NARM:  The NeuroAffective Relational Model

I am a certified NARM Therapist (NARM is the NeuroAffective Relational Model).  With five years of training with Laurence Heller, including his one year master class focusing on using the model for the treatment of personality disorders, I fully integrate top-down and bottom-up approaches in my clinical practice.

NARM™ is an integrated top-down and bottom-up approach. In developmental trauma, individuals incorporate the environmental failure they have experienced in a bottom-up process of disturbed regulation and a top-down process of distorted identifications. Knowing how to work with the complex interplay between nervous system and identifications greatly expands our therapeutic effectiveness.

Self-regulation has become an important part of psychological thinking. The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM) brings the current understanding of self-regulation into clinical practice. This resource-oriented, non-regressive, psychodynamically informed non-pathologizing model emphasizes helping clients establish connection to the parts of self that are organized, coherent and functional. It helps bring into awareness and organization the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional without making the regressed, dysfunctional elements the primary theme of the therapy.

Laurence Heller, PhD, (NARM Co-founder) presents the first introduction to the Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) in Los Angeles, 2013.