Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.
A core NARM principle is that the capacity for connection, with both self and others, defines emotional health. In the Introduction, we saw that all children need to feel connected to themselves and to their caregivers: they require loving attunement to their needs and emotions, and they need to be supported enough to feel safe in their dependence as well as in their independence. Finally, they need attuned acceptance of their developing sexuality and heart-centered relationships in order to integrate their capacity to love. The fulfillment of these needs is essential to the success of our formative years and continues to be of primary importance throughout our adult lives. To the degree that children’s core needs are attuned to and reasonably satisfied, they feel safe, trusting of the world, and connected to their bodily and emotional selves. They grow up experiencing a sense of well-being, regulation, and expansion.
A primary need emerges and is satisfied. It recedes into the background and another need emerges; and so the cycle continues. When, for a child, this need-satisfaction cycle is significantly interrupted, healthy development is disturbed, and the environmental failure triggers both tension and bracing in the musculature and activation and imbalances in the nervous system and biochemistry—all of which sets the stage for symptoms and disease. When basic needs are not met and the protest to get those needs met is unsuccessful, children come to feel that something is wrong with their needs; they cannot know that it is their environment that is not responding adequately. Therefore, they internalize caregiver failures, experiencing them as their own personal failures. Reacting to their caregivers’ failure to meet their needs, children come to feel various degrees of anger, shame, guilt, and physiological collapse. Tragically, to the degree that there is chronic lack of attunement to their core needs, children do not learn to attune to the needs within themselves. When basic needs are consistently left unsatisfied, the need-satisfaction cycle is interrupted, and nervous system dysregulation and identity distortions are set in motion that often have a lifelong negative impact.
Human beings are born with an essential adaptive ability: the capacity to disconnect from painful internal and external experience. We are able to disconnect from experiences of pain and anxiety that accompany the lack of fulfillment of our primary needs. To the degree that any core need is chronically unfulfilled, children are faced with a crucial choice: adapt or perish. Any core need that remains consistently unsatisfied threatens children’s physiological and psychological integrity and prevents them from fully moving to the next developmental stage. Developmental progression is disturbed or interrupted. In order to survive, children adapt to their compromised situation by developing what in NARM we call an adaptive survival style. Survival styles are the result of children’s adaptations to the chronic lack of fulfillment of one or more of their biologically based needs: connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality (see Table 1.1).
Survival styles are adaptive strategies children use to protect the attachment relationships with their parents. Children sense the parts of themselves that their parents accept and value as well as the parts of themselves their parents reject. They adapt to their parents’ acceptance or rejection in order to maintain and maximize the attachment and love relationship. As shown in Table 1.1, each adaptive survival style reflects the foreclosure of some aspect of the core self in order to maintain parental love.
| CORE NEED | SURVIVAL ADAPTATION | STRATEGY USED TO PROTECT THE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP |
| Connection | Foreclosing connection Disconnect from body and social engagement |
Children give up their very sense of existence, disconnect, and attempt to become invisible |
| Attunement | Foreclosing the awareness and expression of personal needs |
Children give up their own needs in order to focus on the needs of others, particularly the needs of the parents |
| Trust | Foreclosing trust and healthy interdependence |
Children give up their authenticity in order to be who the parents want them to be: best friend, sport star, confidante, etc. |
| Autonomy | Foreclosing authentic expression, responding with what they think is expected of them |
Children give up direct expressions of independence in order not to feel abandoned or crushed |
| Love-Sexuality | Foreclosing love and heart connection Foreclosing sexuality Foreclosing integration of love with sexuality |
Children try to avoid rejection by perfecting themselves, hoping that they can win love through looks or performance |
TABLE 1.1: Foreclosure of the Self to Maintain the Attachment Relationship
We survive by adapting to our environment. Initially, our survival strategies are life-saving responses and represent successful adaptations, not pathology. However, the adaptations and accommodations we make, although once protective, limit us as adults. Living life based on adaptations learned in childhood restricts our capacity to respond appropriately and creatively to the many challenges of adult life. 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.
Our survival styles are reflected in our bodies in two ways: as areas of tension (hypertonicity) and as areas of weakness or disconnection (hypotonicity). Patterns of tension and weakness reveal the ways we have learned to compensate for the disconnection from our needs, core self, and life force. Muscular constriction, bracing, and collapse are the physical mechanisms of adaptive survival styles. Tracking in the body and paying attention to the felt sense gives us an important roadmap for working with the internal conflicts of each survival style.
There are many ways that connection can be compromised in human development, including through inadequate parenting or misattunement, shock trauma, and developmental/relational trauma such as abuse, neglect, or early loss. Understanding the process by which each adaptive survival style internalizes and perpetuates the environmental failure distinguishes the NARM approach from other psychodynamic therapies. NARM helps individuals become aware of how they organize their experience using survival styles that have outlived their usefulness.
All of us are somewhere on the continuum of connection to disconnection from our core selves and our bodies. In NARM the focus is less on why individuals are the way they are and more on how their survival style distorts what they are experiencing in the moment. It is not to say that the why of a client’s personal history is not part of the therapeutic process. Understanding why patterns begun in childhood can be helpful is useful to the degree that this understanding impacts present experience. Health is restored not simply by exploring personal history but by supporting the ability to reconnect to the basic life force, as seen in Chapter 12.
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.
The symptoms and emotional suffering particular to each survival style indicate specific patterns of disconnection that are reflected in our bodies, our behavior, our personalities, our relationships, our work life, and even in the illnesses to which we are prone. At the onset, survival styles are life-saving adaptive strategies that we have all used. It is important never to lose touch with the suffering inherent in each survival style and to approach this suffering with compassion.
Each of the five adaptive survival styles is complex and multifaceted, and the following chapters can provide only a general orientation. Each description follows a similar organization:
• An introduction to the adaptive survival style
• A description of the early developmental and relational traumas that set the survival style in motion
• How the adaptive survival style continues to impact the adult nervous system and identity
• Growth strategies to help individuals move toward resolution of the core dilemmas of each adaptive survival style