Category: Transforming Trauma Podcast

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, host Sarah Buino facilitates an important discussion between NARM creator Dr. Laurence Heller and Dr. Christina Bethell, researcher, author, policy advocate, and professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Dr. Bethell is on the Board of Directors for the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) and is part of a team of trauma-informed advocates who developed the brief: A Trauma-Informed Agenda for the First 100 Days of the Biden-Harris Administration. Dr. Bethell is leading an effort to promote an agenda of healing and prevention through safe, stable, nurturing relationships, in policy and practice. She is currently involved in multiple research projects focusing on trauma healing, including an article with Dr. Heller, and how to scale trauma-informed trainings for health care professionals on a national level. 

Dr. Bethell has had the opportunity to testify before U.S. Congress advocating for trauma-informed care, and is working with members of the American Academy of Pediatrics to evolve the national conversation from our current understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress, to a greater focus on promoting relational health.  Dr. Bethell’s work has centered on creating the research base to “promote family resilience and parent-child connection, and looking at social determinants [for health] like alcoholism and mental health problems, emotional neglect, or emotional abuse.”

Dr. Heller and Dr. Bethell reflect with Sarah their shared focus on spreading effective trauma-informed training to helping professionals who work with clients and communities impacted by trauma. Both Drs. Bethell and Heller share their view of the importance of centering relational and somatic attunement when treating childhood trauma, creating a process that can be replicated, without being manualized. As Dr. Bethell describes, it’s necessary to identify the “common elements and principles of practice, and core competencies,” while honoring that relationships can never be taught in a protocol. This poses a challenge for NARM and other similar modalities that highlight and honor the full human experience, and promote a deeper understanding of nuanced and caring relationships. The pressure to achieve Evidence-Based status often leads therapeutic approaches to follow strict protocols that can lead clients – particularly those that have experienced complex trauma – feeling labeled, reduced, misattuned and even objectified. Dr. Heller shares his concerns about manualized therapies and also his mission of promoting NARM as a humane treatment to those that have experienced complex trauma.

Dr. Bethell suggests that, in fact, there is a need to “flip the script” on how we understand what is the most effective parts of Evidenced Based practices, and begin looking at the common principles and elements that create healthy relationships to support healing. She brings in the exciting movement toward centering medical care on therapeutic presence, and research that is demonstrating that compassion is actually at the center of all other interventions. As she says, “it’s kind of like rewiring Maslow’s hierarchy and putting the connection at the center.”  A theme throughout the conversation is the need to center ‘human-ness’ in the helping professionals’ presence, between the provider and the patient, as well as how the provider relates to themselves.

Drs. Heller and Bethell agree that there is a strong need for more trauma-education and normalization generally, so that as a society we recognize that childhood trauma happens to everyone (albeit in different degrees of severity), and that addressing one’s unresolved trauma is a necessary part of working as a helping professional.  As Dr. Heller states, “the people who are doing this kind of work and research are not acknowledging their own fears of connection, their own fears of vulnerability, their own issues with even having compassion for their own suffering.” To do this, providers, researchers, and policy advocates who are leading the trauma-informed movement need to be willing to be in touch with their own vulnerability, and willing to address their own unresolved trauma, rather than treat the topic of complex trauma as if it can be studied and implemented from a totally objective perspective. 

They close their conversation discussing the recent shifts within healthcare to assessing, treating and understanding trauma and resilience. They reflect on what is leading to these shifts, including more nuanced research in child and human development, advances in brain science, and re-focusing funding streams to address ‘diseases of despair’, such as addiction and behavioral health. This focus on trauma-informed care has led to the need for effective trauma trainings for helping professionals all over the world. Many helping professionals recognize the basis of health and resilience as being about connection and relationship, but they do not yet have the advanced clinical skills to implement the kind of changes to their practice that are needed. 

