Do You Know Your Adaptive Survival Style?
by Caitlin White
In 2020, the word “trauma” is basically a national catchphrase.
And though it doesn’t even seem possible, there was an event that was potentially even more personally traumatizing than what you’ve been through this year:
Your childhood.
Yes. Childhood trauma. The one time in your life where you couldn’t control anything that was happening to you, and the significant adults in your life imprinted a relational blueprint on your heart, mind, and body.
Newer, more sophisticated frameworks for understanding these early traumas are constantly emerging. And one of the most compelling new approaches is NARM (The Nero Affective Relational Model), a somatically-based (read: body-focused) psychotherapy that examines developmental stages. Dr. Laurence Heller worked on the theory itself for close to forty-five years before publishing his book in 2012.
Dr. Heller’s work suggests that we all have survival styles, which are adaptive strategies that children develop when their core needs aren’t met. Even in the most loving, stable home, the possibility of not getting a core need met early in life exists for everyone. Essentially, these adaptive strategies are coping mechanisms to deal with feelings of pain, isolation, and hurt feelings, and these strategies become our survival styles, which persist in our adult relationships and create adverse emotional responses. Each survival style is named for the unmet need— or whatever was missing during childhood.
These survival styles may start off as a good thing, but they actually become hard-to-shake patterns that are less useful over time. Eventually, these survival styles cease to help us function as our lives change, and can actually become unhealthy, affecting our relationships, careers, self-esteem, and happiness.
Which one feels like you?
1. The Connection Survival Style
Unmet Need:
This survival style derives from a lack of connection with significant adults during childhood. Traumas leading to this survival style can include physical or emotional abuse, parental substance abuse, feeling rejected, blamed, or unloved by parents, and failed attachment attempts with anxious, depressed, or mentally-ill parents.
How this survival style forms:
Chronic neglect and abuse can cause children to dissociate and numb themselves, and disconnect from other people, which can lead to a vicious cycle of feeling excluded and unwanted. If children are made to feel like a burden to the significant adults in their lives, they often try to become invisible to lessen that burden and keep those relationships intact, even if those relationships subsequently become unhealthy or disconnected.
This survival style arises to help children protect themselves and their relationships, as disassociation prevents them from feeling overwhelming pain and sadness, allowing them to survive and function.
How this survival style is expressed:
People with this survival style ultimately struggle to relate to others, as well as connect to their physical and emotional selves. They feel shame about needing anything from other people, leading them to self-isolate. And while they crave connection, they also fear it—they’re used to numbing themselves, so opening themselves up to feel pain and sadness is terrifying.
This survival style might also lead to high anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.
2. The Attunement Survival Style
Unmet Need:
People with this survival style didn’t receive any attunement to (or, validation of) their emotional and physical needs as children.
How this survival style forms: Children who don’t receive validation or attention to their needs learn to stop expressing their needs, and sometimes, reject their own needs all together. Specifically, they might give up their need for love and care, and instead, turn their focus to the needs of others.
Essentially, they stop pursuing their own desires because they believe that expressing their needs will lead to rejection and disappointment.
How this survival style is expressed: Attunement style survivors assume if they express their needs, they’ll be rejected, so they repress or remain unaware of what they actually want from relationships. They’re used to scarcity and sadness, and tend to long for what they don’t have—when I get X, I will finally be happy.
Or, instead, they might tell themselves that they have no needs. That they are the strong ones, and people need them, making them hyper-attuned to the needs of others; they are the empaths and caregivers. Often, people with this survival style feel empty and worthless because their needs are unimportant, expecting others to disappoint them; they also have a tendency to self-sabotage.
3. The Trust Survival Style
Unmet Need:
People who form this survival style often lack a feeling of safety during childhood, affecting their capacity to trust both themselves and others.
How this survival style forms:
When children are forced to grow up too quickly and give up their childhood at a young age, they suffer from a loss of safety and trust in the significant adults in their lives. This loss of childhood might come from an irresponsible parent (in which the child has to “parent” the parent), or a parent who was manipulative, and forced the child to try to be someone else.
