The Beginning of Our Identity: Understanding the Connection Survival Style
Checklist for seemingly unrelated symptoms that may indicate difficulty with the Connection life theme.
| Do you prefer to recharge your batteries by being alone rather than being with other people? | Yes | No |
| Did you need glasses at an early age? | Yes | No |
| Do you suffer from environmental sensitivities or multiple allergies? | Yes | No |
| Do you have migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, or fibromyalgia? | Yes | No |
| Are you aware of prenatal trauma such as intrauterine surgeries, prematurity with incubation, or traumatic events during gestation? | Yes | No |
| Were there complications at your birth? | Yes | No |
| Have you had problems maintaining relationships? | Yes | No |
| Were you adopted? | Yes | No |
| Do you have difficulty knowing what you are feeling? | Yes | No |
| Would others describe you as more mental than emotional? | Yes | No |
| Do you have disdain for people who are emotional? | Yes | No |
| Are you sensitive to cold? | Yes | No |
| Do you often have the feeling that life is overwhelming and you don’t have the energy to deal with it? | Yes | No |
| Do you prefer working in situations that require theoretical or mechanical skills rather than people skills? | Yes | No |
| Are you troubled by the persistent feeling that you are on the outside looking in? | Yes | No |
| Are you always looking for the why of things? | Yes | No |
| Are you uncomfortable in groups or social situations? | Yes | No |
| Does the world often seem dangerous to you? | Yes | No |
A person who experiences early trauma, regardless of its source, does not feel welcomed into the world. When, at the beginning of life, for whatever reason, we do not feel welcomed, we find it difficult to develop a sense of our right to exist, of our sense of self, and of our entitlement to fully live.
The life theme of this earliest survival style develops in relation to the issue of connection. Our earliest experiences of life in utero, at birth, and with early attachment shape our relationship to feeling secure in our capacity for contact. When this capacity for connection is in place, it supports our right to be and is the foundation upon which the healthy self is built. Early trauma compromises our sense of safety and existence in the world and our capacity for connection: we do not learn how to connect to ourselves, to our body, or to others.
Our earliest trauma and attachment experiences form a template for our lifelong psychological, physiological and relational patterns. The identity of individuals with early trauma is shaped by the distress they experienced in early life. Difficulties at this initial Connection stage of development undermine healthy progression through all later stages, impacting self image, self esteem, and the capacity for healthy relationships. Trauma in this Connection phase is the basis for many seemingly unrelated cognitive, emotional, and physiological problems.
Early Events That May Cause Long-Term Traumatic Reactions
Caregiver Related
A family where one or both parents struggle with Connection issues themselves
A mother who is chronically depressed, dissociated, or angry
Being the result of an unwanted pregnancy
Attempted abortion
Mother abusing alcohol or drugs during the pregnancy
A psychotic mother
Attachment failures
Being made to feel like a burden
Environmental Failures
Premature birth
Long, painful delivery
Extended incubation without caring physical touch
Early surgery
Significant traumatic events in the family during pregnancy or early life
Death in the family
Global events such as being born into wartime
Intergenerational trauma such as the being born to Holocaust survivors
Natural disasters
Even with loving parents, trauma can find its way into an infant’s life. For example, a premature infant may require incubation. Until relatively recently, it was not known that premature infants needed physical contact and that touch had a powerful impact on their nascent organism. They were untouched in the incubator, sometimes out of fear of infection or out of the belief that it would be overwhelming to them. Having loving parents can mitigate early trauma but the effect of inadequate connection at the beginning of life remains in the physiology and psychology of the developing child and later adult.
Biological Dysregulation
The fetus/developing infant is completely dependent on its caregivers and on a benevolent environment. As a result of this total vulnerability, the infant’s reaction to rejection, failure of connection, and early trauma is one of terror. This terror is overwhelming to the nascent organism and its nervous system. It leaves its mark on every level of experience as a core withdrawal, contraction and frozenness. This frozenness and contraction is the only way an infant can manage the high arousal of terrifying early trauma. This profound state of contraction, high arousal, and freeze creates systemic dysregulation that affects all of the body’s biological systems. This underlying biological dysregulation is the shaky foundation upon which the psychological self is built.
