmatic therapeutic intervention which has been cogently identified and described…both the dilemma involved with currently available therapies and the neccessity for a new model/approach targeted at this growing population…to begin to heal the neuro-affective relational deficits and the neuro-biological disease processes which accompany developmental and shock trauma.
Bradley R. Maybury (verified owner) –
I got this book a week ago and have now thoroughly gone through it twice, highlighting and taking notes, as well as doing the exercises. Having practiced somatic meditation and mindfulness for a year and a half and experiencing expansion and greater aliveness through these practices, I knew that these tools were very helpful to me. What I didn’t know and what this book made very clear was why these practices were so helpful. This book is a map of the terrain of my psyche and the directions on how to traverse that terrain and go from a place of emotional numbness and subdued aliveness to greater emotional intelligence, feelings of connection to self and others, and an increasing sense of aliveness. Granted not all of this has happened in the week since a got the book, but over the year and a half of practicing daily. That said the book has made the cause and now the course very clear and I’ve experienced big leaps forward in the areas mentioned, and of course all life areas as these are directly impacted. The book also added many insights, practices, and the motivation that goes along with these. It’s very well written, easy to understand, and most importantly to apply. This really works! If you or someone you’re close to, or clients you work with suffer from developmental trauma, and you want understanding and effectiveness in healing, get this book now! Many thanks to Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre
Brenda L. Rivera (verified owner) –
The best book about trauma I have ever encounter. If you have read tons of books, have done lots of work on yourself, have tried different healing modalities and have seen a few different therapist and yet, years after still know that there is something that doesn’t quite fit because certain emotions just keep coming up, then this is your book!!!!!! This book is so packed with information I feel like I graduated from a psychology class. You will find yourself and understand so much more about yourself , your past , your trauma , the ” why ” this and that . I can not recommend enough. I first borrowed the audiobook and then I had to buy the actual physical one. It’s your life and you deserve to heal . Much love and blessings in your path to integration.
L. Peters (verified owner) –
As a graduate student, this book has been fundamental in blowing the doors off of my own developmental trauma and understanding it in others. Taken in context with other therapies, theories, and how trauma has historically been approached, this book takes on even greater meaning.
I can understand some reviewers’ frustrations however, because while it’s a concise overview, it won’t answer all of your questions. (i.e. Can you have more than one survival style? Yes!) As a student, I have the luxury of dissecting the readings in class. It’s very helpful.
If you are a graduate student working towards licensing in therapy, social work, etc., or if you have a firm grasp of basic psychology and healing, you will find this a fairly easy and fascinating read. I wouldn’t call it a “self-help” book, but it is certainly enlightening.
As to the claims that it’s not scientific, perhaps that is because there’s not a citation in the book. While this is usually an issue for me, in this case, these theories are their own, based on their own work, and built upon accepted and known psychological foundations. If you need citations for basics like attachment theory, brain functions and the like, perhaps this is not the book for you.
Other books I would recommend to help complete the picture would be Frank and La Barre’s The First Year and the Rest of Your Life and Young, Klosko, and Weishaar’s Schema Therapy.
TheHappyGentleman (verified owner) –
This is one of the clearest and most comprehensive books on the issue of trauma and its impacts that I have come across. I have read dozens and rate this above them all.
The book remains focused on the issue of trauma and its concrete impacts. Rather than getting dogmatic or attempting to discredit, the authors take an integrative and wholistic approach that rewards the reader with a very sensible, full picture of trauma and how it works on both the biology and the spirit/mind/emotions/psyche. While intended for therapists most likely, it is of obvious interest to anyone suffering from early trauma who wishes to have control over their treatment and recovery.
Kathleen (verified owner) –
One of the most important topics of our world, that can explain most of the violence, narcissism, addiction and bullying, in my mind… it is a clinical work that translates for a nonclinical reader interested in how almost all of us are injured from childhood and how we can integrate and resolve these injuries so we don’t continue to injure others in our adult life. It acknowledges that our bodies, not just our minds are part of the process of healing and processing. It focuses on attachment issues with children and their parents, and the different stages of childhood that trauma affects, and how a clinician can work with a client, and how a client has been affected by the trauma in that childhood stage.
Kathleen (verified owner) –
This book is cutting edge material regarding post traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is a condition that has been belatedly recognized as a medical condition. Therefore funding for research is available and much attention is beiby given. This gave me some much hope for my own daughter who is a victim of incest by her father. It was stopped before she was 4 years old but our case never left family court after a 6-year battle. This was 25 years ago. She is doing well in life, but she suffers. I wish this book had been available to her therapist back then! One more way Audible has literally saved my life!
Josephine March (verified owner) –
Until my therapist recommended this book, I had no knowledge of developmental trauma. Prior to reading this book, I thought all traumas were shock-based. The authors carefully and thoroughly explain the differences between these two types of traumas.