Drs. Bethell and Heller both agree the NARM Training Institute is at the forefront of what this trauma-informed training could look like for helping professionals from various fields. Dr. Bethell ends the episode with encouragement and a ‘call to arms’ for all NARM-trained, and other trauma-informed professionals, to step into places of leadership and bring their perspective and skills to healthcare, mental health, education and other social systems. As she describes, “[These systems are] aching for support and help on how to ground the concepts of healing, recognizing… developmental trauma, and doing something about it.”

“I remember asking my therapist, what does self-love even feel like? And I’d had fleeting moments of experiencing it. Now it just is. It’s just there. And that’s beyond any expectation that I ever thought I would have. And that’s what I think of when I think of “transforming trauma.”” – Sarah Buino

In this special year-end episode celebrating the first year anniversary of the Transforming Trauma podcast, our host Sarah Buino and NARM Senior Trainer Brad Kammer reflect on this first year of Transforming Trauma! 

Brad shares that when the NARM Training Institute was founded in 2018, the intention was “to do our part in bringing trauma-informed work to so many individuals, families and communities that are dealing with the effects of complex trauma.”  While the NARM Training Institute has been mainly focused on training mental health and other helping professionals in the NARM approach, they have also been committed to making NARM more accessible to those in need.

During a NARM Training in Chicago, Brad had the idea to create a podcast that would be widely available, free, and bring important messages about complex trauma to listeners everywhere.  He invited Sarah and together they worked toward creating a podcast that would capture the magic in the work to share with the world – and thus began Transforming Trauma!

Since January 2020, Transforming Trauma has had over 50,000 downloads in more than eighty countries, listenership has grown over 300%, and it has been ranked in the top 10 mental health podcasts on Apple Podcasts. 

Sarah and Brad reflect on the inspiring guests they’ve had on who have shared their expertise, dedication, compassion and heartfulness in their work of healing trauma.  They reminisce about their guests from within the NARM community who have shared with great passion how they are applying NARM in various ways.  They also express gratitude to their other remarkable guests, including several experts in the field of trauma-informed care, as well as several social justice advocates whose work relates to the cultural and systemic dimensions of complex trauma.  

They fondly reflect on the meaningful conversations and connections between NARM creator Dr. Laurence Heller, and the dedicated NARM Trainers who are bringing this work to communities around the world.  Sarah and Brad also share their deep gratitude for their Transforming Trauma production team.  

As Sarah and Brad celebrate their first year of the Transforming Trauma podcast, they express how moved and inspired they feel to know that in their very first year, Transforming Trauma has made such an impact on people’s lives.  With humility and excitement, they commit to continuing to use this platform to promote and support personal and collective healing of complex trauma.

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, our host Sarah Buino interviews NARM Practitioner and coach Iris McAlpin. Iris specializes in eating disorder recovery, complex trauma, and self-sabotage. Iris also hosts a podcast called Pure Curiosity which seeks to facilitate nuanced conversations about the human experience and de-stigmatize mental health challenges. Iris shares that NARM has changed her life in being able to notice the ways that she puts pressure on herself and the ways that she tells herself that she ‘should’ be showing up in the world. Her intention for this episode is for listeners to also notice and be able to soften around the pressure that they place on themselves. 

Sarah and Iris dive into how Iris began her work in eating disorder recovery, which began with her own healing and recovery from bulimia. Iris found that as she progressed in her recovery and was able to get control of the behaviors of her eating disorder, she began to turn her attention to her unresolved trauma, which was mostly relational in nature, that was at the root of the behaviors. NARM helped her to see this theme in a new way, as she came to understand that not only binging and purging, but “many other behaviors that we… throw under the umbrella of self-sabotage are really just coping tools,” for unhealed relational and attachment traumas. Iris saw that eating disorder behaviors are “a very ‘effective’ way to manage the dysregulation and… intense feelings that come up as a result of complex trauma.”  Iris has been impacted by the emphasis in NARM not being on the behavior of a person, but rather on the inner-state that is underneath, driving the behavior. 

