This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com Hello Substack Pals! We’re getting close to wrapping up our first read-a-long and it’s been so wonderful getting to engage and share in this work with you. I’d love to hear from you about what you liked, what you wish were different, and ideas for future book clubs (or other ideas!). On TikTok, many of you have expressed a desire for deeper support and connection in your personal growth journeys. This inspired the idea of the “Self Help Drop Out Club”—a space for those who want to move beyond quick-fix advice and dive into meaningful, lasting transformation - a mixture of a community chat space and live meetings. If this resonates with you, let me know in the comments or reply directly. Together, we can create something truly supportive and connected. Be sure to scroll to the bottom for our live book club meeting date and link! Also - new this week, I added a summary! I know for some of us, 25 minutes is way too long to be able to listen to/take in all at once. So if you, like me, enjoy a shorter summary to process and then come back later to the longer post, scroll down to the bottom! Now, onto our transcript this week: Welcome back for our read-along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we're going to be exploring Chapter 7, the NARM Emotional Completion Model.   And as a reminder, I'm here recapping these chapters for you, whether you're reading along with me or you're just listening along. I want to make this information more accessible so that you can take it and apply it to your life. Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work in this way. Let's dive in.   So as you may remember from our earlier discussions together, when we are children, we are biologically wired to stay in connection to our caregivers above all else. We rely on our caregivers to love us, support us, and provide a safe and caring environment where we can learn and grow and develop. And when our environment is not able to provide that to us and our caregivers are not able to provide that to us for whatever reason, it is the most heartbreaking experience because we won't expect that from our caregivers. We expect our caregivers to love us and show up for us.  And when they aren't able to do so, when we aren't able to safely attach to them, when we aren't able to safely develop and grow and be curious and have emotions, it is so devastating. It is hopeless. It is helpless.   And we will have this experience of really, really deep despair.  And so, of course, as children, living with that deep despair just feels completely intolerable.   As adults, at the very least, when we experience heartbreak, we have this ability to understand it, to have some cognition about it and to feel our way through it. But as children, we can't conceptualize that maybe our parents are having a hard time or our caregivers are having a hard time.  Instead, it feels like something must be wrong with us.  And so, of course, we would disconnect from our emotional experience to prevent a deeper feeling of loss. And when we do that, we disconnect ourselves from the full vitality and connection of life. But that's what we had to do to survive.   When we get into our adult life, those survival strategies don't magically disappear.   And so we're trying to navigate a life where we want to feel fullness, connection,   love, aliveness, but we had to disconnect from that. And that is what can lead to us feeling so stuck and so dissatisfied in our lives. Emotions are such a central part of how we understand ourselves, how we create meaning in our lives,  and how we connect with others and navigate the world.   And so if we learned that it wasn't safe and we had to disconnect from our emotions,   then we are missing a key part of our experience. That is why people who identify as int