Two weeks before her wedding in 1988, Diane Poole Heller suffered a terrible car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury and overwhelming trauma symptoms. What could have been simply a devastating personal tragedy instead became the catalyst for a profound professional transformation. The accident triggered not only symptoms from the crash itself but also painful memories from her past—a phenomenon common in trauma where one overwhelming event can pull earlier traumas into consciousness, creating a cascade of distress that feels impossible to navigate.

Searching desperately for relief from her symptoms, Heller discovered Peter Levine and his groundbreaking Somatic Experiencing work. Through her own deep exploration of this body-based trauma resolution approach, she learned why symptoms bind excess arousal from overwhelming events, how to work with autonomic nervous system regulation, and crucially, how to evoke and complete the unfinished or inhibited self-protective responses that remained trapped in her nervous system from the accident. As she discovered how to apply straightforward strategies, tools, and corrective exercises, her trauma symptoms reduced significantly. The experience was so powerful and transformative that she trained as a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and spent the next twenty-five years training other therapists worldwide.

This personal healing journey profoundly shaped Heller’s understanding of trauma and ultimately led to her pioneering work in attachment theory. As she worked with clients and trainees over time, she noticed the critical connection between relational or attachment wounding and trauma—and shifted her focus toward helping people reconnect the broken connections that arise in the face of isolation and dissociation that accompanies most trauma experiences. From this integration of trauma resolution and attachment theory, she developed her signature framework DARe (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience), also known internationally as SATe (Somatic Attachment Training experience), as a way to help reshape the unhealthy patterns, adaptations, and behaviors people learn in less-than-ideal childhood circumstances.

Diane Poole Heller, PhD, holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and maintains a limited private practice in Louisville, Colorado. She is president of Trauma Solutions, a psychotherapy training organization dedicated to supporting the helping community through specialized training in trauma and attachment work. Her expertise in trauma healing has benefitted survivors and families of the September 11 attacks and the Columbine High School shooting, making her a highly sought-after consultant, speaker, and presenter for organizations worldwide.

In 1989, Heller began her formal work with Dr. Peter Levine, founder of the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETI). As Senior Faculty for SETI, she taught Somatic Experiencing trauma work internationally for over twenty-five years, becoming one of the most experienced and respected trainers in the somatic trauma field. Her work during this quarter-century helped establish Somatic Experiencing as a major force in trauma treatment, training thousands of practitioners across dozens of countries in Levine’s revolutionary approach to healing trauma through the body.

However, Heller’s own clinical observations kept pointing her toward attachment dynamics as the critical missing piece in trauma treatment. Traditional trauma therapies often focused exclusively on processing traumatic memories or regulating arousal without adequately addressing the relational context in which trauma occurred or the attachment wounds that trauma creates. She observed that many clients could make progress in resolving specific traumatic events yet still struggled profoundly in their intimate relationships, unable to trust, connect, or feel safe with others despite symptom reduction.

This clinical puzzle led Heller to deep study of attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth to explain how early relationships with caregivers create internal working models that shape all future relationships. Bowlby’s revolutionary insight was that attachment isn’t just psychological or emotional but fundamentally biological—human infants are hardwired to seek proximity to caregivers as a survival mechanism, and disruptions to this biological imperative create profound distress and adaptation.

Ainsworth’s Strange Situation research in the 1960s and 1970s identified three primary insecure attachment patterns in infants beyond secure attachment: anxious-ambivalent attachment, where infants showed intense distress at separation and difficulty being soothed upon reunion; avoidant attachment, where infants showed little outward distress at separation and avoided or ignored the caregiver upon reunion; and later, researchers Mary Main and Judith Solomon identified disorganized attachment, characterized by contradictory, confused, or bizarre behaviors reflecting profound fear of the attachment figure who should provide safety.

While attachment theory had traditionally focused on infancy and early childhood, researchers began exploring how these patterns persist into adulthood. Adult attachment research by Mary Main, Phillip Shaver, Cindy Hazan, and others demonstrated that attachment patterns formed in childhood profoundly influence adult romantic relationships, parenting, professional relationships, and even relationship with self. Adults with secure attachment navigate relationships with relative ease, trusting others, managing conflict constructively, and maintaining both autonomy and intimacy. Those with insecure attachment struggle in predictable patterns matching their childhood adaptations.