When a fetus or an infant experiences early trauma and/or attachment wounding, the source of the threat is the environment in which they live, the only home they have. Whether the threat is intrauterine or takes place in the early months of life, there is no possible safety independent of what is provided by their caregivers. They are completely dependent. From the infants’ point of view, the danger never goes away and there is no possible resolution. They can’t run from the threat, they can’t fight it; the fallback position is to go into freeze. When there is chronic threat without possible resolution, the nervous system goes into a high state of arousal and the entire organism is trapped in a defensive-orienting response. Being locked in perpetual high arousal is a painful state which the infant manages by numbing itself and going into freeze.
A fetus/infant cannot know itself to be a good person in a bad situation. The roots of lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are found in the distress states caused by early environmental deficiencies. Infants experience early environmental failure as if there were something wrong with them: later cognitions of “I am bad” are built upon the somatic sensation: “I feel bad.” Understanding this concept alone has helped many people who suffer from patterns of low self-esteem, shame, and a sense of deficiency begin to see themselves in a new compassionate way.
Chapter 3
There are two subtypes to the Connection Survival Style. Though utilizing two different coping strategies, both subtypes experience a great deal of emotional, psychological, and often physical pain. Physically, both subtypes appear disembodied and absent: They have an overall frozen appearance that can be reflected in bodies which may look fragmented, disjointed and under energized.
| 1) The Thinking Subtype manages their high levels of arousal by disconnecting from their body and living a life of the mind. This subtype relates in an intellectual rather than a feeling manner and is drawn to professions that emphasize thinking over feeling. They can be the stereotypical scientists and engineers who are contemptuous of emotions and oriented to what they consider the objective “facts”: “The Universe is empty and cold. There is no such thing as God.”Having developed their thinking component from a very early age, they can be clear and powerful thinkers, often quite brilliant. Being disconnected from their bodies, and comfortable being by themselves, they are drawn to professions where those capacities are assets.2) The Spiritualizing Subtype manages their high levels of arousal by completely disconnecting from the body and living in the energetic field. They tend to be otherworldly and ethereal. Because they have never embodied, they are drawn to spiritual movements and often have access to very real spiritual and psychic states that “normal” people are not aware of. They can use this access to spiritual and psychic states to “spiritualize” their pain. Supporting their disconnection, a common underlying spiritualizing belief might be: “This planet is a cold and painful place, but God loves me.”Though meditation is a means to become increasingly present, many in this spiritualizing subtype are drawn to it because, having never been welcomed on this planet, it is more comfortable for them to live on non-physical, otherworldly planes. In this way, they turn to meditation to reinforce their dissociation. |
Both subtypes experience a great deal of fear and even terror of intimate contact: They avoid people, especially crowds, being more comfortable one-on-one if at all. They either have difficulty making eye contact or lock on to eye contact in an unfocused way. Individuals with this survival style are uncomfortable being touched and may even experience physical touch as painful.
Chapter 10
Moving to Resolution: Connecting with Self and Others
Regardless of the symptoms and surface issues, holding in mind the overarching organizing principle of reconnection to our bodily self and to others makes the therapeutic process richer and more efficient.
For those who struggle with the Connection survival style, there are two parallel and complementary aspects to the core organizing principles for growth and therapy: reconnecting with our own body and emotions and the parallel process of learning to experience contact with other people as an enriching reciprocal experience, rather than as a source of threat. Reconnection with self and others enables us to heal the dysregulation caused by the systemic chronic high arousal and frozenness. In the process, we learn how to support healthy self-regulation as well as reciprocal regulation through relationship.
The NeuroAffective Relational Model™ orients toward supporting the process of reconnection in present time. To do this effectively, NARM utilizes a process-oriented approach that works with exploring coming in and out of contact. Tracking the process of connection and disconnection in the body and in the therapeutic relationship itself is an essential addition to traditional psychodynamic therapies.
Changing The Paradigm
In the NARM approach, we work simultaneously with the physiology and the psychology of individuals who have experienced developmental trauma, and focus on the interplay between issues of identity and the capacity for connection and regulation.
NARM uses four primary organizing principles:
- Supporting connection and organization
- Exploring identity
- Working in present time
- Regulating the nervous system
Although listed sequentially (Table 10.1), in reality the primary principles, tools and techniques listed below weave together. In NARM, we track several themes at the same time in a figure-ground process: For example, at any given point, we might primarily focus on the theme of identity, while the issues of connection/disconnection, safety, and tolerating aliveness are in the background. At other times, the process of connection/disconnection might be in the foreground, while other themes remain in the background.
