Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Survival Style’ functions as a technical construct anchored almost exclusively in Laurence Heller’s NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), where it designates one of five patterned adaptive responses — Connection, Attunement, Trust, Autonomy, and Love-Sexuality — that crystallize when biologically based core needs go chronically unmet in early development. Heller’s central thesis is paradoxical: these styles originate as life-preserving adaptations, ingenious foreclosures of authentic selfhood undertaken to maintain the attachment relationship, yet persist into adulthood as the very engines of nervous system dysregulation, identity distortion, and relational incapacity. The term thus sits at the intersection of developmental trauma theory, somatic psychology, and attachment research, demanding both top-down (psychodynamic, cognitive) and bottom-up (somatic, nervous system) clinical attention. Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor tradition engages cognate material under the rubric of ‘survival resources,’ treating comparable embodied adaptations with explicit respect for their original adaptive value before encouraging their replacement by more flexible ‘creative resources.’ The critical tension across both traditions concerns temporality: what was once adaptive becomes, beyond its useful moment, a constricting prison. No Jungian or mythological voice in the corpus addresses survival styles directly; their appearance in adjacent passages is coincidental rather than conceptually engaged.