Heller recognized that while this research provided crucial theoretical understanding, it offered limited practical guidance for how adults could actually heal attachment wounds and develop secure attachment capacities they never received in childhood. Most attachment research was descriptive and diagnostic rather than prescriptive and therapeutic. She set out to develop a clinical approach that integrated attachment theory’s developmental wisdom with somatic trauma resolution’s body-based methods and relational psychotherapy’s emphasis on the therapeutic relationship as agent of change.

The DARe approach (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience) provides a sound theoretical understanding of both early childhood and adult attachment while moving beyond theoretical concepts to give practitioners and individuals concrete skills, strategies, and corrective exercises that improve communication, deepen intimacy, and help heal early attachment wounds. The approach recognizes that many individuals presenting for treatment in clinical settings have histories of insecure attachment—even though attachment may not be the presenting problem—and that these attachment adaptations profoundly affect treatment outcomes across all modalities.

Central to DARe is understanding the four attachment styles and how they manifest in adult behavior, physiology, and relationship patterns. Secure attachment represents the ideal—people who can both seek and provide emotional support, maintain healthy boundaries, navigate conflict effectively, and balance autonomy with intimacy. Research suggests approximately 55-60% of adults demonstrate secure attachment, though this varies significantly across cultures and populations.

Avoidant attachment (also called dismissive attachment) characterizes people who learned early that expressing needs, seeking comfort, or showing vulnerability led to rejection, criticism, or emotional unavailability from caregivers. These individuals adapt by minimizing attachment needs, prioritizing independence and self-sufficiency, intellectualizing emotions, and keeping others at emotional distance. Physiologically, they often show dampened emotional expressiveness and may disconnect from body sensations and feelings. In relationships, they struggle with intimacy, may feel “suffocated” by partners’ emotional needs, and often withdraw when conflict arises. Approximately 20-25% of adults show predominantly avoidant attachment patterns.

Anxious or ambivalent attachment (also called preoccupied attachment) develops when caregivers were inconsistently available—sometimes nurturing and attuned, other times neglectful or rejecting. Children in these environments learn they must amplify attachment behaviors to get needs met, leading to clingy, demanding, hypervigilant monitoring of relationship status. Adults with anxious attachment fear abandonment intensely, seek constant reassurance, struggle with self-soothing when alone, and often appear “needy” or overwhelming to partners. Physiologically, they tend toward hyperarousal and heightened emotional reactivity. Approximately 15-20% of adults demonstrate predominantly anxious attachment.

Disorganized attachment represents the most severe attachment disruption, typically arising from early experiences of abuse, neglect, or profound fear of caregivers. When the person who should provide safety is also the source of terror, the attachment system experiences irreconcilable conflict—the biological drive to seek proximity to the caregiver for safety conflicts with fear of that same person. This creates profound confusion, dissociation, and contradictory behaviors. Adults with disorganized attachment often exhibit elements of both avoidant and anxious patterns simultaneously, struggle with emotional and behavioral regulation, may dissociate under stress, and frequently have difficulty maintaining stable relationships or sense of self. Approximately 5-15% of general population shows disorganized attachment, but rates are dramatically higher (up to 80%) among individuals with histories of severe trauma, abuse, or complex PTSD.

Heller emphasizes that attachment styles aren’t rigid diagnoses but fluid adaptations that can shift across relationships, contexts, and developmental periods. Someone might show secure attachment with friends but anxious attachment with romantic partners. Attachment patterns can change through corrective relational experiences—therapy, intimate partnerships with securely attached individuals, or intentional healing work. Crucially, Heller views these patterns not as pathology but as intelligent adaptations to particular relational environments. A child who becomes avoidant isn’t “damaged” but brilliantly adaptive—they learned that emotional expression led to rejection, so they adaptively minimize emotional needs to preserve whatever connection remains available.

The DARe framework provides clinicians with practical tools for working with each attachment adaptation. For avoidant clients, therapy focuses on gradually building capacity to notice and tolerate internal experience, developing comfort with emotional expression, and recognizing that vulnerability can strengthen rather than threaten relationships. Interventions emphasize small, titrated doses of intimacy and emotional connection, respecting the client’s genuine need for autonomy while gently expanding their window of tolerance for closeness.

