CRM – The Comprehensive Resource Model
It’s Safe to Stay Awake!! Healing from the impact of traumatic experiences requires that there is sufficient brain and body-based safety in order for survival terror and all painful/intolerable affects to be stepped into, felt fully, remembered/re-membered, and re-oriented to so that transformation can occur. Full orientation toward profound grief, rage, shame, disgust, and terror allows for liberation of the truths of one’s life and facilitates integration of all aspects of all experience into the whole of one’s being, creating the ultimate connection to self as mind-body-spirit.
The Comprehensive Resource Model recognizes that the ability to “stay awake” to the truth of our life in sessions and day to day, without the urge to return to “slumber” through defense responses and dissociation, provides the opportunity to be in an authentic loving relationship with ourselves first and foremost. From this comes our ability to step fully into healthy relationships with others, one-on-one as well as in community, locally and globally.
The realization/manifestation of the interconnection between our “true/spiritual/core self” which is not defined by trauma, our human body, and our relationship with others and the earth we live on allows for the power of love to potentiate and actualize in a way that creates change in the microcosm of our internal world, our families, and the macrocosm of the world as a whole.
Neurobiological Scaffolding of The Comprehensive Resource Model
The Comprehensive Resource Model provides the neurobiological scaffolding that allows the brain to establish a physiological state of sufficient safety for fear responses to be recognized as relevant to the past but not the present: it allows the client to be fully present in the moment while orienting to the reality that pertained in the past. There are 7 primary resources and 5 secondary resources utilized throughout treatment using CRM, all of which are sourced internally WITHIN the client and which impact the functioning of mid-brain –based subcortical looping systems that perpetuate symptoms and dissociation rather than affiliation and connection. Few of the resources inherent in the CRM are brand new inventions. It is the combination, sequencing, flow, and nested use of these resources that allows clients to safely experience the ascents and descents in the builders’ scaffolding of the massive and complex construction housing the mind/brain in order to heal fully. In particular, the “dandelion root” events (acute or chronic and often associated with attachment disruption) which catalyze defense responses and dissocation are targeted in treatment rather than the symptomatic sequalae of these events.
The neurobiological looping systems running from brainstem to body to midbrain to cortex and back again are dismantled as a consequence of the layered neurobiological resourcing process. This makes the model different from many others and quite effective where other approaches may have been unsuccessful. It is the construction of scaffolding resources and the process of nesting them together concurrently or sequentially with eye positions anchoring these resources throughout the healing work that is at the core of the support afforded to the person’s journey of mind/brain healing through the CRM.
Healing Alchemy
All of the CRM resources are body-based. This is a bold statement when it is recognized that severe dissociative patients/clients have difficulty in being embodied. The key to the veracity of this is the anchoring every resource used through an eye position. Internal resources and CRM Resource eye positions can be used across the dissociative spectrum (from the mild, non-life interfering dissociation that we all experience at some point in our lives to Dissociative Identity Disorder). Activating the innate, organic healing energy grid within the body, enhancing dormant neurobiological attachment processes/attunement, and identifying and connecting with core self and spiritual essence allows the power and breadth of The Comprehensive Resource Model to augment one’s potential to heal and be healed. Although there are discernible similarities with other approaches to the treatment of complex trauma disorders, the Lineage of Comprehensive Resource Model does not specifically include modalities other than The Trauma Model (Colin Ross), Breathing and Somatic skills from the healing work of Barbara Barnett, and Lisa’s Resource Model. However one of its strengths is that it can be seen to contain the most effective concepts and tools in an easy-to-use format. It was only through creative application of efforts to heal that these emerged as most salient.
CRM provides the opportunity for re-connection to one’s true self; to the meaning of the truth of one’s life; and to the ability to embody love in one’s actions. Remembering and reconnecting to our internal as well as ancestral resources and joy is as important to this process as is the integration of traumatic and painful memories through the removal of the distressing emotions they have been carrying. This method of resourcing allows for a healing alchemy: the experience of re-connecting to the innate resources in the soma within the context of our pain allows for the transformation of suffering from emotional and behavioral freeze to the manifestation of our highest purpose through action while living in a human, physical body. This is what we desire, what we are looking for, consciously or unconsciously. www.comprehensiveresourcemodel.com