Sanctuary by the Sea Counseling Services

08/14/2026

A great temptation in the practice of therapy is to align ourselves with one side of a client's experience.

We may find ourselves encouraging clients to let go of self-criticism, express more anger, forgive someone, set better boundaries, or adopt what seems like a healthier perspective. While these intentions often come from a genuine desire to help, taking sides can unintentionally deepen the very inner conflicts our clients are struggling with.

In NARM, rather than encouraging one part of a client's experience over another, we invite curiosity about all of it. Our clients' emotions, behaviors, and survival strategies developed for a reason. Before challenging or trying to change them, we want to understand the role they've played in that person's life.

As we support clients in becoming curious about all sides and facets of their experience, they begin developing the capacity to hold more complexity for themselves. From there, change doesn't have to be forced. It often emerges naturally through greater awareness and embodied integration.

08/13/2026

What do you most want for yourself?

It's the first question NARM practitioners ask our clients. Before exploring anything else, we begin by trying to understand what truly matters to the person sitting in front of us.

It's also a worthwhile question for us as helping professionals to reflect on for ourselves.

What do you most want for yourself in your work? Greater confidence? A deeper understanding of what's going on under the surface? A way of working that feels more connected to who you are? A community of colleagues who continue to challenge and support your growth?

If those questions resonate, the Fall 2026 NARM-Informed Professional Training could be the next step in your professional development.

Our next live online cohort begins August 28, and we'd love to have you join us.

You can learn more or apply here: narmtraining.com/npt

08/03/2026

Most clinicians were trained, at some point or another, that helping clients express their feelings is the best intervention when they're disconnected from those feelings. But especially when it comes to anger, catharsis is not always—and not even usually—the most needed intervention.

When clients seem unable to access their anger, we don't encourage or cheerlead them toward it. Instead, we ask more questions about their relationship with anger. By exploring all sides of that relationship, clients can begin developing a different relationship to their emotions rather than becoming more split off from them.

The path toward our clients' healing is rarely found by pushing harder in one direction.

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📖 To learn more about NARM's understanding of chronic shame and guilt as well as how to effectively work with these processes, the newest NARM book Healing Shame and Guilt is on sale now at all major book retailers.

05/19/2026

05/14/2026

Healing Shame and Guilt is out now!

Today marks the release of the newest NARM book:
Healing Shame and Guilt (from North Atlantic Books)
by Dr. Laurence Heller and Stephan Niederwieser.

This book's publication is an important moment for our community. Many of us have been waiting for a deeper articulation of how NARM understands and works with shame—and this book offers that in a clear and comprehensive way.

Rather than approaching shame as an emotion, this work explores it as a layered process that impacts identity, connection, and how we relate to ourselves.

Written for both helping professionals and those on their own path of growth, it brings together decades of clinical insight into an accessible framework.

Order Healing Shame and Guilt here: https://tinyurl.com/Healing-Shame-and-Guilt

(For our NARM community in Germany, the German edition of Healing Shame and Guilt will be released on June 24. You can preorder it here: https://tinyurl.com/German-HSG)

04/26/2026

Being able to name a feeling isn’t the same as actually feeling it.

Emotional awareness includes recognizing what’s happening:
“I feel angry.” “My body feels tense and anxious.” “I’m hurt.”

Emotional capacity includes awareness—but doesn’t stop there.
It’s the ability to stay present to and even witnessing what we’re feeling without immediately disconnecting—shutting down, reacting, or becoming completely overwhelmed overwhelmed.

Someone can talk about their emotions in great detail and still struggle to stay present when those emotions arise.

Of course, insight matters and it’s often a first important step.
But without the capacity to stay connected to ourselves when the insight comes, it can only take us so far.

In NARM, we work with both—supporting awareness and building the capacity to stay present to our full experience.

04/03/2026

Big emotional release isn’t necessarily the goal.

In depth-oriented trauma work, what matters more than intensity is capacity.

Can we stay with our sadness without collapsing?
Our anger without escalating?
Our fear without disconnecting?

Staying with what we feel doesn’t mean suppressing it OR making it bigger. It means gradually developing the capacity to remain present with emotional experience while
staying connected with ourselves.

When that capacity grows, emotions can be integrated rather than acted out or acted in.

Emotional integration doesn’t necessarily involve a dramatic release. It unfolds over time as we learn to stop disconnecting from what's arising.

03/29/2026

Many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves today were formed early on.

“I’m too much.”
“I’m not enough.”
“I have to handle everything alone.”

At one point, those conclusions helped us make sense of our world and helped us figure out how to survive within it.

But as we grow up and out of those original circumstances, we’re allowed (even invited) to revisit those beliefs.

We can begin to question the conclusions we once drew about who we are.
And perhaps most importantly, we can reconsider how we relate to ourselves today.

03/29/2026

What if healing from the effects of complex trauma didn’t have to mean going back and analyzing everything that ever happened to us?

Of course, our early experiences matter.

But in NARM, the focus of the work isn’t on revisiting the past for its own sake. We can’t change what happened to us. What we can work with are the adaptations we made in order to survive.

How do those adaptations continue to show up in the present moment?
How are they influencing who we take ourselves to be, how we relate to others, and how we see the world around us?

Working with complex and developmental trauma doesn’t require reliving the past. It invites awareness of the strategies that formed in response—and exploration of whether they are still necessary.

The past informs the work.
But the work happens in the present.

03/12/2026