To understand this more deeply, Iris takes the listeners through a deeper look at the trauma of diet culture, in which clients deal with intense self loathing and self hatred, shame of their bodies and body image, and obsessive thinking about food. Iris discusses the common understanding of eating disorders, and the misconception that they are driven by vanity. Iris sees this very differently, through the lens of complex trauma, and describes that “because we live in a culture with a lot of thin privilege and a lot of fatphobia, it has nothing to do with vanity… really it has to do with belonging.” She further specifies that even if there is a supportive community around the person struggling, the larger society still is not supportive. Iris shares that this desire for belonging is the key motivator for disordered eating, and until the client addresses this issue, the behaviors will continue.

Iris has found that NARM helps the eating conversations fade into the background, as individuals begin to place the emphasis on their relationship with themselves. She has found that to be true in her own recovery, sharing that “Anytime I was sort of trying to do a ‘frontal assault’ on the eating disorder, like trying to really focus on and dismantle that, it was kind of a trap for me.” Instead, she finds that by “working on other areas of my life, and examining those attitudes and beliefs and behaviors, it felt safer.” NARM has given her the context for this “ripple effect,” as she calls it, giving her a deeper understanding how, by attending to those deeper layers, we often find the behaviors organically begin to improve. 

Iris and Sarah go on to discuss the Autonomy survival style in NARM, and how this adaptive survival strategy results in a lot of self-sabotaging behaviors. “There’s a lot of pressuring of the self. There’s a lot of negative self-talk. There’s a lot of efforting and rebelliousness… not only rebelling against perceived authority, but also rebelling against our own internal goals and agendas, which is part of the formation of a lot of self-sabotage behaviors.” These self-sabotaging behaviors can cause a range of behaviors from food issues, to toxic relationship dynamics, to procrastination, to fear of success. Iris expresses that NARM has helped her to ground her work in the utility and intelligence of these behaviors, rather unconsciously shaming her clients (as they shame themselves) for having them. 

Iris shares several ideas of changes that she would like to see in the field of treating eating disorders. The first that she names is this shift away from focusing on eating behaviors, and getting to the deeper causes of those behaviors. Next, she would love to see trauma-informed models such as the NeuroAffective Relational Model, used in treating eating disorders. Finally, she is hopeful and interested in the re-emerging field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and feels that this treatment can have profound effects in supporting clients to recover from eating disorders when administered in a safe and therapeutic setting. 

The two discuss the pitfalls and trauma that is inherent in seeing progress — whether it be client progress, our own healing, or our cultural progress — as a one-way, linear process. NARM has given both Sarah and Iris a broader understanding of what progress means, and as Iris shares, allows her to see that our healing often happens through “hidden paths that we’re not able to see until much later.” 

The two end their conversation discussing one of the biggest learnings that Iris has gathered in her work with complex trauma; she acknowledges that doing this deeper level of work can feel really scary at times. She shares about her own experience of confronting her triggers, and how NARM has taught her to work with her fear by using curiosity to guide her. “I really see those triggers as an invitation to open.” This ability to see that nothing is ‘wrong’ with our survival styles, and instead look at our growing awareness of ourselves as an opportunity to learn and make different choices is central to the NARM process.

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, our host Sarah Buino is joined by therapist, social worker, and author Daniel Shaw to discuss his seminal book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Daniel explores the theme of traumatic narcissism from a developmental and trauma-informed perspective. In his work, he connects the challenging symptoms and behaviors of clients diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder to the deeper understanding that they were raised in a highly traumatic environment by narcissistic caregivers. His underlying message for listeners is that, “It’s important to understand what’s going on in the mind of the narcissistic traumatizer in order to help patients free themselves from those relationships, in order for therapists to help the patient, and in order for the patients to help themselves.”

Daniel began his research in social work after leaving a religious group that he participated in for thirteen years, and which he later came to identify as a cult. In this group, Daniel experienced traumatic abuse through the cult leader, who “needed to inflate their own narcissism by controlling others.” This dynamic is exactly what he came to see represented in the relational system of the traumatizing narcissist, which he identified as a “system of subjugation.”

