Category: Transforming Trauma Podcast

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.  

“The relational dynamics that NARM is speaking to are so rooted in our biology and our relationships and our everything, our connection to the sacred; everything is informed by these principles.” ~Dr. Mazen Atassi

In this episode, Transforming Trauma host Sarah Buino speaks with Mazen Atassi, naturopath and NARM Practitioner, about how he uses NARM principles to support psychobiological healing in his medical practice. Throughout the episode, Sarah and Mazen explore the idea that NARM is for everyone and they take a closer look at how Mazen has applied NARM in the naturopathic realm. 

Mazen is passionate about the relationship between mental and physical wellbeing, a critical link that he says traditional mechanistic traditions often overlook in their response to illness. In his search for additional supportive modalities with which to treat clients, Mazen discovered the NeuroAffective Relational Model, NARM. For Mazen, the NARM model honors the somatic, bottom-up processing of the body, and also brings a needed top-down element that focuses on a crucial component: the relationship to self. The model’s approach to addressing complex trauma and re-establishing self-compassion align with Mazen’s healing philosophy. He shares his experience utilizing the tools the NARM model provided him and how the tools support two key naturopathic principles: Tolle Totem, treating the whole person, and Tolle Causam, address the root cause of disease. 

Mazen shares how the internal chaos from complex trauma can lead to a range of psychological and physiological symptoms, from anxiety, depression, and addiction, to digestion issues, migraines, auto-immune disorders, and more. In his practice with his clients, he has used NARM, in addition to his other tools, to intentionally bring organization to the order of therapeutic interventions. He has found it most effective to start with counseling to explore the client’s relationship to themself and their self-worth, and then move into other direct interventions that address their symptoms. Mazen credits the NARM model for supporting his clients in reconnecting to their self-compassion and resilience. This reconnection to the self can serve as a pathway to reclaiming optimal physical health.

Throughout the episode, Sarah and Mazen also discuss the stigma surrounding mental health in the Muslim community, of which Mazen is part. The pair share that within practiced religion, there can often be cultural dynamics, generational trauma, and spiritual bypassing that can fragment a person’s relationship to self within these systems. Mazen shares how he’s been able to employ his NARM skills and shared religious heritage to breach barriers with some of his Muslim patients. The resulting intimacy allows communication to flow freely and liberates clients who might not otherwise seek help. “If we open ourselves up to that, it’s not even that we’re doing anything. It’s like we are sharing in this gift of life and this healing, you know? And it’s such a beautiful thing. It’s like a springtime in every session. It’s like this rebirth.”

Mazen shares with listeners his hope for how NARM can touch more than just those in the clinical space. “I hope [NARM principles] can be underlined and emphasized to the greater population as a way of creating a conscious culture of a healthy civilization…These principles are crucial, and they’re not just for the clinical space.” The episode concludes with Mazen sharing moving stories from both his practice and his own NARM training experience.

“It’s about really getting into that experience of compassion for myself, my people, for our journey, for what it means to adjust within… all those different layers.” ~ Lynn Feinberg

In this special “High Holidays” episode of Transforming Trauma, host Sarah Buino welcomes guest Rabbi Lynn Feinberg, the first female Jewish Rabbi in Norway, as well as NARM Practitioner, to reflect on her research into intergenerational trauma for second and third generation Holocaust survivors in Europe.  One of the tenets of NARM training is the idea that a practitioner must first attend to their own trauma before employing the model in practice with clients. For many, that means an exploration of patterns left-over from unresolved early trauma, including any cultural, historical or intergenerational themes. 

Lynn, who is the daughter of a Norweigan Holocaust survivor, certainly has been on this journey. While she is a Norweigan citizen and lives in Oslo, she has spent time living abroad in Israel, Denmark and the US, and has focused professionally on advanced degrees in Judaism, psychology and feminist spirituality. 

One of her main areas of focus is on belonging. As the only Jew in her school and friend groups growing up, from early in her life Lynn reflected on the differences being Jewish and the unique challenges she faced due fitting in. Similarly, due to her father being a Holocaust survivor, her family’s relationship to their Jewish identity was complex. So while she officially belonged to the larger Norweigan culture, she says that it “was not quite mine.”  As she got older she came to the realization that there was a whole other culture, her Jewish identity, in which she had no accurate mirror from anyone around her.  Her current research is “really getting into that experience of compassion for myself, my people, for our journey, for what it means to adjust within [to] all those different layers.”

Lynn quickly began to realize that there were invisible forces that were impacting people like her, second and third generation Holocaust survivors that no one was talking about.  Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust (“Shoah” in Hebrew), she recognized an initiation, a journey of liberation in facing and resolving the intergenerational and cultural trauma.  “Trauma integration also has an aspect of initiation in it…A trauma that’s not healed can be likened to an initiation that never was fulfilled.” Lynn reflects that she has been on this journey of “grounding myself in my own story and…owning myself in a larger perspective and from a more historical perspective…to this collective trauma story.”  

In NARM terms, Lynn says she had a “big aha” recognizing that this journey is about “disidentifying” from her historical trauma story.  As she is currently writing her PhD thesis, she states “it’s also about bringing in a larger story so that your story can be held in a larger story. And the more you can contain that larger story, the more you can also relax in your own story.”