For anxious clients, work centers on developing internal resources for self-soothing, learning to self-regulate without constant external reassurance, building tolerance for aloneness, and recognizing that expressing needs calmly rather than urgently increases likelihood those needs get met. Somatic interventions help clients notice and down-regulate hyperarousal, while relational work provides consistent, reliable attunement that gradually builds trust that the therapist (and eventually others) won’t abandon them.

Disorganized attachment requires particularly skillful, trauma-informed work given the underlying fear and dissociation. Therapy prioritizes safety, predictability, and helping clients develop capacity to notice and tolerate internal states without dissociating. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a primary healing agent—through consistent, attuned, non-threatening presence, the therapist helps the client experience perhaps their first truly safe attachment relationship, creating neural patterns for connection without fear.

Heller developed specific experiential exercises and somatic interventions that support attachment healing. These include boundary exercises helping clients notice and communicate comfortable interpersonal distance; co-regulation practices where therapist and client synchronize breathing or heart rate to build capacity for nervous system regulation within relationship; and “dual awareness” exercises maintaining simultaneous attention to internal experience and external relationship, preventing dissociation while staying connected.

One particularly powerful DARe intervention involves helping clients access and strengthen their “Secure Attachment Skills” (SAS)—the innate biological capacity for connection that exists in everyone regardless of attachment history. Heller believes we are biologically programmed for secure attachment and that healing involves discovering what interferes with these natural tendencies and learning what strengthens them. This asset-based rather than deficit-based approach emphasizes clients’ existing resources and resilience rather than focusing exclusively on wounds and pathology.

The approach integrates multiple therapeutic orientations. From psychodynamic psychotherapy, DARe draws understanding of unconscious patterns, defenses, and how early relationships create internal working models. From Gestalt therapy, it incorporates emphasis on present-moment awareness, contact and withdrawal cycles, and experiments rather than interpretations. From somatic psychology including Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and other body-based approaches, it brings understanding of how trauma and attachment live in the body and nervous system, not just cognition and emotion.

DARe also draws from affective neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology, incorporating research on how relationships shape brain development, how the nervous system encodes relational experiences, and how neuroplasticity allows adult brains to reorganize through new relational experiences. Dan Siegel’s work on interpersonal neurobiology particularly influenced Heller’s understanding of how attuned relationships promote neural integration and how rupture without repair creates fragmentation.

Heller’s 2019 book The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships, published by Sounds True with a foreword by Peter Levine, presents DARe principles for both clinicians and general readers seeking to understand and heal their own attachment patterns. The book provides accessible explanation of attachment styles, their origins, how they manifest in adult relationships, and most importantly, practical exercises and strategies for moving toward secure attachment.

The book has been translated into over fifteen languages including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, German, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish, making Heller’s work accessible to a global audience. Ronald Siegel, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, praised it as “filled with wise guidance based on decades of clinical experience and scientific training” providing “a wealth of clear, practical tools that anyone can use to improve their relationships and enrich their lives.” Peter Levine wrote that the included exercises “will certainly help you rediscover your true, embodied self, and will guide you to renegotiate your own obstacles to connections with others.”

Earlier, Heller published the audio program Healing Your Attachment Wounds: How to Create Deep and Lasting Relationships with Sounds True in 2017. This in-depth audio learning program sheds light on the three styles of insecure attachment and the ideal fourth style of secure attachment, helping listeners understand their own patterns and providing guided exercises for healing. The program addresses why traumatic events often awaken or amplify attachment-related fear, anger, isolation, or helplessness, and how trauma and attachment theory complement each other in understanding and healing relational wounds.

Her first book, Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery, co-authored with Laurence Heller (no relation) and published by North Atlantic Books with a foreword by Peter Levine, drew directly from her personal experience of car accident trauma. The book takes readers through case histories and exercises explaining and treating health problems and trauma brought on by automobile accidents. Symptoms following auto accidents can persist for weeks, months, or longer, including nervousness, sleep disorders, loss of appetite, sexual dysfunction, chronic pain, and emotional difficulties. The book is used worldwide as a resource for healing not just auto accident trauma but a wide variety of overwhelming life events.

Beyond books and audio programs, Heller created and produced Surviving Columbine, a documentary film produced with Cherokee Studios that aired on CNN and supported community healing in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. The film provided psychoeducation about trauma responses while offering practical tools for survivors and community members struggling with the aftermath of mass violence. Her direct trauma consultation work with Columbine survivors and with families affected by the September 11 attacks brought DARe principles into crisis response and mass trauma contexts.