I will be reading it again as there is such a dense concentration of helpful and healing tools/ resources presented over the course of these pages. At times, it was not easy to read, but the authors conveyed their message of hope and healing in a gentle, non-judgmental, helpful manner. I learned a lot from this book. Worth every penny.
Julie Mills (verified owner) –
I’m not being dramatic, just factual. I’m one of the developmentally traumatized adults who lives a lonely, lifeless life. I’ve been to MANY therapists who’ve taken great pride in themselves with their diagnosis that I’m co-dependent. One told me to get a cat for my loneliness. Another told me that adult coloring is a creative outlet. Another told me to Let Go and Let God! Which all left me alone again. On my own again. And reinforced that there is no one to help me. And then came NARM!!! This book is both fascinating and well-written for BOTH therapists and lay-people. Thank you with all my heart!
Mark Twain (verified owner) –
This books is an amazing book that is not expresses the ideas very crisp but also offers a completely different perspective to look at life. It cuts across other models of how mental health and human interaction works to show that maybe the underlying principle of how everything works is different.
The title suggests that the book is about developmental trauma. Yet it’s not limited to people dealing with severe trauma. It provides insight in how most of us work and how our childhood affects our adult relationships.
The book identifies five different attachment styles: trust attachment, love/sexuality attachment, independence, etc. It suggests that during human development each attachment develops at a different point of growing up. For example at six months old, our connection with a parent is that they are holding us in their arms and looking at us. A couple years later, we may be developing trust with our parents. Can we trust them that our needs will be met.
If there are problems with one of the attachment styles, children will usually progress through a healthy range of calling attention to their needs – starting with “hey mommy, I’m hungry” to using healthy aggression. The concept of “health aggression” caught me eyes. The book is full of terms where simply hearing the term was a huge insight in and off itself. In this case, the idea that aggression can be healthy was intriguing. If that doesn’t work, the child’s sympathetic nervous system gets activated (fight/flight). If that doesn’t work, the parasympathetic nervous system gets activated (e.g. shutting down).
Simply these ideas of the different nervous systems are a fascinating concept. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system can be triggered at the same time (stepping on the gas and break at the same time). That’s for example, when we panic and try to suppress the panic.
The books proposed remedy is to pay attention to what we are feeling in our bodies because that’s how we find out about our needs. In the ideal world that the book paints, we can freely express our needs in our relationships and (as adults) also deal with when people don’t necessarily tend to our needs. (E.g., because I’m a hungry adult doesn’t mean the other person has to feed me. They could be full and not interested in going to a restaurant with me. Yet, that I am aware of my hunger and can express it appropriately – without fear, panic or not at all -, that’s the goal.)
Most people I know are functioning adults, yet I often find that what the book describes affects me. Often when I’m with people, I’m very focused on making sure that they feel entertained and comfortable. (That might be a good host’s job.) Yet the book’s idea is that I should scan my body to realize what’s going on with me and express my needs, e.g. “I feel a bit bored, let’s check out the other pool.” The book shifted my thought of what a good relationship looks like: Both people should feel comfortable to express their needs and the other person responds to that. (And needs don’t have to be monumental things like needing help to move, but a need for comfort at the end of a tiring hike, a need for play in a conversation that turned dry, etc.)
The book opens up many interesting topics. For example, it suggests that based on unmet childhood needs, people may develop pride. E.g., if they were ignored as a child, they may pride themselves as easy going. The book suggests that for each pride, there is usually an opposite shame. That example person may have shame around being too needy. That concept alone is very interesting. Now when I hear people making prideful statements, I wonder if there is an opposite shame in place as well. (The pride essentially is trying to make us feel good about a place where we are hurting.)
I’ve written many quotes from the book into my notebook. It was a real page turner because each page offered so many intriguing insights to how life works.
CJ Scarlet (verified owner) –
I’ve lost count of the self help books I’ve read, but this one tops them all. I saw myself in the pages and felt so seen and understood. I’m buying copies for others in my life who need this wisdom.
Nancy Cobb (verified owner) –
It was a very helpful book and had a lot of good information in it
G. Blakey (verified owner) –
I finally found a book that clearly addresses the right approach to work with people who have been negatively affected by Developmental Trauma, rather than shock trauma. It is written with a focus of helping therapists learn about this new approach, but in a way that those who have experienced this form of trauma can learn about how the adverse experiences in childhood lead to psychological problems in later life, and how there is an approach that can help them with their problems. There are a couple of examples of how a session with a NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) therapist works with a patient, so one can understand the significantly different approach this new therapeutic technique works. It is wonderful to read this, and feel so appreciative that someone has figured out how developmental traumas need to be addressed in a different way from the way violent or sexual traumas need to be treated.