In NARM, we use the mindful awareness of the life force and its distortions as an orientation to the healing and growth process. Figure 12.1 provides principles for NARM’s psychobiological approach and offers guidelines to help individuals work toward increasing connection and aliveness.
In the Introduction and in Part A, we presented the process of how the life force becomes progressively distorted in adapting to developmental trauma and environmental failure. In Chapter 10, we developed a clinical understanding of the NARM principles, tools, and techniques needed to work therapeutically. In this chapter, we focus on tracking the life force, reading the chart from top to bottom—from the most symptomatic parasympathetic distortions, through sympathetically dominant symptoms, and ultimately to core expression and health. Figure 12.1 was initially presented in the Introduction (as Figure I.2) and is repeated here as we focus on the process of reconnection and the healing of the distortions moving from top to bottom.
Working therapeutically with developmental trauma as opposed to working with shock trauma requires overlapping but different sets of skills. 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. Clients often say, “I feel like I’ve gotten my life back”—which is to say, as can be seen by following the shock trauma branch of the chart from the top to the bottom, that these clients have successfully moved from freeze, fear, and helplessness, through completion of the fight-flight responses, to reconnection with their core energy and life force.
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 (Figure I.4). As described in the distress cycle, when there has been developmental trauma, we incorporate the environmental failure both in a bottom-up process of disturbed regulation and in a top-down process of distorted identifications. NARM developmental work, addressing clients’ cognitive, emotional, and sensate world, addresses nervous system dysregulation, the distortion of identity, and the interplay between the two.
When working with developmental trauma, the goal of the NARM approach is to help clients connect to and live their original core expression and thereby recover their right to life and aliveness. To illustrate working with the life force as it has been distorted through environmental failure and developmental/relational trauma, we will track the progress of Paul, who reflects the experience of many clients with the Connection Survival Style. Although Figure 12.1 is relevant for all the survival styles, we chose a client with the Connection Survival Style because it is with these individuals who have experienced the earliest developmental/relational trauma that the life force has been most distorted and is most bound in symptoms. Following Paul’s progress allows us to follow the process of healing from the top of the chart to the reintegration of core expression and aliveness at the bottom of the chart through the three stages of healing the resolution of (1) parasympathetically dominant symptoms, (2) sympathetically dominant symptoms, and then (3) healthy connection and re-regulation. For clarity and to illustrate how to work with the life force from its most distorted symptomatic form to its core expression, we are conflating Paul’s process that developed over the course of long-term therapy. The focus here is specifically on the expression and distortions of the life force and less on the therapeutic techniques that were presented in Chapter 10.
Paul was symptomatic in a number of ways. Early in therapy, the symptoms he described were predominantly parasympathetic in nature. He described himself as lonely and isolated, with strong self-judgments about his inability to sustain a close relationship. Additionally, he had a number of physical symptoms, including stomach problems, various muscle pains, and environmental sensitivities. He reported often feeling phobic and fearful and periodically quite depressed. It also became clear, as I (Larry) got to know him, that he was significantly dissociated; he had little capacity to reference either his emotions or his bodily experience.
FIGURE 12.1: Distortions of the Life Force. To understand the therapeutic process described in this chapter, read the chart from the top down.
I began to address Paul’s dissociation by interrupting his tendency to intellectualize and inviting him to reference his experience in the present moment:
“As you’re talking about your life right now, what are you noticing in your experience?”
Initially, I wanted to get a sense of Paul’s capacity to access his internal world, including his sensations and emotions. Paul at this point in therapy, had no direct way of knowing how frozen, dysregulated, and disconnected he actually was. He just knew that he had many symptoms and that he was hurting. The parasympathetic response of dissociation is driven by underlying sympathetic global high arousal. Paul’s global arousal was partly the result of bottom-up processes that most likely began with his premature birth and the inadequate physical contact he experienced during his month in the incubator. In addition to this early trauma, both of his parents were profoundly unattuned to his needs and sometimes abusive; his father was physically and emotionally abusive, and his mother was highly anxious and emotionally invasive.
At the same time as I tracked Paul’s capacity to access his internal world, I also paid attention to his capacity for personal connection with me. As awareness of his internal experience developed and he became more comfortable with me, on the level of the nervous system the ventral vagus and social engagement system slowly came online, helping him to come out of dissociation and giving him more effective possibilities with which to manage his high sympathetic arousal other than through dissociation and social isolation.