In 2019, the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC) awarded Heller with a Lifetime Humanitarian Award, recognizing her decades of contribution to healing individual, community, and collective trauma. That same year, she joined actress and advocate Rosie Perez on stage at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York to discuss childhood trauma, its impact on adult relationships, and managing PTSD.

Heller offers multiple training formats for clinicians and helping professionals wishing to learn DARe. The DARe Certificate Program provides comprehensive, in-depth training in the model combining psychotherapeutic modalities, scientific and spiritual perspectives with attachment and trauma-informed tools, techniques, and strategies. The program is designed for clinical professionals with active practices—therapists, social workers, psychologists, counselors, and other licensed mental health providers. Graduates receive credentials and are listed on Heller’s high-traffic website as Approved DARe Certificate Program Graduates and Providers, supporting practice growth and professional development.

The program emphasizes experiential learning—participants don’t just study attachment theory intellectually but engage in exercises designed to help them experience and embody the work themselves. This personal transformation work is considered essential; Heller believes therapists must do their own attachment healing to effectively facilitate clients’ healing. Unhealed attachment wounds in therapists can create blind spots, trigger countertransference reactions, or subtly reenact attachment dynamics from therapists’ own childhoods.

The Attachment & Trauma Mastery Program offers a hybrid learning format combining self-paced online content with live training. Each week, participants access pre-recorded training videos, audio recordings, transcripts, and supplementary resources including worksheets, demonstrations, and exercises. Live weekly training calls and Q&A sessions with Heller provide opportunities to practice experiential exercises, review teachings, and discuss cases and client demonstrations. All live sessions are recorded and posted within 48 hours, available for lifetime access.

Heller also teaches quarterly 3-Day DARe Live Intensives led by DARe faculty combining live training, teaching lectures, practical demonstrations, experiential exercises, and supplementary support material. Participants leave each workshop clearly understanding how to integrate and apply attachment and trauma principles, techniques, and corrective experiences in clinical settings.

For those wanting introductory exposure to DARe, Heller offers a free attachment style quiz on her website helping people identify their predominant attachment pattern. She also provides a 2-hour, 4-part self-paced video training series delivering a thorough primer on the four attachment styles including how they develop, how to identify each adaptation’s language and behavior patterns, ways attachment styles affect relationships positively and negatively, and tools, tips, and exercises for moving toward secure attachment.

The NARM Resources Shop offers on-demand learning with pre-recorded webinars, demonstration sessions with debriefs, and demonstration bundles from multi-part client series, plus e-books, worksheets, and tools supporting ongoing personal and professional growth. Monthly public consultation calls provide opportunities for helping professionals to receive expert consultation in supportive group settings while learning from challenging cases presented by fellow practitioners.

Heller regularly teaches and presents at prestigious international conferences and events. She has been featured on Sounds True’s Insights at the Edge podcast multiple times, discussing topics including “We Are Designed for Connection” and exploring how attachment patterns are engraved in both mind and body, highlighting long-term effects of trauma and neglect. She teaches at venues including conferences on trauma, attachment, somatic psychology, and integrative healing across North America and Europe.

The theoretical foundations of DARe rest on several core principles. First, Heller views trauma fundamentally as disconnection—from ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, other people, our lives, and the earth. This framing shifts trauma from event-focused to relational and existential. The healing task isn’t just processing memories but restoring connections that trauma severed. Attachment wounds represent a particular form of this disconnection—relational trauma that disrupts our fundamental biological capacity for connection with others.

Second, DARe emphasizes that we are all biologically hardwired for secure attachment. Just as plants naturally grow toward sunlight, humans possess an innate organismic impulse moving toward connection, health, and wholeness. This impulse persists regardless of how withdrawn, isolated, or traumatized someone has become. The therapeutic task involves identifying and removing obstacles blocking this natural movement toward connection rather than trying to create connection from scratch. This asset-based perspective honors clients’ inherent capacity for healing and avoids pathologizing adaptations that once served survival.

Third, the approach recognizes that insecure attachment patterns represent intelligent, creative adaptations to particular relational environments. A child who develops avoidant attachment isn’t fundamentally damaged but brilliantly adaptive—minimizing attachment needs preserved whatever limited connection remained available with emotionally unavailable caregivers. These adaptations served crucial survival functions in childhood but typically outlive their usefulness, creating ongoing suffering in adult life when old survival strategies get applied to safe, healthy relationships.

