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Hello Substack Pals! We’re getting close to wrapping up our first read-a-long and it’s been so wonderful getting to engage and share in this work with you. I’d love to hear from you about what you liked, what you wish were different, and ideas for future book clubs (or other ideas!).

On TikTok, many of you have expressed a desire for deeper support and connection in your personal growth journeys. This inspired the idea of the “Self Help Drop Out Club”—a space for those who want to move beyond quick-fix advice and dive into meaningful, lasting transformation - a mixture of a community chat space and live meetings. If this resonates with you, let me know in the comments or reply directly. Together, we can create something truly supportive and connected.

Be sure to scroll to the bottom for our live book club meeting date and link!

Also - new this week, I added a summary! I know for some of us, 25 minutes is way too long to be able to listen to/take in all at once. So if you, like me, enjoy a shorter summary to process and then come back later to the longer post, scroll down to the bottom!

Now, onto our transcript this week:

Welcome back for our read-along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we're going to be exploring Chapter 7, the NARM Emotional Completion Model.   And as a reminder, I'm here recapping these chapters for you, whether you're reading along with me or you're just listening along. I want to make this information more accessible so that you can take it and apply it to your life. Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work in this way. Let's dive in.  

So as you may remember from our earlier discussions together, when we are children, we are biologically wired to stay in connection to our caregivers above all else. We rely on our caregivers to love us, support us, and provide a safe and caring environment where we can learn and grow and develop. And when our environment is not able to provide that to us and our caregivers are not able to provide that to us for whatever reason, it is the most heartbreaking experience because we won't expect that from our caregivers. We expect our caregivers to love us and show up for us.  And when they aren't able to do so, when we aren't able to safely attach to them, when we aren't able to safely develop and grow and be curious and have emotions, it is so devastating. It is hopeless. It is helpless.  

And we will have this experience of really, really deep despair.  And so, of course, as children, living with that deep despair just feels completely intolerable.  

As adults, at the very least, when we experience heartbreak, we have this ability to understand it, to have some cognition about it and to feel our way through it. But as children, we can't conceptualize that maybe our parents are having a hard time or our caregivers are having a hard time.  Instead, it feels like something must be wrong with us.  And so, of course, we would disconnect from our emotional experience to prevent a deeper feeling of loss. And when we do that, we disconnect ourselves from the full vitality and connection of life. But that's what we had to do to survive.  

When we get into our adult life, those survival strategies don't magically disappear.   And so we're trying to navigate a life where we want to feel fullness, connection,   love, aliveness, but we had to disconnect from that. And that is what can lead to us feeling so stuck and so dissatisfied in our lives. Emotions are such a central part of how we understand ourselves, how we create meaning in our lives,  and how we connect with others and navigate the world.  

And so if we learned that it wasn't safe and we had to disconnect from our emotions,   then we are missing a key part of our experience. That is why people who identify as intellectualizers, though they might understand everything very clearly, still feel stuck because they have that disconnection from their emotional experience.  

And often, if we had to disconnect from our emotions, it means we disconnected from our body and the sensations there as well.  And that's often where we see that freeze or that functional freeze of the nervous system where we're going through life, but we feel numb or disconnected from ourselves.  

So, for example, in our early lives as children, we are crying because we don't have the ability to regulate ourselves as babies because we're stating that we need something from the environment.  And in a healthy, securely attached environment,   the child will be responded to and the need will be met. And that emotion of distress or need or whatever it is, feels resolved and completed. And we can go back to feeling regulated and exploring and playing and connecting.  

But if we live in an environment that can't meet our needs, then we experience an environmental failure or a rupture.  In that case, what we will learn is that it's not okay to have needs.  Maybe my caregiver comes and they're upset, or my caregiver comes and they're withdrawn, or they don't come at all.  So over time, what we learn is to shut down our experience.  Because it's futile, it's useless.  And not only is it useless, but it disconnects us further from our caregivers. And that, again, brings up that hopeless, helpless feeling.  

None of this, again, is about blaming your caregivers and parents, but rather understanding how early environmental failures and ruptures led to us disconnecting from our own emotions, from our own needs.  And these roots can start so early.   And they start in families,  even if you weren't harmed, even if your parents loved you,  but they couldn't attune to you and they couldn't show up to you, or you had ruptures in school through bullying or from your teachers.  Then we learn from this deeply young age to shut down our emotions and shut down our ability to know what we want and move toward it, which is that experience of agency.  

Part of moving forward and connecting to ourselves or our adult consciousness is allowing some of these emotions that have been held down for so long to be felt and move through. Oftentimes people think why would I need to feel them now why can't I just be rid of them if I'm not feeling them right now and the answer to that is you're feeling them you're just working really really hard to hold them down to repress them to push them down you may not be aware of that because you may have been doing it for so long.  

But that's where that same analogy comes in of driving the car with the emergency brake on.  It takes such a toll on us over time.  And so the answer isn't to hit the gas harder, but the answer is to start to let off the emergency brake.  As we explore this model of emotional completion,   we want to differentiate between fear and anxiety,   which is such an important part of the NARM model.  

Fear or terror is a response to something that is directly threatening us,   that is directly threatening our survival.  So you're out walking in a bear,   you come upon a bear or,  you know, my example of a tiger trying to eat you.   Your survival system is going to activate.  Your nervous system and brain are going to immediately choose a fight,  flight,  fawn,  or freeze response to ensure that you survive.  None of this is conscious.  It's all happening very, very quickly below the surface with your brain and nervous system deciding what is the best choice of survival.  

It is so important to understand that as children, these environmental failures don't just make us feel anxious, but they trigger terror.  Because we know, again, that biological wiring makes it so that the threat of the loss of connection with our parents and our caregivers, our attachment relationship, it does impact our survival.   We are completely reliant on the adults in our lives as children to survive.  So that loss of relationship is literally a threat to our lives.  

That is different from the adult experience where we know that losing a relationship or having something scary or challenging happening to us can be hard, but that our life is not at stake.  And that is very, very different  

NARM talks about this as futuristic memory, meaning where we're holding these past experiences and projecting them into our present and future.  Here and on TikTok,   you've likely heard me talk about predictive patterning, and this is that same idea where our brain is using what has happened to us in the past to try to predict what is going to happen in the future.  And again, that's to keep us safe.  

It's actually super adaptive so that we don't have to be making conscious choices all of the time, which would be exhausting. The predictive patterning lets us drive to work safely, even if we're not % focused.  But where it becomes challenging is if we've had these environmental failures in our early life, and that sets up a pattern that says,   for example, everyone is going to reject and leave me because I'm not good enough.   Then we are predicting that all of the time to people around us.  And that creates this internal experience of anxiety.  

So when NARM is talking about this distorted reality, this futuristic memory that happens for us in adult relationships, that is because in our brain, those old predictive neural pathways are there telling us that is what is going to happen.  So it's not just that you're anxious,  it's that your brain has an old predictive pattern saying,   having needs is unsafe because I may lose the connection.  Being my own person is unsafe because I may lose the connection.  

And so it's entirely possible that in your adult life, the anxiety that comes up has nothing to do with the present situation, but is rather that old predictive pattern.   We know that we can change predictive patterning, thank goodness, right?  We know that we can change our brains and form new pathways.  But to do so, we have to be aware that a predictive pattern is coming on. And that is why I talk so much, and NARM talks about this too, about learning to observe these different patterns or these different parts of us, and to start to be curious about, similar to rock strata, like the Grand Canyon, where you see all the layers, to see what lies beneath.  

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