Unintegrated aggression can be acted in against the self or acted out against others. Acting in involves turning aggression toward the self. In Figure 12.1, we placed this dynamic in the transitional area between parasympathetic and sympathetic symptomatology because the aggression itself is sympathetically dominant, but when it is turned against the self, it leads to parasympathetic symptoms.
On Paul’s journey toward reintegrating the life force, he followed the very common pattern of clients who act in their aggression against themselves, which leads them to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. At this point in therapy, Paul did not know he was angry, except at himself or in a vague or generalized sense when he felt bitter and “hated the world.” Referencing the sequence of distortions in Figure 12.1, the unacknowledged anger that Paul experienced as self-hatred was the result of his earlier splitting off of aggression, which was then turned inward and which now reinforced his nervous system dysregulation. Although it was clear to me that Paul was very angry, at no time did I push him to feel the anger. Instead, I explored his fear of anger, at first of others’ anger and later his own.
With Paul, I used elements of the exercise in Figure 12.2 by inquiring into his relationship with anger, both his own anger and other people’s. His first response was “What anger?” Like many individuals who have experienced relational trauma, Paul was unaware of his own anger and frightened of other people’s anger.
For Paul, who as a child experienced abuse and neglect, the initial responses of anger and rage toward his parents were profoundly threatening. It was too frightening to feel anger and rage toward the parents he loved and upon whom he was completely dependent. Unable to tolerate the negative feelings toward his parents, Paul tried to protect the attachment relationship and his loving feelings for them by splitting off his negative feelings into a “bad self” that became the container for the aggression he experienced as dangerous. There is a vicious cycle at work here: early environmental failure naturally provokes aggressive feelings, which in turn are experienced as too dangerous to be felt and as a result are split off; this split-off aggression becomes the source of increasing dysregulation and distress. The capacity to split off dangerous emotion is, particularly for children, a life-saving mechanism. Splitting is a dissociative process leading to parasympathetic symptoms, as seen in Paul’s self-hatred, freeze, and dissociation.
EXPLORING YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO ANGER
Do you tend to act your anger in against yourself or act it out against others?
If you are easily angry, then anger is probably a default emotion and in this case, it is useful to do a personal exploration into what you are really feeling when you automatically default to anger.
If you are self-critical, self-judging, self-hating, then you are acting anger in against yourself. If this is your pattern, then you undoubtedly have many fears about anger. An exercise that can be useful for you is to write down as many fears about anger as you can find. Write down why it is not safe to feel or express anger.
If you have strong internal inhibitions against anger, see if you can find a situation in your life when you uncharacteristically expressed protest that had a positive result.
Explore your family of origin’s relationship to anger. In some families, no one is allowed to be angry, or everyone is angry all the time. In other families only one or both of the parents can be angry, but not the children.
FIGURE 12.2: Exercise to Support the Exploration of One’s Relationship to Anger
Paul’s father was a rageaholic who was both emotionally and physically abusive—behavior that only further reinforced his son’s splitting. Paul eventually had this insight into his lifelong sense of “badness”:
“Because I felt that the badness was inside me, I felt I had more control. I could figure out how to be ‘good’ so I wouldn’t get hurt anymore.”
For Paul, being angry meant that he was like his father and therefore “bad.” Splitting off his anger and rage reinforced a sense of powerlessness but also meant he was unlike his father and therefore “good.” This is often the compromise that people who grow up with early relational trauma or abuse work out for themselves: foreclosing a part of themselves to preserve the attachment relationship with the parent.
Splitting takes different forms depending on circumstances, but the common component is to feel that aggression, anger, and rage are “bad,” whereas powerlessness and gentleness are “good.” The tendency is to project the split-off anger onto other people and be frightened of their aggression. The end result of this common process left Paul imagining judgment and rejection coming from others that was for the most part not there. Paul’s “bad” self became the object of his hatred. Paul hated himself for needing, for feeling, for his many symptoms, and ultimately even for existing. By splitting off and redirecting his negative emotions, he protected his love for his parents, though at great cost in terms of his sense of self and his capacity for engagement and aliveness. When his aggression was split off, his aliveness and strength were split off as well, and his connection to his core life force was diminished.
