Therapy for the patterns insight alone can't reach.
NARM® therapy with Kate Bergman, LISW-S, works with developmental trauma — the survival strategies your earliest relationships taught you, the ones that now feel like personality. You’ve probably already named these patterns in other therapy. NARM® is where you finally stop living inside them.
What Is NARM® Therapy?
The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM®) is an approach to healing complex and developmental trauma — the kind that doesn’t come from a single event, but from years of adapting to relationships where parts of you weren’t welcome. Developed by Dr. Laurence Heller, NARM® integrates attachment theory, neuroscience, and somatic awareness.
Most trauma therapy looks backward: process the memory, resolve the past. NARM® works differently. It starts from a simple observation — what happened to you matters, but what keeps you stuck is happening now. The self-abandonment, the perfectionism, the guilt that arrives the moment you consider putting yourself first: these are present-day survival strategies. NARM® works with them in the present, where they actually live.
That’s why NARM® doesn’t require you to retell your story in detail, and why it tends to reach places years of insight-oriented talk therapy couldn’t. Insight explains the pattern. NARM® works with the part of your nervous system still running it.
Who Is NARM® For?
NARM® is a strong fit for adults who grew up managing someone else’s emotions, who learned early that love was conditional on being good, helpful, impressive, or invisible. In my practice that’s most often smart, self-aware people — many of them women — who have done meaningful therapy before, and who notice the same patterns still running underneath everything they understand about themselves.
- You keep choosing people you have to earn — and abandoning yourself to keep them
- You know your attachment style, your triggers, your history — and it hasn't changed the pattern
- Self-trust feels theoretical: you can advocate for anyone except yourself
- You're high-functioning on paper and quietly exhausted in practice
How Do NARM® Sessions Work?
Sessions are conversational — no protocols, no homework packets, no reliving. We start with what you want for yourself, which sounds simple and rarely is. As we work, we track two things at once: the story you’re telling, and what your body does while you tell it. When an old survival strategy shows up in the room — the deflection, the hedging, the apology forming before the sentence is out — we slow down and get curious about it together.
Over time, something shifts underneath the insight: you stop organizing your life around old threats that are no longer present. NARM® calls this reconnecting with agency. My clients usually describe it more plainly — they say they finally feel like themselves.
Why Does NARM® Certification Matter?
Many therapists list NARM®-informed training. Certification is a different commitment: the full practitioner training through the NARM Training Institute, plus demonstrated clinical competency in the model. I completed my NARM® Therapist certification in 2026, and I’m currently the only NARM®-certified therapist in Northeast Ohio.
That matters for one practical reason: NARM® looks deceptively simple from the outside. Working with survival strategies in real time — without reinforcing them, without shaming them, without turning the session into another place you perform — takes depth in the model, not familiarity with it.
NARM® Therapy Questions, Answered
What does NARM® stand for?
Is NARM® the same as somatic therapy?
Do I have to talk about my childhood in NARM® therapy?
How long does NARM® therapy take?
Curious whether NARM® is what's been missing?
A free 30-minute conversation is the easiest way to find out. No intake forms, no pressure — just a real answer about whether this approach fits what you’re carrying.