by Harmony Kwiker
Developmental trauma emerges over time through chronic relational disruption—a combination of things that happened (intrusion, misattunement, chaos, or abuse) and things that didn’t happen (consistent attunement, repair, safety, and delight). As Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre describe in Healing Developmental Trauma, these early relational patterns shape the developing nervous system into core survival adaptations designed to maintain safety and preserve connection with caregivers, often at the expense of connection with the True Self.
In this way, developmental trauma isn’t defined by a single event, but by the absence of secure, attuned relationship in which the child could safely express emotion, explore their environment, and return to regulation through co-regulation. Over time, this unmet relational need becomes the template through which we perceive ourselves and the world.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
When safety and attunement are unreliable, the child’s nervous system does what it must to survive. Their instinct is to adapt—to organize in whatever way preserves connection and minimizes threat. Over time, these adaptive patterns become embodied as personality traits and beliefs such as:
- “I can’t need too much.”
- “It’s not safe to relax.”
- “My feelings are too much.”
As I write in The Awakened Therapist, these adaptations reflect the body’s inherent intelligence doing its best to find balance in an imbalanced environment. Yet what once protected becomes limiting later in life, constricting the free flow of vital force and twisting energy around internal polarities like worthiness and shame, closeness and independence, expression and suppression.
Healing begins when awareness meets these adaptive patterns with compassion, allowing the energy that was once bound in survival to move toward integration.
From Survival to Contact: The Gestalt Lens
In Gestalt therapy, we see developmental trauma not as pathology but as unfinished business—gestalts that never reached completion. Each contact boundary disturbance (introjection, retroflection, projection, deflection, or confluence) represents a moment when full contact with the environment was too overwhelming to bear.
For instance:
- A child who learned to swallow their anger may retroflect, turning that energy inward.
- A child who had to stay attuned to a parent’s emotions may become confluent, losing touch with their own needs to preserve closeness.
In a Gestalt process, these incomplete experiences are brought into the here-and-now. Rather than talking about the past, the client is supported to embody what arises in the present moment—to feel, sense, and give voice to the fragments that once had to be suppressed. When these parts are met with presence and awareness, the organism naturally moves toward completion.
Awareness as the Catalyst for Healing
Through awake awareness—the formless, unconditioned aspect of consciousness—the therapist offers a clear and compassionate mirror. As awareness touches a client’s frozen pattern, the unfinished becomes finishable.
In this sacred process:
- The body begins to metabolize stored emotion.
- The nervous system learns safety through relationship.
- The psyche reorganizes around truth rather than adaptation.
In The Awakened Therapist, I describe awareness as the alchemical agent of transformation: “Awareness alchemizes energy.” When we bring awake awareness to the body’s story—to the protective strategies that once ensured survival—the energy bound in those strategies begins to move. Integration arises not through effort, but through allowing.
Integration: Coming Home to the True Self
From a Gestalt perspective, wholeness arises through contact—contact with our sensations, our needs, our boundaries, our environment, and our deeper truth. From the lens of Heller and LaPierre’s NARM model, connection replaces survival. And from the transpersonal and energetic perspective I teach, energetic coherence replaces fragmentation.
When awareness and energy flow freely, the unfinished business of the past dissolves into the clarity of the present. The nervous system finds coherence. The psyche finds truth. The soul finds home.
Healing developmental trauma is not about becoming someone new—it’s about becoming who we truly are beneath the adaptations. It’s a sacred return to our innate wholeness, where our vital force flows unimpeded and our True Self leads the way.
Developmental trauma is the story of interrupted becoming.
Healing is the sacred process of completion.
And awareness is the bridge between the two.
Continue Your Learning
If this resonates with you, I invite you to join The Awakened Therapist Level 1 Training. This is a transpersonal counseling certification training, where we explore a trauma-informed approach to facilitating deep transformation.