Inside the NARM model | Maya Vaughan | #054 Mastering Change

Many of us carry wounds from not being fully seen or held as children and those early patterns can quietly shape how we relate to connect and protect ourselves as adults. Today on Mastering Change I'm joined by Maya Vaughan, Director of Training at the NAMM Training Institute who teaches the Neuroeffective Relational Model a non-pathologizing deeply relational approach to healing developmental trauma through safe attuned connection. Here's my conversation with Maya, welcome to the Mastering Change podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you. So if you could just in your own words Maya just give me a little bit of background about yourself and how you found yourself as you said you were just about to say like here to me really, to ultimately and the two words that you're doing in the trauma in the trauma space. I think my journey in trauma healing began way before my professional journey in trauma healing. I think I was kind of born with an interest in human psychology and human interactions and what it means to be human and especially the relationships between humans and how they have the potential to wound and to heal and I think that's something I'd kind of always carried with me and just seemed to know that my early childhood experience is being left and rejected by a father and the kind of heartbreak that I somehow could even plug into as an adult that painful heartbreak and what it led me on to do how that heartbreak caused me to basically be running running my whole life running away from the grief and I somehow kind of a part of me before I'd even begun to understand really psychology or the mechanics of developmental trauma. I somehow had this knowing that moment or series of moments had kind of indelibly impacted me before I even understood about ACES and childhood trauma and how it had kind of sent my nervous system into a kind of dysregulated performative state where I was like see me see me let me show you that I can dazzle you and charm you so you don't ultimately break my heart and I think that kind of knowing is what led me to start to research make sense of air I tried a number of different therapies psychotherapies many of which are the reason why I don't do or offer professional courses in those types of therapies which I experienced on the whole as being quite gaslighty and not very attuned or resonant with my experience and so I found myself in lots of so called very highly recommended therapeutic psychotherapeutic approaches with highly recommended psychotherapists or psychoanalysts and I think thanks to my mother I always had quite a strong instinct about what felt safe and what didn't and on the whole I experienced those sessions from quite a young age actually is not very safe and not holding and not very relational and kind of made me question my own truth and which you know a bit of challenge is good but this overanalysis just instinctively I kind of knew this isn't this isn't the way to integrate and heal my past experiences I need something that honors the whole person and makes me feel safe enough to unfurl it feels instinctively true to me and coming into connection with myself so I think in a way those missteps actually are what really led me to search for something that was much more profoundly relational and holding and that led me to norm I'd already been working as an attachment specialist and as a relationship coach which is I didn't actually say what I did I went straight into my trauma healing journey didn't I I just realized that so I just pause here and just yeah yeah okay so here and now I'm a director of the trauma training institute which specialises in offering professional courses to mental health practitioners in norm it's a strange acronym it stands for the Neuro-effective relational model it was devised by the most profound and brilliant clinician called Dr. Lawrence Heller in the US I'll come back to that so I'm currently that's my current incarnation I'm a director of the institute and I also work as a non-fereps and a relationship coach and I draw from emotionally focused couples therapy which I've done lots of trainings in and I draw from norm and I kind of combine them in my work with individuals and couples with this attachment lens and with this profoundly non-pathologizing relational approach so that's what I do I segueed out back to yeah so how did you come across norm then and why was it so different to the other modalities that you'd kind of tried to use I came across an arm initially because a very close friend and colleague of mine who I'd been on the kind of trauma healing journey with for many years he was a he's a psychologist he's now the clinical lead actually for my non-professional trainings in the UK but he'd been saying to me for ages my this model just encapsulates all that we're looking for not only does it have a brilliantly simplistic and yet profoundly deep because human experiences complex but a really clear way of understanding the mechanics of developmental trauma how our early experiences imprint us and so that's one piece so it's a very clear comprehensive framework which helped me make sense of this instinct I'd had right from word go that this early heartbreak had led me to operate in ways that wouldn't were not serving me dysregulated