Access your innate healing response to trauma
Jane sees clients in Berkeley. Please contact her for a free 30 minute phone consultation.
 
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With the combined skills of my training as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, a NARM™ Practitioner, a Zen Priest, and other disciplines, I would like to help you:
Depending on your needs, we can call on the skills of somatic mindfulness and self-inquiry to help you calm your system and release patterns that may have helped you at one time but are now in your way. These skills are already a natural part of who you are. |
Symptoms we can address using NARM™ or Somatic Experiencing®
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Read about NARM™ in the next paragraph
Read about Somatic Experiencing® a couple paragraphs down
About NARM™
The NeuroAffective Relational Model for healing developmental trauma
NARM works with the Life Force
The spontaneous movement in all of us is toward connection and health. No matter how withdrawn and isolated we have become, or how serious the trauma we have experienced, on the deepest level, just as a plant spontaneously moves towards the sun, there is in each of us an impulse moving toward connection. This organismic impulse is the fuel of NARM.
Many adult difficulties stem from early conditions - abuse, neglect, inadequate support, or support conditioned upon shutting down aspects of our authentic expression in relation to our early caregivers (usually parents).
In the NARM model, we build on your strengths and the resources you have as an adult, as we simultaneously inquire into how you may have identified with the strategies you used to thrive as much as possible given your early environment.
NARM works both bottom-up (including somatic mindfulness and regulation of the nervous system) and top-down (with thoughts, shoulds, and limiting beliefs we tell ourselves).
Working in this way, we can help you:
- Shift patterns of self-judgment and self-hatred to a sense self-acceptance and confidence
- Develop more sense of agency and choice in life
- Feel less like a victim of your childhood
- Develop the ability to connect to feelings and needs that previously seemed overwhelming
- Experience more connection to both self and others
In a NARM session, you will learn to use a mindful awareness of your experience in the present moment. This is includes developing awareness of a “felt sense” (somatic mindfulness), thoughts and beliefs, and emotion. This mindfulness is in the service of slowing down enough to notice patterns that helped us to survive in the past (and so we can appreciate them) but are constricting who we are and our full life energy now.
NARM was developed by Dr. Laurence Heller. I recommend his book (with Aline LaPierre) Healing Developmental Trauma.
About Somatic Experiencing® (SE)
SE, an educational somatic therapy, is based upon the observation that animals in the wild are naturally able to recover from threatening experiences without becoming traumatized. Our human bodies have the same natural ability to recover from accumulated stress or trauma.
We can gently tap into this ability with the help of the Somatic Experiencing process and our own awareness.
(Somatic Experiencing was developed by Dr. Peter Levine. I recommend his book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.)
We can gently tap into this ability with the help of the Somatic Experiencing process and our own awareness.
(Somatic Experiencing was developed by Dr. Peter Levine. I recommend his book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.)
What happens when you are overwhelmed or traumatized?
When there is a perceived threat to life, your body produces a huge amount of energy to flee or fight for survival.
If this survival energy is not used up or discharged from your body, it may later show up as symptoms. SE helps your body gradually and gently discharge this excess survival energy.
If you were not able to fight or flee, your body may have gone into a freeze. A freeze can feel like paralysis, spaciness, numbness or even fatigue and apathy, and is often accompanied by shame. A freeze helped you to survive at the time of a threat; however, it contains a high amount of survival energy that needs to be released, allowing your full energy and effectiveness to be available to you now.
If this survival energy is not used up or discharged from your body, it may later show up as symptoms. SE helps your body gradually and gently discharge this excess survival energy.
If you were not able to fight or flee, your body may have gone into a freeze. A freeze can feel like paralysis, spaciness, numbness or even fatigue and apathy, and is often accompanied by shame. A freeze helped you to survive at the time of a threat; however, it contains a high amount of survival energy that needs to be released, allowing your full energy and effectiveness to be available to you now.