Unlike perspectives that can ostracize or vilify narcissistic tendencies, Daniel’s perspective on narcissism is very similar to that of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM). Narcissism is understood to be a common trait that all personalities experience to some degree. While Daniel acknowledges that this trait can be quite harmless, for example “sometimes people are just a little more self centered”, his work focuses on the narcissistic person who is predatory in their behavior, and who seeks to establish relational dynamics in which they can control others “through belittling and intimidating and humiliating.” Daniel describes these individuals as highly seductive at first, and then after their initial phase of seduction others become subjugated to the narcissist. “So that person actually … comes to believe that they are bad and the narcissist is good. And the reason the narcissist is cruel to them is because of their badness.” He goes on to explain that the victim of traumatic narcissism is so affected by this relational system, that it is incredibly difficult to stop blaming themselves or feeling alienated from themselves. 

In a healthy parent-child relationship, the parent honors and understands a child’s natural dependency, and allows them to gradually grow more independent over time through healthy individuation. This healthy individuation celebrates the child’s growing independence, while also allowing the child to come back and check in to re-establish safety as they slowly venture farther and farther into the world. Daniel and Sarah come together with Daniel’s statement that “We are born completely dependent and there’s… no reason on earth why a child should grow up ashamed of that dependency.” However, the narcissist is not brought up in this healthy environment. Narcissistic parents resent the child’s dependency, shame them for it, and create a traumatizing environment in which the child’s dependency on their parent becomes the source of pain and suffering. These children often grow up with one of two outcomes: to become profoundly depressed with low self-esteem, or to take on aspects of this narcissism themselves and recreate relationships with this relational system of power-over and control through humiliation. As Daniel states, the traumatized child can then become the narcissist, who begins “disavowing and denying any kind of dependency, any kind of need, and associating [need] with shame. And then the person that they choose to relate to has to carry that neediness and that shame for them.”

Sarah and Daniel discuss the common thread in Daniel’s work and NARM. Much like in NARM, in which the therapists support clients to reconnect with their own agency, Daniel’s intention in working with people that have experienced narcissistic abuse is to help them “retrieve a faith in themselves that has been taken from them by the narcissistic abuser.” In both NARM and Daniel’s work, the therapist supports the client to raise their awareness of what has become internalized from their childhood abuse, including the vicious ways that these clients often degenerate and belittle themselves throughout their lives. This is a  “powerful moment” in the therapeutic process, as the client begins to recognize that they themselves have taken on the role of their abuser through their own self-objectification. 

Sarah then turns the conversation to the complexity of narcissism in a family system. Oftentimes, there is not only the traumatic narcissist who is creating relationships of subjectation, but there is also the covert narcissist, who is often the one that is standing by and watching what is unfolding, and not protecting the children from the abuse that is taking place. This person is essentially sacrificing the child to the relationship, which is a form of narcissistic abuse. Though there are common gender dynamics in these family configurations, both Sarah and Daniel are careful to note that these forms of narcissistic abuse are truly ‘gender blind,’ and can happen in any family system. 

Daniel describes the healing from these forms of traumatic narcissism he sees when the client is able to look at themselves without judgment, and with compassion for their own experience. This form of self-inquiry is about re-discovering their own relationship to themselves through compassionate understanding. Sarah and Daniel close by discussing the role of the therapist, and how therapists can support the client in this process of self-reflection through being fully attuned and letting them know that we are “in their corner.” If the therapist is able to do this, the therapeutic relationship then becomes a place where the client can begin to feel this unconditional, fully present relationship from another, so that they can begin to feel it for themselves. 

A much more in-depth look at the NARM perspective on narcissism is available through the NARM Masters Training on working with Personality Disorders.