One of the challenges for Jews living for thousands of years in diaspora has always been the conflict between adaptation to modern ways versus adherence to traditional ways. Having lived and studied in the United States has allowed Lynn to compare and contrast how Jews in Europe and Jews in America have adapted differently to life post-Holocaust amidst undercurrents of antisemitic policy. Sarah and Lynn connect the collective Jewish experience of historical and intergenerational trauma with those suffered by Black Americans and other Indigenous cultures living within the confines of colonial/Western structures. Woven into these collective experiences are personal stories of survival and assimilation in the face of structural othering and gaslighting. But as Lynn points out, Post-Traumatic Growth is disrupted when marginalized groups continue to experience ongoing trauma and the dominant culture refuses to address the wounds. 

The episode concludes with Lynn comparing a cyclical view of intrapersonal and intergenerational healing against the Western notion of a singular, linear fix. “I think that’s what’s so brilliant with the NARM process,” she says, “is this seeing the hardship for what it is and recognizing the depth of it.” Lynn has found NARM to be an ideal platform with which to explore deeper into her historical and intergenerational trauma and begin to “disidentify” from the unresolved trauma patterns, thereby reclaiming deeper authenticity within herself.

“We can safely say that that Self in its undamaged state is in everybody.” ~ Dr. Richard Schwartz, Founder of Internal Family Systems

“There’s a part of us that always remains undamaged.” ~ Dr. Laurence Heller, Founder of NeuroAffective Relational Model

Transforming Trauma host Sarah Buino facilitates a ground-breaking discussion between Richard Schwartz, PhD, founder of the Internal Family Systems model (IFS) and Laurence Heller, PhD, founder of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM).  Pioneers in the mental health and trauma fields, Drs. Schwartz and Heller discuss each other’s work and reflect on the intersections of the IFS and NARM models.

While many think of IFS and NARM as being models for trauma, Drs. Schwartz and Heller acknowledge that the similar focus of both IFS and NARM is truly on the Self, that internal place within us all that provides the foundation for our lives despite the complexity of wounding and traumas that one has experienced. Although aspects of ourselves can become damaged and distorted by trauma, Drs. Schwartz and Heller both agree with a non-Western perspective that the Self “in its undamaged state is in everybody” (Schwartz) and “always remains undamaged.” (Heller).  Dr. Heller says, “I talk about the spontaneous movement and all of us is towards healing connection…Our role as therapist is to support an organic coming back to the source, going back to the deeper connection. And so the NARM work explores what gets in the way of that kind of integration.”  Both IFS and NARM are oriented around supporting the organic process of individuals returning to their authentic selves; in this way, they are also models for healing complex trauma.

Dr. Heller shares with Dr. Schwartz that throughout the years of teaching NARM, many people have remarked on the similarities between the IFS and NARM models. This feedback fueled the intention for bringing Drs. Schwartz onto the Transforming Trauma podcast to give an opportunity for the two to reflect on these important therapeutic models. As they get further into their discussion, they find agreement on many areas and recognize that while they use different language, they are often referring to similar concepts.  Within the frame of each model, they explore the role of the body and somatics, attachment theory, psychopathology, family systems work, the therapeutic relationship, spirituality, and more.

One interesting area they discuss is about parts work. While IFS is a parts-based model, focused on the three main parts of exiles, managers and firefighters, NARM uses a more general perspective referring to the two different aspects of self, child consciousness and embodied adult consciousness. As Dr. Heller says, “we disconnect certain important elements of who we are from our consciousness. And generally then later those foreclosed aspects of ourselves return in the form of various kinds of symptoms…which are artifacts of the child consciousness. [NARM] teaches people how to support the development of the embodied adult consciousness.”  Speaking to the 3 main parts in IFS, Dr. Schwartz talks about the firefighters and managers, two forms of protection which protect against old wounding (the exiles). “Firefighters are trying to fight the exiles’ pain and they do it in contrast to the managers…They take you out of control. They are very impulsive and they don’t care about the collateral damage that you do to your body or your relationships. They just know they’ve got to get you out somehow. So most symptom patterns in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], I could give you this alternative explanation for, in terms of which protectors are clustered.”

One area where Drs. Schwartz and Heller strongly agree is the importance of the embodied state of the therapist as an essential component to supporting the healing of complex trauma. From the IFS lens Dr. Schwartz shares, “Clients’ protective parts can immediately sense the confidence and the safety [of the therapist] and it starts to resonate with the client.” From the NARM lens Dr. Heller shares, “the level of integration that the [therapist] experiences has so much impact then on the therapeutic relationship.” Both express concern over some of the mostly widely used psychotherapeutic models like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Exposure Therapy and EMDR, and the need for more embodied, relational models – like IFS and NARM –  that focus on the role of the therapist-client dynamic in addressing complex trauma.

This engaging discussion reinforces what many students have said to Dr. Heller over the years that there are many similarities between IFS and NARM, despite Drs. Schwartz and Heller never meeting until this podcast recording. There is a feeling of an important coming together as these two pioneers in their field reflect on their 40+ year careers, find common ground and mutual appreciation. At the end of their discussion, Dr. Schwartz shares: “It’s great for me to find kindred spirits. There aren’t that many of us that think this way.”  

As their engaging discussion concludes, the sense is that this could be the beginning of a meaningful, powerful relationship between two very important therapeutic models. What might the future hold for IFS and NARM working together for bringing healing to our world?

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Ron Kurtz / The Hakomi Institute

The Gestalt Institute Of The Rockies 

Alexander Lowen / The Alexander Lowen Foundation

Conversations with Alanis Morissette – Episode 9