Fourth, DARe integrates top-down cognitive and insight-oriented approaches with bottom-up somatic and body-based interventions within relational context. Attachment patterns live simultaneously in thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiology. Healing requires working at all levels—helping clients develop insight into their patterns while also directly addressing nervous system dysregulation, incomplete survival responses, and somatic holding patterns that maintain attachment adaptations.

Fifth, the therapeutic relationship itself serves as primary agent of change. Through consistent, attuned, boundaried, trustworthy presence, the therapist provides perhaps the client’s first experience of secure attachment. This lived relational experience creates new neural pathways and internal working models more powerfully than intellectual understanding alone. The relationship must be real, genuine, and authentic rather than technically correct but emotionally hollow. Clients’ nervous systems detect authenticity versus performance, and healing requires genuine human connection.

Heller’s work integrates naturally with other major trauma and attachment-focused approaches. Bessel van der Kolk’s research demonstrating how the body keeps the score validates DARe’s emphasis on somatic interventions and nervous system regulation as essential for attachment healing. Van der Kolk’s work showing that trauma fundamentally affects how people inhabit their bodies aligns with Heller’s understanding that attachment adaptations create characteristic patterns of embodiment, breath, posture, and somatic experience.

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory provides neurobiological framework explaining how autonomic state determines capacity for social engagement. Porges’ hierarchy of autonomic responses—ventral vagal social engagement, sympathetic fight-flight, and dorsal vagal shutdown—maps directly onto attachment dynamics. Secure attachment correlates with flexible access to ventral vagal social engagement, while insecure patterns reflect chronic sympathetic hyperarousal (anxious attachment) or dorsal vagal shutdown (avoidant attachment). Disorganized attachment involves rapid, unpredictable oscillation between states.

Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy offers detailed methodology for tracking and intervening with somatic manifestations of attachment patterns. Ogden’s focus on mindful awareness of sensation, breath, gesture, and movement complements DARe’s somatic emphasis while providing specific techniques for working with body-based attachment adaptations.

Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology framework illuminates how attachment relationships literally shape brain structure and function. Siegel’s concepts of neural integration, the window of tolerance, and mindsight provide neuroscience grounding for DARe’s clinical observations about how secure attachment promotes integration while insecure patterns create fragmentation and dysregulation.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy developed by Richard Schwartz provides complementary framework for understanding attachment wounds creating protective parts. IFS conceptualizes avoidant attachment as managers working to prevent vulnerable parts from emerging, anxious attachment as firefighters desperately seeking connection, and disorganized attachment as extreme polarization between parts. DARe and IFS share emphasis on non-pathologizing, compassionate understanding of adaptations as attempts at protection and healing.

For clinicians, DARe offers framework for recognizing how clients’ attachment adaptations show up in the therapeutic relationship and how to work skillfully with these dynamics. Avoidantly attached clients may resist emotional depth, cancel sessions when work gets vulnerable, intellectualize rather than feel, or maintain cool detachment. The therapist’s task involves respecting these defenses as legitimate protective strategies while gently inviting experimentation with slightly more connection and vulnerability.

Anxiously attached clients may seek excessive contact, become dysregulated between sessions, struggle with therapeutic boundaries, or catastrophize minor ruptures in therapeutic alliance. Therapists need to provide consistent reassurance and availability while gradually helping clients develop internal resources for self-soothing and tolerating therapist’s unavailability.

Disorganized attachment presents the greatest clinical challenge. These clients may simultaneously seek and fear closeness, oscillate rapidly between trust and suspicion, dissociate when stressed, or test therapeutic boundaries in confusing ways. Therapists must maintain extraordinary consistency, patience, and groundedness while working very slowly to build safety and help clients tolerate connection without dissociating or becoming overwhelmed.

Heller emphasizes that therapists’ own attachment styles profoundly influence clinical work. Avoidantly attached therapists may intellectualize, maintain excessive distance, struggle with clients’ emotional intensity, or miss attachment dynamics entirely. Anxiously attached therapists may over-accommodate, blur boundaries, become anxiously preoccupied with clients’ approval, or seek connection inappropriate to professional role. All therapists benefit from understanding their own attachment patterns and how these influence clinical perceptions, interventions, and relationships.

