You are not
the problem.

Thank you for considering coaching with me. I thought I would take this opportunity to explain a little about how my coaching works, and to go over a graphic that I end up using in almost all of my discovery sessions, where clients and I see if it might be a good fit to work with each other.

Generally, in my coaching, I do whatever I think is most truly helpful in the moment, but I use the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) for healing developmental trauma as an overall framework. I think it's great. It worked for me. It seems to work for my clients. And I think it's particularly suited for narcissistic abuse. It is the only real psychologically deep model that was designed for CPTSD, or developmental trauma. It comes out of Gestalt therapy, attachment theory, somatic experiencing mostly, and some psychodynamic grounding as well.

In NARM, the idea is not that there are symptoms or problems we want to eradicate. I don't do an intake interview. I don't inventory symptoms. The idea is that within all of us is an impulse toward growth and self-realization. It's just that we've had to make adaptations to our environment along the way, which caused us to disconnect from the parts of ourselves that are capable of realizing that.

So at the top, the client supplies the fuel, meaning you're coming to me. Just like a plant grows toward the sun, you're watching this video. There's something in you that knows what it wants and is trying to get it. And I just get behind that and help you explore what's in the way of that coming to fruition.

Which brings us to pillar one: in the beginning of every session, I just say, what would you like for yourself today? What would you like to walk away with? Here's your magic wand, what do you want, if you could get it? Sometimes it takes a while to get clear on that, because we've had to disconnect from it for so long. But eventually we settle on something and explore what the impact of that would be. How would that make you feel? Because even if you have five million dollars, or the best relationship, or all the friends in the world, if it doesn't make you feel any better, what's the point? So what's the feeling you're looking for? That's important. Then I mirror it back to you and get your consent to explore what might be getting in the way of that.

Here, I'm just a flashlight at this point. I'm curious about how this is going off the rails, or, much of the time, we'll explore instances, even small ones, where you've actually managed to pull this off. How did you do that? Because you had a role in that. Let's explore it.

In terms of how things are going off the rails, that's all a manifestation of the core dilemma in NARM. Essentially, as a child, you have two competing priorities. You need to separate, differentiate, become independent, express your needs, be in touch with your feelings, exercise your core capacities, realize yourself, be your true self. And then the competing priority: you have to maintain the attachment relationship to your caregivers. If that's an environment of failure on the environment's part, chronic misattunement, neglect, or abuse, then preserving that attachment relationship means you have to disconnect from your true self, your feelings, your needs, your desires, your capacities. And for a child, attachment always trumps authenticity. For everybody.

Everybody makes these adaptations to one degree or another. So it's very depathologizing. It's all the same stuff, no matter how wonky the symptoms may eventually appear to be. They're adaptive survival strategies. And at this point, I just ask the expert, which is you. You're the expert on your experience, not me. I may have some hypotheses, based on my knowledge and experience, but I run them by you. And if they're off, you correct them. I like that. That's good for survivors of narcissistic abuse.

Really, we just deconstruct and slow down recent experiences. Okay, you want this, and then you try to get it, and it's not working out. Why? All the adaptations we made in the past will show up between us and what we want. So we don't conduct archaeological excavations of the past, because what you focus on gets bigger. We look at how it's showing up in the present, and explore how, maybe unbeknownst to you, you're playing an active role in perpetuating these adaptations that are no longer necessary.

I get really curious about this, and we figure out the mechanics of the adaptive survival strategies. That leads into reinforcing agency, owning the role we play in our own internal drama. There's what is, our situation, our circumstances, and there's what we do to ourselves with what is. The situation might be not so good, and I never want to invalidate that. But the part we have control over is what we do to ourselves with it. What are we making of that situation? How are we construing it? How are we talking to ourselves in relation to it? Did we stop breathing? Because we're not just at the mercy of what is. It largely depends on what we do to ourselves with what is that determines the results and the experience.

And a lot of what we do to ourselves with what is, is shame ourselves. This shows up a lot, guilting ourselves, condemning ourselves, shaming ourselves. In NARM, shame is a reflexive verb. It's not like, oh, I have x quantity of shame, well what do I do with that. It's an active, reflexive process. We're acting on ourselves. And we do that without shaming ourselves for shaming ourselves, because all of these adaptive survival strategies, all the ways we disconnect from ourselves as kids or in abusive relationships, are essentially driven by shaming ourselves. So if we now notice that we're shaming ourselves, and we start shaming ourselves for that, well, we can notice that too. But really, we have compassion for these adaptive survival strategies, because they did save our life at one point. They preserved the attachment relationship. They were our best option at the time.

As we have cracks in our patterns, as we increase agency, agency is the bridge between child consciousness and embodied adult consciousness. Child consciousness is like when you're in an emotional flashback, or one big long emotional flashback: you feel like a powerless kid getting bounced around in a brutal adult world. You don't have any influence; it's just happening to you. But agency naturally leads to embodied adult consciousness, which is acting intentionally with what is, in a way that's connected to your true feelings, your body, and your heart.

So as we have moments of increased embodied adult consciousness, I reflect those shifts, psychobiological shifts, expansions of our true self, and we take time with those and let them integrate. Then we track when there's a counter-expansion, a contraction. Because there's always going to be contractions after any expansion. Our survival strategies don't just give up; they're associated with survival. We track that, and we don't take sides against either the expansions or the contractions. We want more expansion, but we understand the value of the contractions.

Over on the right is the emotional completion model. We have these big storehouses of anger, grief, and fear that we work with somatically, to discharge, and to increase our window of tolerance, so we can use those emotions the way they're meant to be used, and allow them the way they're meant to be allowed, in the present and the future, reconnecting to our bodies and discharging all of this fear.

And my job, down at the bottom, is to be present, curious, and nonjudgmental, to check in with my own self: what's coming from me, what's coming from you, and to maintain a fifty-fifty balance between us. That's the relational part. It's an offshoot of relational psychoanalysis and the idea of intersubjectivity. I'm a subject having an experience; you're a subject having an experience; we're having an intersubjective experience. As opposed to: you're an object, you're a problem to be solved, and I'm the expert. Because that's how a lot of therapy or coaching can end up working, and that is retraumatizing for anybody, but especially for someone who's suffered narcissistic abuse.

So that's a little about how I work. If you'd like, the next step would be to book a free thirty-minute call. Thank you.