anxious efforting constantly needing to prove fixing and I kind of had this instinct and then the norm framework just profoundly made sense to me it just fitted a kind of knowing and gave me even more depth that's the framework and then the practice of norm is so profoundly relational and non-pathologizing and non analytical and very kind of present process that the experience of receiving an arm session and giving one is so profoundly connecting that once I kind of started to step into it and understand it and begin to train in it and receive sessions in it and I still receive sessions in it and it's still the best model I found for helping me and my clients to come into connection with ourselves in real time and when we find that home base that's the anchor from which everything else flows and it feels a bit magical but there's actual tools obviously that are happening in the space very precise tools so how does it what so how does it work what do you what is it what does it entail and to have a norm session for example yeah great question there's a way of understanding the mechanics of developmental trauma like I said and how it how we understand it is that we adapt as children to survive the profound pain of not being met emotionally in the way we need to and we're not talking necessarily about the sharp end abuse and neglect we're talking about practically every single one of us is touched in some way by not being optimally held as children and I'm looks at it in terms of our core needs connection, attunement, autonomy so that's the kind of ability to be set free in the world and to feel safe to individuate and to love sexuality for us to be able to enter the world open-hearted without this kind of conflict so we understand those emotional core needs and we have a way of observing the patterns that clients might fall into depending on where the rupture took place in their lives at what stage in their developmental journey the type of rupture so there's that's the kind of theory so we've got constantly in our minds as practitioners a kind of sense of what survival pattern our clients might be wrestling with that gets in the way of them connecting to themselves and living with what we call full aliveness so that's the theory but the practice is creating a very relational attuned non-pathologizing space between the therapist and the client ie kind of offering in the space those core emotional needs that may not have been met so it's a kind of corrective experience energetically in the therapeutic space and then the interventions are totally client-led so you start every now session with a question what is it you most want for yourself what what would feel like a good result if you were to walk out of this session with me let's let's be ideal let's be imaginative and you know that a lot of people have never been asked. what their deepest desires are. And as we start to land in that, most people more or less start to touch on very similar things. Freedom, ability to breathe, feel at ease in the world, comfortable, without anxiety, without fear, connection to self, there'll be very common comments around what we most long for, which is to feel connected. You know, it comes in all different phrases and guises. So once we have that desire, it becomes what we call the red thread through which all non-sessions follow. And so we then just get curious, let's explore like what's getting in the way of you feeling connected to self or without anxiety or whatever they've named as their deepest desire. And that's when, up comes all these patterns that we adapted. Sorry, adaptations, I should call, or what we call survival patterns, that we adapted to survive the pain of not being held by our caregivers. So that sounds really, I completely understand it and kind of when, so let's say I'm saying I don't want to feel anxious and anxiety is a big issue for me and you kind of relate that back to my, something that the rupture that happened in my childhood and then this survival pattern or the adaptation that's happened in my adult life. What, because naming it and kind of intellectualising it, understanding it intellectually is one thing. But then how do I move on from, how do I move forward from that? Then brilliant question. I might have miscommunicated, we actually don't intellectualise in arm and we don't name in arm. So the practitioner is holding that hypothesis in the background. But we're not telling a client where what's happened, we're not actually necessarily even spending a lot of time in the backstory or the ruptures because we understand in arm that everything that's getting in the way of connection to self, these early adaptations, although they happened in our childhood and the driver for these adaptations which I haven't mentioned is all around fear of attachment loss. So if you're not met optimally, what a child will do is it will in order to hold on to the attachment with the parent or the caregiver in order to survive, they will turn on themselves and they will disconnect from their own authenticity, whether it's their need for attunement, to feel safe, individuation. So yeah, those are the mechanics of it, but we're not analysing that or even naming it in an arm session. All we are doing is inviting a client to tune into what they most long for for themselves and then we get curious