DNMS
DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS MEETING STRATEGY
WHAT IS DNMS?
The Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy is a gentle, multi-dimensional, client-centered ego state therapy developed by Shirley Jean Schmidt, MA, LPC and is a powerful therapy tool used to help heal unmet needs, trauma wounds and attachment wounds from childhood.
WHAT ARE DEVELOPMENTAL NEEDS?
Caregivers are meant to provide more than just basic physical needs, like food and a diaper change. They are, in fact, responsible for developing a healthy nervous system, which includes soothing and regulating painful emotions.
Attachment wounds form when emotional needs are not met. This occurs when important good things do not happen – like when parents fail to make a loving connection, soothe painful emotions, or attune. When parents are physically abusive or threatening, they inflict both trauma and attachment wounds.
As a result, your neural architecture will lack stability and have difficulty self-regulating difficult emotions. You can feel confident and positive in one moment, then scared, angry, ashamed or sad when triggered by a parent, your children or an event.
Many of these reactions are painful, lingering by-products of unmet emotional needs and developmental gaps from as early as infancy.
HEALING THE WOUNDS
When we’re significantly wounded in childhood, we formulate neural pathways that get stuck in time, which we call “child parts”. From then on, those wounded child parts may feel hurt, powerless, alone, and lost. They hold negative, untrue beliefs about self and world. Reminders of a painful past can trigger a flood of overwhelming emotions, evoking a felt sense that the past is still happening now.
Some child parts manage those painful emotions with troubling behaviors like overeating, starving, withdrawing, gambling, or drinking.
Triggering emotions can also lead to reactive behaviors: screaming at a partner or your children, lack of empathy, avoidance, control issues and more—what can be called Fight, Flight, Fix or Freeze responses.
DNMS THERAPY WITH YOU
I will talk with you with compassion and empathy about the quality of your relationship to your caregivers and dive deep into your memories and emotional responses to them.
We will work together to help form a healing team of nurturing internal resources to meet the needs of your wounded child parts.
The result will be an ability to throw off the “costume” of memories you’ve been carrying around for so long and start healing from attachments wounds dating back to childhood.
The positive results are the ability to live life feeling secure, healthy self-love, eagerness to learn and grow, and an ability to self-soothe.
When we wrap up the sessions, I’ll make sure you feel stable and safe moving forward, knowing how to use the self-regulating techniques you learned, and evaluate the progress you have made.