Splitting cannot be resolved simply on the level of the nervous system or from the perspective of the “inner child” or child consciousness. Unlike working with an incomplete fight response against a stranger, when there has been relational trauma, children develop many internal inhibitions against their anger at the parents in order to protect the attachment relationship and their feelings of love. Since only the adult consciousness can hold both love and hate, tenderness and anger simultaneously, I explained this dynamic of splitting to Paul’s “inner adult” at an appropriate point in therapy. This understanding became a reference point to which I returned whenever he slipped back into patterns of self-hatred and self-rejection. An unexpected side effect for Paul, as with so many people, is that as his splitting resolved, and as he owned and integrated his aggression his chronic fearfulness greatly diminished. Disowned and disavowed aggression and anger are often a significant hidden source of chronic fear. In general, it is useful when working with chronic anxiety to look for split-off anger. On the journey toward reconnection with core expression and the life force, anxiety and anger are ultimately transformed into healthy self-expression, strength, and the capacity for separation/individuation.
As described above, splitting is fueled by the need of abused and neglected children to keep their attachment system intact. Children use splitting to manage the experience that their parents, who can sometimes be loving and upon whom they are completely dependent, are the same parents who are manipulating, neglecting, and abusive. Splitting results from the biological imperative that children experience to keep their attachment with their parents as secure as possible.
It was easier for Paul to recognize his rage about his father’s physical and emotional abuse. Less obvious to him was his anger toward his mother for her clinginess, chronic anxiety, and invasiveness. He was able to recognize and begin to integrate his anger toward his father earlier in his therapy, but it was not until later that he could recognize and acknowledge anger at his mother. In his mind, she had been the good parent, and as he acknowledged his anger at her he at first felt guilt and then the fear of losing the sense of close connection he had with her. Each step that children take toward individuation is ultimately a psychological step away from their parents. Unfortunately, Paul’s mother experienced his healthy drive to individuate as his abandoning of her. Lacking emotional maturity, she reacted by undermining and covertly threatening him rather than by supporting his developing autonomy.
We can speculate that some of Paul’s chronic resignation came from his early incubation experience. It was also true that Paul’s attempts to establish his autonomy, particularly with his mother, were met with what he came to understand as his mother’s own abandonment reactions. She used fear and guilt to bind Paul to her. She would threaten him by saying or implying, “Okay, you can go off on your own, but I may not be here when you come back.”
Because at an early age protest had been so unsuccessful, Paul had a hard time standing up for himself as an adult. This meant that co-workers would often foist unpleasant tasks on him, knowing that he would not protest. When served a bad meal at a restaurant, he could not speak up for himself and communicate his displeasure. In Paul’s inner world protest was experienced as dangerous and futile. He rationalized his lack of protest with “What’s the use? It’s not going to change anything anyway.”
When aggression and anger are split off and acted in, they are turned against the self in the form of self-hatred. Paul was filled with self-hatred but did not recognize it in his self-rejection for “never fitting in,” never feeling “smart enough,” or “worthy of relationship.” He had always felt like an outsider and hated and blamed himself for feeling that way. Paul felt shame and judged himself for his many symptoms; he was so used to feeling this shame and self-judgment that he did not recognize it as self-hatred. He also did not understand the original secondary gain of his self-hatred, which was to protect the attachment relationship with his parents.
Addressing his adult consciousness, I contextualized the bigger theme of self-hatred by explaining how it was an attempt to come to terms with and manage both his early trauma and his anger. It was useful to repeatedly name his self-hatred as it emerged and to support him to become more compassionate and accepting toward himself. I regularly pointed out the different forms his self-hatred took because it was so automatic and reflexive that at first, he did not recognize it for what it was; it had become part of his identity. I helped him see that he, like all children who experience trauma, abandonment, or rejection, had developed a pattern of blaming himself. Helping him to see that when he was a child he could not experience himself as a “good person in a bad situation” had a relieving impact on his negative sense of self. He came to see that he would never direct at anyone else the vicious messages that he routinely directed toward himself.
Paul primarily tended to act in, but some children, and later adults, identify with the “bad” aspect of the splitting and the seeming power it gives them, becoming abusers themselves. Until the splitting is resolved, the terrible choice is to identify as either victim or victimizer, prey or predator.
