NARM Touch

NARM Touch | Advanced Seminar

Neuroaffective Regulation through Touch

Research shows that touch, even before the capacity for language develops, is an essential foundation of our earliest relational experiences – the fundamental mode of relating between caregiver and child. Through touch, we develop an image of our body and its boundaries, a sense of embodiment that contains all of our experiences at neurophysiological, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive levels.

We will focus on the importance of conscious touch while learning self-regulation through co-regulation, working with implicit memory and the challenges of early attachment experiences.

The seminar addresses emotional, relational, cognitive, and developmental maladaptations that cannot be addressed through verbal means alone. To work through these vulnerabilities, it is essential to encourage the intelligence of the body and the intelligence of the brain to work together in a collaborative way.

Course Objectives

This clinical training provides a specific hands-on approach to working with key patterns of “bracing” and “collapsing” in response to developmental trauma.

Systematically deconstructing the somatic components of relational and emotional trauma is a powerful tool for those seeking to deepen their skills in somatic psychotherapy.

Psychotherapeutically trained NARM practitioners gradually learn to build their confidence in integrating body-oriented interventions, therapeutic touch, and patients’ self-touch into their clinical practice.

NARM practitioners with a background in somatic therapy will expand their psychological skills and learn interventions and language applications that address developmental and emotional trauma with greater sensitivity and ease.

Topic Overview

Content and schedule are subject to change by the instructor.

• Simple body therapy techniques and patient-centered (self) touch to work “bottom up” with implicit procedural behavior, posture, and movement, and “top down” with thoughts, beliefs, and trauma-based identifications
• Being present in an embodied way and basic skills in providing supportive touch
• Touch that invites a sense of being held (and simultaneously) allows for space, to stabilize dysregulated emotional patterns
• Interpersonal neurobiology – supporting and strengthening the emotional center (heart area) to explore how relational stress affects early attachment and adult capacity for relating
• Embodied presence, orientation to the midline, healing through conscious reconnection to the life force
• Developmental process: attachment and separation/individuation
• (Somatic) resonance vs. transference dynamics
• A new orientation to resources and agency as a foundation for the development of the adult self
• Deepening understanding of the survival styles Connection and Attunement
• Somatic mindfulness and touch as a meaningful sensory dialogue
• “Feeling safe”: neuroception, interoception and proprioception and the implicit/procedural memory