“Our global future of healing… is in these kind of collaborative fields that we will bring these powers together and learn from each other — help each other to see the things that we are still not seeing ourselves and be a kind of a global healing force.” ~Thomas Hübl

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, Dr. Laurence Heller, the Creator of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is joined by Thomas Hubl, a teacher, author, and founder of the Academy of Inner Science and the Pocket Project. Thomas’ work combines somatic awareness practices, advanced meditative practices, and transformational processes that address both individual and collective trauma. Larry and Thomas discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the similarities between individual and collective trauma responses, and how their work overlaps in seeking to transform complex trauma through therapeutic, collective, and spiritual pathways. 

Thomas begins the conversation by sharing his own experience of quarantine, how it has affected him personally and in the work that he does. He discusses the shock and fear that were stirred by this need to adapt quickly, and the importance of supporting self-regulation, co-regulation, and group coherence in these transitions. Thomas’ organization found new ways to support his team in co-regulation by offering a space to discuss the difficulties of living in social isolation. Similarly, the NARM Training Institute adapted by moving online and launched the first NARM Online Basics Training, allowing over 130 students to connect to NARM teachings. 

The two agree that it’s very important to understand on both individual and community scales the way trauma impacts us all.  This brings the conversation to the ways that individual trauma responses take place within the larger context, or network, of the collective experience. Thomas discusses the cultural fragmentation that is happening in our collective experience through emerging themes of polarization and racism, and how this mirrors the individual psyche’s fragmentation in response to trauma. The two reflect on how though this polarization has always been there, it is also being exposed in a new way. Dr. Heller reinforces that though there is something “peeling back,” right now on a collective level that is exposing painful beliefs and polarization, there is also widespread, international interest in learning about trauma. Both Dr. Heller and Thomas have experienced a growing feeling that there is a “global community interest in healing.”

Thomas touches on the themes in his upcoming book on healing collective trauma, and his desire to create a deeper dialogue between what he calls the ‘scientific approach’ to healing trauma and a more mystical approach. His work supports the healing of European communities that were involved in WWII and the Holocaust, and focuses on “how the individual healing happens in a wider collective container.” This wider container is the focus of his work, and similar to the NARM perspective, he seeks to understand the root of the trauma rather than the symptoms (which can take the form of racism, political differences, economics, etc) on the surface of the collective experience. 

Both Dr. Heller and Thomas have worked with groups of people that come with “big scars,” or profound forms of collective trauma, such as the Palestinians and Israelis, Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, and the decedents of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi officers. They discuss the energy that forms in the larger container of these experiences, something that Thomas calls the “collective field,” and Dr. Heller names as a “heart space,” that opens up and supports the healing of everyone in the room. Dr. Heller’s NARM approach focuses more on individual healing while taking in and acknowledging the larger context, while Thomas’ work focuses on the collective experience but acknowledges and works toward individual healing as well. 

The two teachers uncover their mutual interests in the energetic fields of communities that have been through traumatic experiences, such as war or exploitation, and in exploring the “cultural architecture” in communities that can store trauma and unconscious collective material. Again and again, they uncover the mirroring between the way that individuals store and deal with trauma and the ways that communities do. This mirroring includes the numbness/denial of painful experiences, patterns of tension and collapse, fragmentation, and movements of the whole system toward healing or toward maladaptive ways of surviving. They both agree that though there is something really connecting about working within one’s own culture, it can also be difficult to have a true broader perspective. They share with each other their experiences of the impact and value of what unfolds when working together across cultures. Together they come to the vision that “That’s going to be our global future of healing, that… we will bring these powers together and learn from each other, help each other, to see the things that we are still not seeing ourselves.”

This episode concludes with Dr. Heller’s thoughts on the ways that a spiritual or mystical perspective can help us to understand narcissism, proposing the idea that narcissism begins the moment we begin to perceive our disconnection from the larger source (what some may call God or the universe, etc). Thomas reflects back this idea that we are always, on the deepest level, connected, but that we forget, or bury, the connection, and start to believe in an egoic sense that we have to get something from the environment. Larry and Thomas end by sharing their experiences of giving and receiving becoming the same thing through their teaching, and the circular way in which their hearts are both offered and filled by connection with themselves and others.