Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy (DNMS)

Explained by Rick Holcomb 2002

DNMS Therapy has been developed to help you on your healing journey. DNMS assists you to recognize and strengthen your adult nurturing and protection skills and then to identify and heal childhood traumas and deficits.

Adult nurturing skills, such as empathy, understanding and patience, and adult protection skills such as action-taking, decision-making and courage, all exist within everyone. DNMS helps you to recognize and strengthen your awareness of these skills within yourself. Strengthening is aided by using hand held pulsers that provide a gentle vibration. The pulsers help stimulate the creation of new electrical circuits in your brain so that you can more easily access these skills when you need them.

Childhood traumas are things that DID happen that should have NOT have happened. The child needed protection from these traumas but did not get it. With DNMS you are assisted to link your adult protective skills to the memories of the trauma. This helps you get unstuck from these memories and start to move on.

Childhood deficits are things that DID NOT happen but which should have happened. The child needed nurturing and guidance, but did not get them. With DNMS you are assisted to link your adult nurturing skills to the memories of poor nurturing. This helps you get unstuck from these memories and start to move on.

DNMS Therapy

Explained by Shirley Jean Schmidt

Recent innovations in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) have focused on resource development and installation, and repair of developmental deficits. DNMS is a new strategy for correcting developmental deficits. This approach assumes that the degree to which the needs of a particular developmental stage were not met, is the degree to which the client is still stuck in that stage. It involves meeting those developmental and attachment needs now, to help clients get unstuck from the past.

Needs meeting work begins with the assimilation of three internal Resources (Spiritual Core Self, Nurturing Adult Self, and Protective Adult Self). They are installed individually and as a group - to form a Healing Circle. The client is asked to invite into the Circle of Resources, a child part of self that is stuck in the past. Once safely inside the Circle, the Resources can meet the child's unmet developmental needs, process any strong emotions (e.g. anger, grief), and attach securely to the child. Processing is enhanced with alternating bilateral stimulation, either visual, audio or kinesthetic. As developmental needs get met, client's unwanted beliefs, behaviours, and urges disappear. Remarkably, in the process, developmental-stage traumas often desensitize automatically. (See also www.shirleyjeanschmidt.com)