It is useful here to mention the narcissistic and borderline dilemmas. Though individuals with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders have seemingly easy access to their anger, their anger is a default emotion and not in service of separation/individuation. Their acting out of aggression is in sharp contrast to the integration of the healthy aggression that leads to individuation. Their acting out of aggression keeps them psychologically merged with, and re-enacting patterns learned with abusive/neglectful parents.
Paul, though in his late thirties, had had few friendships and no lasting intimate relationship. When not at work he liked to spend his time surfing the web and playing computer games. For years he had isolated himself, reflexively withdrawing from social contact. This lifestyle supported and reinforced his dissociation. Over time I gently encouraged Paul to challenge his withdrawn lifestyle. As he experimented with social connection, more sympathetic arousal inevitably surfaces. At first it took the form of increased anxiety, but as he became more in touch with his emotions, he became more aware of the anger he had not realized was there.
As can be seen in Figure 12.1, freeze, dissociation, and social isolation are the strategies of last resort when internal experience has become unmanageable and overwhelming. Paul came to see that underneath his frozen façade and cynicism was sympathetic high arousal that initially expressed as anxiety and later as anger—anger at the abuse from his father and the invasiveness of his mother as well as primitive survival responses related to his early incubation. Paul’s anxiety signaled that he was moving away from the known territory of his adaptive survival style to something new and unknown. Anxiety is often a signal of unrecognized and disowned emotions coming to the surface, particularly aggression and anger. As Paul’s sympathetic charge was freed from the depression and dissociation that bound it, he became progressively more aware of his anger. Having foreclosed anger for so long, he was afraid that if he allowed himself to feel it, he might become destructive. Anger becomes integrated on a psychological level by recognizing and owning it as one’s own rather than splitting it off and turning it against the self or projecting it. Physiologically, anger becomes integrated not by acting it out, as in beating pillows and screaming, but by identifying, containing, and tracking the energetic experience of anger in the body.
I helped him uncouple the fears he had about his anger from the experience of anger itself:
PAUL: All this anger that’s coming up is scary, and I don’t like it.
LARRY: I know you have a lot of fears and judgments about the anger that is starting to bubble up, but I’d like you to notice what the anger feels like in your body, separate from the ideas and reactions you have to it. See if you can just notice the energy of it.
PAUL: Long pause as he checks into his experience.… It’s not as scary as I thought. It kind of feels strong and expanded in my body.
LARRY: Are there any other words you can use to describe “strong and expanded”?
PAUL: Pause.… I feel warm, tingly, and … with surprise in his voice … big.
LARRY: “Warm, tingly, and big.” Pause.… What happens if you give that warm, tingly, and big feeling more time?
PAUL: Long pause; expressing surprise, and with a stronger and deeper voice.… It feels good and, strangely, my vision seems clearer.
One of the differences between traditional psychodynamic and NARM’s psychobiological working through of aggression is that in NARM, anger is tracked in the felt sense with nervous system regulation being continually addressed. It is difficult to integrate and embody the powerful energies of aggression and anger without a body-centered orientation. Anger, and the aggression inherent in it, is a bodily and energetic dynamic that, when integrated, is empowering. It is important, whenever possible, to explore the implicit intention driving the anger. There is always an implicit communication within anger: a communication to an environment that has failed to respond appropriately. Uncovering the implicit intention helps an individual understand what is needed for completion. It is also important to distinguish anger from blame. Though blame often has elements of anger within it, it is primarily a mental state and is ultimately disempowering.
As therapy progressed Paul became better at recognizing not only his anger but also the telltale signs that he was avoiding it. As Paul reconnected with his anger, I used techniques such as pendulation and resourcing to help him manage the anxiety that inevitably surfaced as disowned feelings and impulses emerged. In essence, for Paul, the perspective of the child consciousness could be summarized as follows: “My life emerged and met a rejecting and threatening environment. I used whatever strategies I could as a child to shut down my body and my emotions to survive. It was too painful and too frightening to feel. If I start to feel my body and my emotions, it will be too much. My needs and my rage will come out, and I might hurt myself or someone else.”
As I further explored Paul’s relationship with his father, he began to recognize his impulse to fight back against his father’s physical and emotional abuse. Over time, as Paul recognized and integrated his anger toward his father, he was able to connect with other feelings that he had also split off: his desire for his father’s love and approval and the sadness and grief he had about never having felt loved by him. Dissociation, apparent indifference, and unresolved anger had disconnected him from the unfulfilled desire for connection with his father.