what's getting in the way and we don't we don't dig, we just let things emerge and what will invariably happen is in our inquiry and as the practitioner we're like a still pond just reflecting what we're seeing. So if I were to ask you, Araminta, what is it you most long for for yourself? What would feel like a wish come true? I'd say, right there, not to be so tired, but that's okay. So let's say anxiety is the piece and you say to be less anxious or and we wouldn't stop there. We would say and I'm curious if you were less anxious, what would that look like? So we start to land in like a positive longing, so you might say I don't know, I guess I'd feel more comfortable in my own body or I'd feel more easel or something like that and we'd land in what felt true for you and that could take by the way five minutes or five sessions really depends. We'd land in what felt true for you that kind of and you feel it and you see it in the client there's a kind of what we call a psychobiological shift, something starts to settle the eyes open, we start to feel a connection and we'll say it feels like we've landed on something and usually there's an agreement because what the what the practitioner's observing they always check they're never assuming does that feel right to you and if they say yes then we start to explore but again we're not analysing we're not putting theories we're letting whatever needs to surface come up and what we see is those early adaptations that we take through our lives that no longer serve us although they did once they protected us from the pain show up and what we'll see is you'll start to say I'm curious what's happening right now. I'm starting to feel a bit stressed I feel like I can't breathe and my breathing's getting shallow okay let's be with that and you're you're also not trying to get anyone anywhere in arm because the idea of a kind of destination is getting in the way of their own on furling and so we'd go on a curiosity led journey without naming without analysing and the client starts to get a felt experience of the contrast between being in connection where they can breathe more deeply something feels true that eyes brighten they feel more settled in their seat to disconnection where they start to contract their breathing starts to go more shallow they start to have fear, fear-based or shame-based thoughts the inner critic comes up and the non-practitioner just keeps reflecting and I'm curious what what's happening for you right now oh there's this thought okay and how does it feel to notice that oh actually there's something that feels a bit more easeful just by naming it okay so as we start to track you're tracking the client a little bit like an organism on a rock you know like an an enemy on a rock ah now you're on furling now you're in a connected place what do you know to see ah something happened the contraction and the contraction is the adaptation and we start to get to know it right here right now there's something that keeps getting in the way of your being just fully dropping in an authentic place it's quite amazing to track and then the client gets better at tracking it and that gives them more anchoring in their own connected lifeless so do you explain to the client what you're that you are tracking them then that you are seeing is they say oh look they've contracted an egg and there's must be something that's come up for you now and then yeah well they get because it's so felt it's such a a present process experiential non-analytical experience that if you're reflecting the client correctly they'll be able to name without giving it psych education words or they'll just say yeah I feel a bit heavier suddenly I can hear the birds singing outside my breath my breathing feels a bit deeper and then you'll say okay can can we just hang out here for a bit and then a contraction will start to come I'm curious something happened oh I've just had this memory of and then or they'll link it to something self-shaming or something and as they see what they do to themselves so much agency comes online it's like oh I'm not a victim of this thing I don't understand I can see what's happening because we're entering it from a very non-analytical place a very experiential place even though the theory is quite you know complex and what kind of clients and do you think would suit this kind of model best I mean because I think out there's I know you said that there are definitely some models that work for some people and some that don't and I think that from my experience I've had I've heard a lot about an arm especially in the addiction world I've heard some really I think I said this to you before I've heard some really really positive feedback from people in the addiction world who said that Narm has literally saved their lives and you know it's been revolutionary revolutionary um revelatory either way all of those things that all of those things I wish I could concur with yeah one of those words is there and and from what I'm hearing with you and obviously you've got the trauma training institute so obviously complex developmental trauma is something where you would see really it's beneficial and you mentioned this kind of attachment wound trauma being and I wonder if I'm not how many more I mean that's pretty much everything isn't it anyone with an attachment