The trust survival style is associated with pageant children, child prodigies, and children with parents who projected their own ambitions onto them. A need for control might form to give the child a sense of safety again, or they might pretend to be something they’re not in order to please their parents.
How this survival style is expressed:
Those stuck in this style need to be in control at all times, and feel that they can’t depend on anyone but themselves. They often fear that being close to others will result in a loss of independence. They also might develop a persona to fit with the ideal of who their parents wanted them to be, as this persona gained them love, attention, and praise.
People with this survival style tend to displace blame onto others, project false confidence, and want power. And the attention and praise that came from their accomplishments pushes them to become ultra-competitive.
4. The Autonomy Survival Style
Unmet Need:
Children who develop this survival style were not allowed to explore their own voice, push boundaries, or express independence. Love can be linked to pleasing or depending on caregivers and fulfilling duties.
How this survival style forms:
People with this survival style might have had all of their other needs met—connection, love, trust. But when a child is not given the ability to set their own boundaries and limits, or speak their thoughts and opinions without guilt or fear, they struggle to become independent. Often, this survival style can develop in children with fearful, anxious, or over-protective parents, or in children raised in strict religious and political environments.
Children with this survival style learn to become overly compliant, even if they are secretly resentful of authority, and become paralyzed by conflict because they just want to be the “good” kid. Essentially, a survival style of compliance and enmeshment develops because that is the way to receive love and praise.
How this survival style is expressed:
Those with this survival style have difficulty setting boundaries or directly saying no, and constantly feel burdened or pressured to live out values that they don’t necessarily believe in personally. They might also view expressions of independence as dangerous, and don’t assert themselves for fear of rejection and criticism. They might feel that being “good” is the way to win love, which makes them care a lot about how others’ perceive them.
People with this survival style tend to cling to anyone with whom they feel an emotional connection because their biggest fear is disappointing others.
5. The Love-Sexuality Survival Style
Unmet Need:
This survival style usually comes from a lack of loving relationships during childhood. Children whose love was rejected or unacknowledged by their parents might develop this survival style.
How this survival style forms:
If, during childhood, someone didn’t have connection, or attunement to their needs, or trust issues, or a lack of autonomy, then they might struggle to form loving relationships as adults, especially those with sexuality. If they were hurt by these unloving relationships, they might form this survival style as self-protection to prevent themselves from getting hurt in future relationships.
How this survival style is expressed:
This is one of the most complex, but also the most intuitive. Often, this survival style inhibits one’s ability to open their heart to new relationships, sexual or otherwise, and makes it difficult to integrate both love and sex into healthy relationships.
Those stuck in this style often use perfectionism when it comes to looks and/or performance in other areas of their life as a goal that needs to be reached before intimacy can be attained. These people tend to be very energetic, successful, and attractive. They’re the jocks and cheerleaders and famous actresses and actors.
Their self-esteem derives from their physical attractiveness, and they judge themselves harshly. They might appear confident, but deep down, they feel flawed, rejected, and unloved.
Why is any of this important?
Since these styles are oriented around an early unmet need, recognizing our adult patterns requires a certain insight into the events of our early childhood that forces us to sort through hazy memories or just finally realize that maybe our traumas were NOT normal.
But identifying our survival styles might help us understand why we sabotage our friendships, or can’t make a romantic relationship work, or never trust easily, or still have issues saying no.
Once an individual’s framework is established and identified, the NARM process is adamant that working through the old, learned traumatic state through both the mind and the body is the key to healing ourselves from the impact these developmental experiences had on our lives.
NARM is an emerging modality and as such, isn’t easy to find practitioners. The book is a bit of a slog, and feels as though it’s written more for professionals, but if you struggle with feeling emotionally stuck as an adult, if you seem to make the same mistakes over and over in your relationships, if you feel enmeshed with your family of origin in an unhealthy way, NARM is an incredibly helpful resource to help you break free of what doesn’t serve you.
Caitlin White is a freelance writer/editor living in LA, interested in empathy, pop music, and wholehearted wellness. She is also the founder and Editor-in-chief of Cinnamon Mag. You can find her here.