Paul’s increasing awareness of and connection to his healthy aggressive impulses also served the process of psychological separation/individuation from his mother. He used his developing connection to healthy aggression in service of setting clearer boundaries with her, becoming emotionally and psychologically more independent. As his anger became integrated, Paul’s dissociation diminished, and he found himself progressively more able not only to identify what he was feeling physically and emotionally but also to feel more comfortable with interpersonal connection in general.
Though grief is not presented in Figure 12.1, grieving is an important element in the reconnection process. Grief is how human beings come to terms with irrevocable loss. It was normal and healthy that Paul would grieve the relationship he never had with his father. As he became increasingly present and connected, Paul also experienced short periods of grief about the lost years during which he was so disconnected from himself and others. This grieving is a normal reaction in the reconnection process, but it is important that it not lead to hopelessness and collapse. Becoming submerged in and too identified with grief can disrupt the reconnection process and reinforce the identification as the helpless child who needed a loving, attuned parent, as opposed to the adult who has the capacity to create healthy connections. Healthy grieving leads to reconnection; it has vitality and aliveness that contrast with the frozen, collapsed grief states that individuals with early trauma present at the beginning of therapy.
Initially, the life force expresses as healthy aggression. To review what we have already addressed earlier, the aggressive impulse is the biological expression of the basic needs for attachment, safety, and attunement. When the environment is misattuned, unresponsive, or threatening, infants experience distress. When the environment continues to be unresponsive, infants’ distress increases and escalates into protest. This initial protest is simply the infant’s way to get the environment to respond to his or her needs. Infants are hardwired to respond with protest when their needs are not being met. If protest does not bring about the needed response, the child’s distress escalates into anger and finally rage. The escalation continues until the need is met or until the child collapses into resignation. In some cases, the escalation of aggression on the child’s part is met with anger by the caregivers. This increase in threat will trigger instinctive responses involving collapse, freeze, and shut down. On an instinctive level children understand that to continue to protest is to risk encountering even more danger.
The life force energy described in Figure 12.1 is the same energy that fuels the separation/individuation process in the child. It is an energy that exists from the very beginning of life. It is the life energy that fuels the chick’s push to break out of the egg and propels babies to be born. It is the physiological energy that later fuels psychological processes. Developmentally, it is healthy aggression and self-expression that lead children to want to feed themselves, tie their own shoelaces, and progressively explore the world on their own. When this healthy, natural aggression and self-expression are short-circuited through lack of attunement, abuse, and neglect, it becomes coupled with fear, shame, and guilt. When this happens, the separation/individuation process is disrupted and children fail to psychologically individuate.
The core energy that is accessed in the healing process supports the psychological individuation that did not take place to an adequate degree in earlier years. It is a psychological axiom that true intimacy is impossible without adequate autonomy. Increasing connection to the life force allows individuals to experience themselves as progressively independent of the shame- and pride-based identifications that developed out of their personal histories, helping them to become more autonomous and in turn to have a greater capacity for attachment and intimacy.
In the course of therapy, as Paul integrates his aggression, he begins to speak out more at work, in personal relationships, and even in impersonal situations such as dining in a restaurant. As he becomes more comfortable with his healthy self-assertion, the original fears that he might act out inappropriately and that protest is futile and even dangerous lessen considerably. Paul begins to wean himself from his obsession with computer games and becomes less self-isolating. Toward the end of therapy, he starts having his first ongoing relationship with a woman.
The growth process is not complete until clients learn how they have incorporated and perpetuated the original environmental failure into their bodies, identities, and behaviors. As we experience the development of personal agency, we come to see that the rejection we fear from the world has already happened. As children it was devastating. For adults, however, as the core life force is integrated, we experience ourselves as increasingly less dependent on our environment in order to express our core or more authentic self.
Nelson Mandela addressed the fear of living life to its full potential when he quoted Marianne Williamson in his 1994 inaugural speech:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
It may come as a surprise that living life in a full and expanded way is one of the most difficult challenges we face as human beings. Growth and change happen as connection to the five core capacities of connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality is established or strengthened. Identity distortions dissolve and self-regulation is reestablished. In a healing cycle, connection to our body, emotions, and life force allows for greater connection with others, and in turn, connection with others supports greater connection to ourselves. The connection that has always been our deepest desire is now no longer our greatest fear.