Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583944893 ISBN 13: 9781583944899

Publisher: North Atlantic Books, 2012

Written for those working to heal developmental trauma and seeking new tools for self-awareness and growth, this book focuses on conflicts surrounding the capacity for connection. Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others and the ensuing diminished aliveness are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model® (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that, while not ignoring a person’s past, emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional without making the regressed, dysfunctional elements the primary theme of the therapy. It emphasizes a person’s strengths, capacities, resources, and resiliency and is a powerful tool for working with both nervous system regulation and distortions of identity such as low self-esteem, shame, and chronic self-judgment.

About the Author:

Laurence Heller, PhD, is the originator of the NeuroAffective Relational Model©, a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma. He co-founded the Gestalt Institute of Denver and is a senior faculty member for the Somatic Experiencing Training Institute.

Aline LaPierre, PSYD, is founder and director of the NeuroAffective Touch® Institute and developer of NeuroAffective Touch® specializing in teaching the integration of therapeutic touch and psychotherapy. Dr. LaPierre is a graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, and The New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and is trained in many body-centered modalities, including Somatic Experiencing®, Continuum, Body-Mind Centering, acupressure, as well as craniosacral, deep tissue, and neuromuscular bodywork. Past faculty in the Somatic Doctoral Program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute (2000–2010), she is deputy editor of the International Body Psychotherapy Journal and vice president of the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP). A clinician, author, artist, and teacher, she maintains a private practice in West Los Angeles. For further information on NeuroAffective Touch®, please visit www.NeuroAffectiveTouch.com.

Review:

“Healing Developmental Trauma presents a comprehensive exploration of our deepest human urge. Seasoned clinicians Larry Heller and Aline LaPierre weave a rich and coherent synthesis of childhood development in the pioneering tradition of Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, and Alexander Lowen. This well-organized, valuable book offers easy-to-understand tools for all of us who are seeking a better understanding of our fundamental conflicts between oneness and separateness, dependence and autonomy. Healing Developmental Trauma provides clear guidance to help us hold, with knowledge and self-compassion, those seemingly irreconcilable opposites and is a vital and accessible map supporting emotional maturity and psycho-spiritual growth.”
—Peter A Levine, PhD, author of In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness and Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Laurence Heller, PhD and Aline LaPierre, PsyD's Healing Developmental Trauma provides a method that blends bottom-up and top-down approaches to regulating the nervous system, and provides the NeuroAffective Relational Model which focuses on maximizing client strengths and resiliency to integrate physical and emotional connections in the body.”
—Midwest Book Review