wound is very often what we see showing up in the therapeutic space anyway but is there a specific you know personality type or that would benefit from this kind of a great question I mean I guess it's it's a model that is designed for healing and integrating there's lots of names for it developmental trauma relational trauma attachment wounding complex PTSD in my view most of us are touched in some way or impacted in some way by not being optimally held as children and so we adapted to survive and I'm not talking about there is the sharp end of course there's the sharp end but most of us you know in that bell curve of something not being fully met because our parents were humans and us as parents are humans and we're going to mess up and it's the nature of the human experience I think so I guess I personally feel that most people people in the bell curve of wrestling with kind of human pain, challenges where they don't feel that they are fully at ease with themselves or in their relationships, which is most people benefit from norm. The in terms of like the more classic trauma, developmental trauma versus shock trauma, PTSD versus complex PTSD, norm is not designed for working with shock trauma. There's other much better approaches like somatic experiencing or more body-based bottom-up experiences because with shock trauma, it's going into the part of the amygdala that you know is not about distorted identity, it's not about heartbreak, it's about shock into the system. And the body-based approaches work really well with that. But any trauma that is relational in its essence, that is at its core, has some kind of attachment wounding or injury, whether it's sharp neglect or whether it's simply not being quite tended to in the way we need as children. Norm has a huge potential to heal and integrate the ways in which we're adapted to survive and free us to live more in connection with self and experience more nervous system regulation, more healthy attachment, more freedom to just be our authentic selves without that adaptation that says it's not safe to be authentic because when you were, you were dominated or told how to be or pressured to be something that in order to keep that attachment with your caregiver, you've closed your own authenticity in order to hold onto that attachment. And we see that a lot in the client work that when someone's wrestling with that particular survival pattern, they're naming what they most want, they're naming their authentic wish and very quickly a despair will follow, it's not possible. I feel suddenly, I feel numb, suddenly I can't seek, I can't think clearly, they get a bit misty or a bit resistant and you see it right here as adults, you can trace, ah, there was something very unsafe about staying in touch with your authentic self. So you reject, you kind of foreclosed it or disconnected from it. So when authenticity and connection is invited, it can feel very unsafe and you see that show up and you hold it. So tell me a bit about emotional focus, couples therapy and how that kind of interlinks with the work that you do with NAM in your training. Ah, yeah. Well, I, by the way, I don't teach the NAM professional training courses. I have a faculty that teaches it, psychotherapists, psychologists and I don't teach EFT either, but I've done lots of training in it and I bring it into my work with, with couples. They're really compatible in the both present process. They're not about analyzing or offering much psych education, although it can come into the work and it can feel useful. But with couples, when you're using EFT emotionally focused couples therapy, the emotions are the kind of driver in the room. So you're not talking about, you're not getting lost in content. Or just like NAM, you're reflecting what you're witnessing, what I call the emotional music. So you bring the emotion into the room and that becomes the kind of fuel for the couple to understand each other more deeply. Because when we stay with the content, we're not dropping into the vulnerable emotions that are driving the reactive cycle that couples get stuck in. So it has similar flavours, but I work quite, I tend to use EFT with couples and NAM with individuals. So that's interesting. So don't use NAM with couples, but you find both of the models similar and what I found really, it's emotional. I don't know much about emotional focus therapy actually. And it's almost, I've only ever had couple therapy a few times, but it's almost says that absolutely opposite of the emotional, of the couple therapy I had, which was as always in a couple of therapy sessions, like you bring in something that's happened that's emotionally charged into the session. And more often than not, the therapists that I've worked with have always wanted to kind of move away from that. I mean, that's not important. That kind of is not important. And so it sounds like the emotional focus couple of therapy is like focusing on the emotional charge that creates whatever the issue, the problem, the rupture is. So how does that benefit the couple then, like by staying with that emotion, staying with that height in the motion? Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. I mean, EFT has been statistically proven, I think, to be one of the most effective couples therapy models there is. And it draws actually from similar sources to NAM in their attachment theory is one of the main kind of bedrocks of both of them. So how does it benefit couples? But what we understand is what's really driving what we call the distress cycle, the chain reaction, something happens that triggers one partner. They have a felt sense inside of them. They tell themselves something about the relationship in that moment. If we slow it down, the trigger event is accompanied with a felt sense in the body, a contraction, something they tell themselves, you're a piece of SHIT or I deserve better. Or why am I always failing at this? There'll be something they'll tell themselves, either about themselves, about their partner or about the relationship. And then they do something with that meaning. They might retreat, they might get angry, they might withdraw, they might shout, they might blame, there will be some reactive behavior that is based on meaning making and vulnerable emotions, attachment fears. It doesn't feel safe here with you. And Dr. Sue Johnson really understood that. I think the real layers that drive the cycle. And so then they do something that then triggers their partner. Then their partner has a felt sense, a meaning making, their emotions then cause a protest reaction. And it's all driven by deeper emotions. And when couples come in and say we've got communication issues, it's like you don't have communication issues, you have emotional lack of safety issues. And these protest emotions of, I don't feel safe with you when you do that, it makes me feel this. That's what's driving the cycle. And if we don't drop down the layers and get curious about the emotions, like when you say or do that, you make me feel like this. And then I have this feeling and then in order to protect myself, I do this. If we don't understand it on an emotional level, we cannot transform the cycle. If we just stay with the content or we move away from it, we're not going to transform anything. And so we have to bring that emotion into the room because then the other partner will go, oh wow. So when I leave the room because I'm feeling engulfed and stressed and feel like I can't do this. I'm failing at this or you're too much. That makes you feel like this. Then you feel left alone and abandoned and then you tell yourself this and then you do this. Oh my gosh. That's where you want to get them to, where they can have understanding and compassion. And if you don't say with the emotion, the whole, the whole fuel of the distress is being missed. Hey, that makes real good sense. So therefore, so I think I misunderstood a bit and I think you were staying with the content of the argument, for example, but it's actually the, what does the argument, how does the argument make you feel ultimately? It's like how does what and what like so if the argument has resulted in one getting angry and the other storming off, how did the one getting angry made the one storming off feel first and how did the guy storming off with the girl storming off make the person who was getting angry feel because both of those feelings will be ultimately the feelings that they're probably replaying from their childhood. Essentially. Yeah, could be childhood or it could just, yeah, often, you know, if you've had difficult childhood experiences, you're likely to be more reactive because that kind of internal safety is maybe a bit less, but it may also just be we're all looking to feel safe in our attachment relationships. It's a basic human longing. And so if our partners are doing something that we, we interpret as not feeling safe, feeling left out in the cold or not understood or not see all those emotional needs that we need as children, we also need as adults. And when we feel they're not being met in our relationships, we protest. And what does that protest behave? It looked like, oh, he slams a door. She goes quiet. And exactly what you said when she goes quiet or he slams a door, how does it make the other one feel? What do they tell themselves? So yeah, we absolutely bring the charge conflict into the room, but we don't stay in the content. We go beneath it and we try to understand the feelings underneath the content. And that's where the transformation happens because once the other feels compassionate, because you can feel compassionate, you can't feel compassion for someone just saying, whatever, like the content part of it, but actually you can feel compassion for someone saying, you know, they felt really sad when you left because I was alone, I felt alone, I felt abandoned or I felt whatever. it was, then people can start to feel compassion when you get seen by the other through eye, compassionate eyes, where you get seen, full stop, right? I think that's a point. You've named it. That's exactly the transformation. As we start to drop down the layers together and you hold the space and the other one starts to realise their partners not. I mean, of course, there are some cases where you've got personality disorders and you've got really problematic behaviors but on the whole in the average bell curve. As we start to name these emotions and we kind of elicit more vulnerable expressions like when you didn't take the garbage out, it made me feel like you don't care about me because I'd asked you to do it so many times and when you didn't, I thought you actually don't