Beyond individual therapy, DARe principles apply to couples therapy, family therapy, group therapy, and organizational consulting. Heller teaches how to recognize attachment dynamics in couple relationships—the classic anxious-avoidant pairing where one partner pursues while the other distances, or two avoidant partners maintaining parallel lives without genuine intimacy, or two anxious partners creating chaotic, drama-filled relationships.

In groups, attachment styles influence how people participate—avoidant members may observe rather than share, anxious members may dominate airtime seeking reassurance, securely attached members may facilitate others’ participation. Understanding these dynamics helps group facilitators create safety and invite authentic engagement from all participants.

Heller’s work has influenced how organizations understand workplace dynamics, leadership styles, and team cohesion through attachment lens. Leaders with different attachment styles create distinct organizational cultures—avoidant leaders may prioritize task over relationship, creating emotionally disconnected workplaces; anxiously attached leaders may micromanage and seek constant validation; secure leaders balance autonomy with connection, task with relationship.

Whether working with individuals healing personal trauma, couples navigating relational challenges, organizations developing healthier cultures, or communities recovering from collective trauma, Heller’s fundamental message remains consistent: we are designed for connection, trauma represents disconnection, and healing involves restoring our innate capacity for secure attachment through attuned relationships that provide what early environments failed to offer.

Her personal journey from car accident survivor to internationally recognized trauma and attachment expert demonstrates the transformative power she teaches. The devastating accident that could have left her merely traumatized instead catalyzed profound healing and professional contribution. Her lived experience of both trauma’s devastating impact and healing’s genuine possibility infuses her teaching with authenticity and hope that purely academic understanding cannot provide.

Heller continues teaching, training, writing, and seeing clients from her base in Louisville, Colorado. Through Trauma Solutions, she supports growing global community of DARe-trained practitioners bringing attachment-informed, trauma-sensitive care to their communities. Her work appears increasingly relevant as collective understanding grows that mental health challenges, addiction, relationship difficulties, and much human suffering trace roots to attachment disruption and developmental trauma.

As research in attachment, trauma, and neuroscience continues advancing, Heller’s integrative approach bridging these fields positions DARe at the forefront of developments in relational healing. Her emphasis that we can learn secure attachment skills regardless of childhood history offers hope to millions who struggle with intimacy, trust, and connection. The message that we are fundamentally designed for connection and that healing our attachment wounds helps heal families, communities, and ultimately the world reflects vision beyond individual symptom reduction toward collective transformation.

From the devastating car crash two weeks before her wedding to developing a globally recognized approach to attachment healing, Diane Poole Heller’s journey exemplifies trauma’s potential not just to damage but to catalyze profound transformation when engaged with awareness, courage, and commitment to healing.

Timeline of Diane Poole Heller’s Career and Major Contributions

1988: Suffered traumatic car accident and brain injury two weeks before wedding
1989: Began work with Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute
1990s: Trained as Somatic Experiencing practitioner
1990s-2014: Served as Senior Faculty for Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, teaching internationally for 25+ years
1999: Created and produced documentary film “Surviving Columbine” (aired on CNN)
1999: Provided trauma consultation for Columbine High School shooting survivors
2001: Provided trauma consultation for September 11 attack survivors and families
2000s: Developed Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience (DARe) framework
2000s: Published Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery (with Laurence Heller)
2000s: Founded Trauma Solutions psychotherapy training organization
2017: Published Healing Your Attachment Wounds: How to Create Deep and Lasting Relationships (audiobook, Sounds True)
2019: Published The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships (Sounds True)
2019: Received Lifetime Humanitarian Award from Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling
2019: Presented with Rosie Perez at Rubin Museum of Art on childhood trauma and adult relationships
Present: Maintains limited private practice in Louisville, Colorado
Present: President of Trauma Solutions
Present: Teaches DARe Certificate Program, Attachment & Trauma Mastery Program, and 3-Day Live Intensives
Present: International speaker and consultant on trauma and attachment

Complete Bibliography of Major Works by Diane Poole Heller

Heller, D. P., & Levine, P. (Foreword). (2019). The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

Heller, D. P. (2017). Healing Your Attachment Wounds: How to Create Deep and Lasting Relationships [Audiobook]. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

Heller, D. P., & Heller, L. S. (2001). Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Documentary Films

Heller, D. P. (Producer). (1999). Surviving Columbine [Documentary film]. Cherokee Studios. Aired on CNN.