Healing Developmental Trauma: Why Combining TRE and NARM Can Be So Powerful

When someone has relapsed for the third, fourth, or tenth time, the question is rarely about willpower. It is almost never about intelligence or insight. The people who arrive at Holina can often articulate, with painful precision, exactly why their drinking or using is destroying their life. They have read the books. They have done the steps. They have sat in countless rooms naming the problem. And still, when a particular feeling rises in the body — a familiar restlessness, a specific kind of emptiness, a wave of something they cannot quite name — the hand reaches for the substance before the mind has finished forming a sentence.

This is not a failure of character. It is a nervous system doing what it learned to do in childhood, long before there was language for any of it. And until the nervous system itself is given a different experience, the behaviour will keep returning, no matter how many times it is intellectually understood.

Clinically reviewed by Marc Rower — Trauma Therapist · Last reviewed 7 July 2026

“TRE helps the body let go of what it has been bracing against; NARM helps make sense of why it was bracing in the first place. Used together, and never rushed, they let insight and the body finally move in the same direction.” — Marc Rower, Trauma Therapist

Addiction as a Symptom, Not the Problem

In our clinical work, we approach addiction as a regulation strategy rather than a moral failing or even a primary illness. The substance, the behaviour, the compulsion — these are sophisticated attempts to manage a body that does not feel safe in its own skin. Alcohol slows a system that will not stop racing. Stimulants animate a system that has gone numb. Food, sex, work, screens — each addiction has its own logic, and that logic almost always traces back to developmental trauma.

Developmental trauma, sometimes described as complex post-traumatic stress, is not usually about a single catastrophic event. It is the cumulative impact of early environments where a child’s emotional needs were inconsistently met, where caregivers were frightening or frightened, where the young nervous system had to organise itself around survival rather than connection. The child adapts. The adult inherits the adaptations. Adverse childhood experiences are strongly and consistently associated with later substance dependence.^[1] And those adaptations, decades later, are often what we are calling addiction.

Why Insight Alone Does Not Stop the Cycle

Conventional talk therapy can be extraordinarily valuable, but it works primarily through the cortex — the thinking, reflecting, narrating part of the brain. The trouble is that developmental trauma is not stored there. It is stored in the body, in the autonomic nervous system, in patterns of muscular holding and breath restriction and visceral activation that operate well beneath conscious awareness.

This is why people in recovery often describe a particular kind of frustration. They understand their history. They can map the connections. They can name the feelings. And yet the body keeps doing what the body has always done. The relapse does not begin with a thought. It begins with a sensation — and by the time the thought arrives, the sequence is already underway.

Effective trauma work for people with addictive patterns must therefore include the body. Not as an afterthought, but as a primary site of intervention. This is where TRE and NARM, used together, can be so useful.

What TRE Does

TRE, or Tension and Trauma Release Exercises, was developed by Dr David Berceli. It is a bottom-up approach — meaning it begins in the body and works upward toward the mind, rather than the other way around. Through a simple sequence of physical exercises that fatigue specific muscle groups, the body is invited into an involuntary tremoring response. This neurogenic tremoring is something mammals do naturally to discharge the residue of stress and threat. In modern humans, the response has largely been suppressed.^[2]

When the tremoring is allowed to unfold in a safe, titrated way, many people describe a sense of warmth, of softening, of the chronic guardedness they have carried for decades beginning to ease. For someone whose addiction has been driven by a hyperaroused, anxious nervous system, this is often the first physical experience of genuine rest they can remember. The formal evidence base for TRE is still emerging rather than settled, which is one more reason we use it carefully and alongside established clinical care.

TRE must be approached carefully with severe trauma histories. We titrate it slowly, particularly in the early phase of residential treatment, because too much release too quickly can overwhelm a system that has been compensating for a long time. It sits within our wider range of somatic therapies.

What NARM Does

NARM, the NeuroAffective Relational Model developed by Dr Laurence Heller, works from the top down. It is a relational, psychobiological approach that explores the survival strategies a person developed in childhood — the ways they organised their identity, their connections, their sense of agency — in order to remain attached to caregivers who could not fully meet their needs.^[3] You can read more on our NARM therapy page.

NARM does not ask the person to relive trauma. Instead, it gently inquires:

• What did I have to become in order to stay connected as a child?
• What did I have to disconnect from in myself in order to do that?
• How are those patterns shaping my adult life, including my relationship with substances?

For someone with addictive patterns, this inquiry can be revelatory. The compulsion is no longer a mysterious enemy. It is a strategy that once made sense, and which is now being seen clearly, often for the first time.

Why the Combination Matters

TRE settles the body. NARM explores the story. When they are sequenced well within a residential setting, the body settles enough that curiosity returns. With curiosity, patterns become visible. With visibility, choice becomes real. And with real choice, the addictive behaviour begins to lose its grip — not because it has been forbidden, but because it is no longer the only available regulation strategy.

A Composite Example

Consider David, a composite drawn from many men we have worked with, rather than any one individual. He arrived in his late forties after his third inpatient stay elsewhere. He understood his drinking. He could describe his father’s coldness and his mother’s anxiety with clinical accuracy. He had done years of cognitive work. And yet within weeks of leaving each previous programme, the drinking had returned.

In residential treatment with us, David began with regular TRE sessions, titrated carefully. Over the first couple of weeks, he reported sleeping through the night for the first time in years. His baseline activation dropped. Only then did the deeper NARM work begin to take root — not as an intellectual exercise but as a felt exploration of the boy who had learned, very young, that being needed was safer than needing. The behaviour did not vanish on schedule. But the relationship to it shifted, and the cycle he had lived inside for decades no longer ran his life in the same way.

Co-Occurring Conditions

Most of the people we work with arrive with what would conventionally be called a dual diagnosis — addictive patterns alongside anxiety, depression, complex trauma, or attachment difficulties. We do not treat these as separate conditions stacked on top of one another. Through our Dual Treatment programme, we treat them as expressions of a single underlying reality: a nervous system shaped by early adversity, doing its best to survive in the present.

If you have relapsed before, or if you have begun to suspect that something beneath your behaviour has never been properly addressed, you are not broken and you are not beyond help. You may simply have been offered the wrong map.

If you would like to speak with our team about residential treatment at Holina, we welcome your enquiry.

Sources:
1. “Adverse Childhood Events as Risk Factors for Substance Dependence: Partial Mediation by Mood and Anxiety Disorders,” PMC, 2009.
2. TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises), Research overview, TRE Global (David Berceli, founder).
3. NARM Training Institute, “What is NARM?”; Heller, L. & LaPierre, A., Healing Developmental Trauma, North Atlantic Books, 2012.

Related Reading

• NARM Therapy for Trauma Recovery
• Somatic Therapies for Trauma and Recovery
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Meet the Clinical Team