really value me and if you don't really value me, does that mean one day you could just get up and walk away? So exactly that as you start to get each partner to name the layers, it generates compassion and understanding and we start to realise they're not leaving the room because they're whatever I believe, they're leaving the room because in that moment they feel, oh no, I can never get it right, I'm always failing, I'm just going to try and protect myself and up until that point the other partners thought they leave the room because they don't give an edge I think. So all the assumptions start to melt and we use the charged conflict as the material for dropping down the layers. Makes a lot of sense, I really hear. Well, you know, I think so these two models of all the models that you've ever worked with, these two other models that you have seen the most transformation both in yourself and in clients that you've worked with then. Definitely, I mean I've only worked with, I mean my training is quite, you know, in terms of what I've experienced as a client and as a human in the world, I've experienced vast array of modalities. In terms of my own work, I sort after the models that spoke to me so it's not like I've trained in many different models but I can absolutely see in real time every day people genuinely transform me both in their relationships and in the individual work coming more into connection with themselves. So yeah, that's, it's very rewarding work and I try to let it in my marriage. Something that gets stuck. I mean, my marriage is what brought me to the emotionally focused work because I almost, I almost threw in the towel because I've been in this conflict pattern with my husband for so many years and I couldn't see a way out and all these approaches that look at the content or communication skills were not touching the sides. So I then had a kind of epiphany and I started to realise there's something underneath that long story short, I started to educate myself and that's what led me to relationship coaching and EFT and it's been a game changer. I've married 20 years and we're more deeply in love now than and for the first few years we were just butting heads because we didn't understand the deeper layers. That's amazing and I think, you know, even just listening to just you talk now, I couldn't really see how, you know, as I said, I've had various attempts at couple therapy and I'm really lucky that I guess that I live and breathe this world but I think being in relationship with someone is the hardest that, you know, for people with attachment for me, it's the hardest thing to do but it's also where we'll get the most healing, you know, because it is where where we will relearn, we will rewire those neuro pathways and it is also where we feel safest really to bring up those kind of behaviors and feelings and triggers etc. So being able to work with a therapist or a coach that can hold you in a safe space to work through that stuff I think is vitally important as well. So it's really really interesting. I might go and find some EFT therapy. Yeah, I mean what you just named about our relationships being the place where we can heal our wounds. That's why I do what I do because it was my own lived experience that transforming my marriage and making it a safe place was what actually healed my childhood trauma. I no longer was operating from that place of fear of rejection because I, not in the initial phase of my marriage, it took moving it to a safe place to heal the childhood trauma along with it but that's why I'm so committed to helping couples to transform and create what we call what EFT says all the time it's about creating emotional safety. That like you said our biggest shadows and our biggest pain come up in our attachment relationships but if we can make them safe by sharing funnrably dropping down the layers being willing to listen it has huge potential for our own healing journey more so than any therapy can give you. And have it and been seen and heard and accepted even in those kind of moments of fear, overwhelm, anger, whatever's come up with your partner and yeah and to work through that stuff to be honest I think is really really can be healing. So well my it's been an absolute pleasure having this conversation with you. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we, before we wrap? No I was just going to say that you know we at the institute we're currently we're offering professional training courses for mental health practitioners in Narm but we're in the process of developing a really exciting diploma course for body workers or others that haven't come from the kind of psychotherapy or counseling track to start learning and training in all the elements that form the kind of bedrockum of Narm from somatic neurobiology attachment, psychodynamic, the whole thing including more eastern approaches and more ancient approaches that had such deep understanding of human pain and healing and so that's something I'm developing which which we're quite excited about. It's not yet ready but it will be coming so watch this space and do check out. You know when that will be ready? We're hoping in autumn. Great. Yeah okay so fabulous. I feel really honored that you've made the space for me today. Love you. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]