The NARM Trust Adaptive Survival Style: An Adaptation to Betrayal and Powerlessness

April 26, 2025

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JIM MCGEE

Key Points

Children who develop the Trust Adaptive Survival Style are taught early on that their true needs for dependency and attachment are shameful and unsafe. They are rewarded for selling out their authentic selves in exchange for conditional parental approval.

In families where these needs are attacked, manipulated, or used against them, children adapt by seeking power, control, and status, believing that external achievement will finally meet their inner longings.

They may become competitive, seductive, manipulative, or overpowering to compensate for deep feelings of powerlessness and betrayal.

The core wound is a compromised ability to trust. True healing requires facing the original betrayal and recognizing how they have continued it by living through a false self.

Early Violated Trust

The NARM Trust Survival Style develops in response to early experiences where trust was violated and dependency was made unsafe. This can occur in family situations where children’s dependency and attachment needs are attacked, manipulated, or used against them.

Having been manipulated by self-serving parents, individuals with this survival style associate dependency with being used. For these children, the dangers of dependency can take many forms, leading them to expect betrayal and sometimes betray first.

This survival style also begins when children receive ego gratification for fulfilling their parents’ ambitions – aka the “golden child”.

• In such situations, parents may be giving in some respects (but also neglectful or controlling), using the child for their own gratification and preventing the development of an authentic self
• “Golden children” raised by narcissistic parents were betrayed – they were not valued for their authentic selves, but incentivized to sell out

Sometimes, the trust Survival Style forms in an atmosphere of abuse and terror, where children experience or witness violence and are left feeling utterly helpless and powerless.

In response to these overwhelming early wounds, trust types often spend their lives chasing personal power as a way to reclaim a sense of safety and control.

Strengths

People with the Trust Survival Style have considerable strengths when their drive for power and control is channeled in constructive ways. On the healthier end of the spectrum, they can be visionaries and dynamic leaders, using their ambition to create and lead effectively.

Both the seductive and overpowering subtypes can be good at reading other people, particularly their weaknesses, which does translate into a strong understanding of many human dynamics.

The seductive subtype often possesses an uncanny knack for knowing people’s vulnerabilities and can make them feel quite important, demonstrating a form of charisma.

The overpowering subtype can inspire confidence in others through their presented strength and drive.

• These strengths are often misused without real healing and are linked to underlying difficulties with trust and vulnerability

In Adults

In adulthood, individuals with the Trust Survival Style employ two basic strategies to exercise power:

Seductive Subtype

• These individuals use an “as if” strategy, acting “as if” they care and are present, becoming experts at reading and seemingly fulfilling others’ needs
• They can and do manipulate and maneuver others into doing their bidding
• Ultimately, people often discover that seductive subtypes have used and betrayed them

Overpowering Subtype

• This involves attempts to control others to enhance their power
• Anger tends to be their default emotion, used to intimidate others

Distortions of Identity

Adults employing adaptations within the Trust Survival Style grapple internally between profound feelings of shame and compensatory prideful identities crafted to defend against overwhelming vulnerability and helplessness.

Shame-Based Identifications

Trust types have deep shame around being profoundly unsafe in vulnerability and dependency. Common internalizations include feeling fundamentally:

• Small
• Powerless
• Used
• Betrayed
• Weak

These shame-based identifications lock individuals into feelings of inherent inadequacy and an enduring sense of helplessness beneath their external façade.

Pride-Based Counter-Identifications

To protect against the overwhelming shame and emotional exposure, these individuals construct powerful pride-based counter-identifications that provide a compelling illusion of safety, strength, and control. Typically includes belief structures such as being:

• Strong and in control
• Successful
• Larger than life
• User
• Betrayer

These pride-based counter-identifications create a strong and assertive external depiction, hiding their true feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness even from themselves.

The healing work within NARM for this survival style lies in gently yet clearly addressing the tensions between these layers of shame and defensive pride, guiding individuals back towards authenticity and genuine self-connection.

Key Features in Adults

• Seeking power and control
• Competitive nature
• Difficulty trusting
• Tendency to be seductive and manipulative, or overpowering
• Good at reading other people, particularly their weaknesses
• Anxiety occurs when they cannot avoid or deny
• Potential for self-destructive behaviors when the idealized self-image fails
• Hypervigilant thinking and chronic anxiety (“life is a jungle”)
• A tendency to “turn the tables” to avoid vulnerability
• An inflated chest to cover up feelings of smallness and helplessness, which protects the heart and protects from tenderness
• Both genders tend to value the opposite sex for superficial qualities and use sexual conquest for the enhancement of power

It is common to use denial and rationalization to negate what is going on in their lives, disconnecting from truth and bodily experience.

• While these strategies may offer temporary relief, they ultimately prevent Trust types from addressing the root of their pain
• This avoidance keeps them stuck in fear, guilt, and inner conflict, hindering true healing and growth

Trust types may dominate, be evasive, slippery, lying, or deceitful to maintain control and avoid vulnerability and helplessness.

When confronted, they might use bluster, obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, confusion, and/or rage to regain control. If that doesn’t work, they may face a severe collapse.

The ultimate extreme of using trust strategies would be psychopathy. This involves a belief that others deserve exploitation or harm when they let themselves be vulnerable to it; they believe everybody thinks this way.

How to Help

Trust types generally avoid therapeutic situations as it puts them in a vulnerable position of needing help. When they do engage, they typically demand special treatment and discontinue as soon as their control is threatened.

• People with this style need coaches/therapists who are clear & direct
• Coaches/therapists must have firm boundaries and not get caught up in power games

Therapeutic Strategies

• Develop a connection to, and compassion for, their underlying hurt and powerlessness.
• Develop the courage and strength to allow healthy dependency on others.
• Remove the mask of the idealized self-image and move toward increasing authenticity.
• Help them develop the courage and strength to be vulnerable.

By addressing the core wounds of betrayal and powerlessness, people with the Trust Survival Style can move towards genuine connection and trust, both with themselves and with others.

Resolution & Post-Traumatic Growth

The adaptive strategies of the Trust Survival Style—such as manipulation, deceit, and control—can lead to harm and distort a person’s character. However, at their core, these people are not “bad”. They are wounded, and trust strategies are compensations.

Healing requires the courage to face the truth, to act with integrity, and to reclaim the authenticity that was once sacrificed for survival.

Resolution for individuals with the Trust Survival Style begins when they recognize how they have continued the cycle of early betrayal by abandoning their authentic selves in favor of a false identity. By facing the painful truth of the support they lacked as children—and the ways this forced them to suppress their realness—they can begin to heal.

As they acknowledge the depth of their original betrayal and allow themselves to grieve, they can return to their bodies, reconnect with their true selves, and reclaim their wholeness.

As their heart opens, their capacity for interdependence increases, and they can reach out for help without losing their sense of self.

Raised to believe that strength meant having power over others, they eventually discover that true strength lies in the courage to be vulnerable.

Therapy / Trauma Recovery Coaching helps them develop a connection to and compassion for their underlying hurt and powerlessness.

Having been so fundamentally betrayed when young, it takes a lot of courage for people with these strategies to “come clean”, allow healthy dependency, remove the mask of the idealized self-image, and develop the strength to be vulnerable.

By choosing to embrace truth and accountability, Trust types can break free from the cycle of self-deception and fear.

This courageous step leads to inner confidence and empowerment, as they align with integrity rather than personal gain. It’s through this shift that they begin to experience a sense of safety, true freedom, true growth, and the long-term rewards of authenticity and self-respect.