Havening Techniques

Today there are many approaches to treating trauma, and we are always moving forward, finding better, faster, safer and less painful approaches.

This is an overview of the methods praised today, and some of the newer methods still being validated in clinical experience.

Havening Techniques is a fairly new, efficient and safe method to

• Lower arousal using a neuropsychological reflex
• Activate calm and safety by lowering arousal
• Help foster resilience in your nervous system
• Decode emotional triggers conditioned in your limbic system
  

My experiences and insights of Havening

I ran into Havening reading the book The Past Is Always Present, by Dr Ronald Ruden (USA) looking for a scientific approach to explain how trauma and stress reactions can be encoded, and resolved. I had developed a specifically trauma-informed tapping, the Trauma Tapping Technique together with my colleague Gunilla Hamne in the Peaceful Heart Network.

Like many of the early adaptors to Havening Techniques I was already using hypnosis for coaching and therapy, in combination with breathing exercises, NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), Sports Psychology and Clean Language. Havening is easy to understand with this background, it brings in a trance state without having to master hypnosis, many of the spoken interventions align with ideas from NLP and other techniques. It is a simple body-mind approach approaching bottom-up and top-down in the spirit of Bessel Van Der Kolk's ideas in his great book The Body Keeps The Score. It aligns with the polyvagal theory of Stephen Porges in lowering arousal and hyper vigilance, entering back into the Window of Tolerance.

What Havening is

In its simplest form, Havening Techniques is a simple stimulation of the body through stroking, either on self or someone else. This is one of the greatest things about both Havening and Tapping - you can do it for yourself, after a session, and, you can do it for someone else. This is not possible with mindfulness, breathing or meditation - which are similar great ways to lower arousal.

Dr Ruden had been shown EFT-tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques), one of the most wide spread tapping techniques, by hypnotist Paul McKenna, and was dumbfounded how well it worked. Like many others he was able to resolve a life long phobia in a client in a matter of minutes. He had just written a book on how the brain handles addiction, and set out on a 16 year quest to explore if there was any scientific mechanism at work beyond the acupressure points and ideas from traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, where tapping has been around thousands of years. Beyond ideas of meridians and energy fields to find a western world logical scientific underpinning.

He dove into conditioning of responses, hormones of stress, conditioning of traumatic responses and the science of touch. Of the studies with keys to this was Taming The Amygdala,by Harper et al 2012. It showed that tactical stimulation of certain points on the upper parts of the body will lower arousal, which the amygdala is believed to be a gatekeeper for. By doing so there is a hypothesis about depotentiation of traumatic responses: if a response is triggered, say you crashed your bike and body badly listening to Beethoven, and from that day you cannot hear Beethoven without feeling uneasy, almost panicking on some days.

The idea of depotentiation is that in the moment when you broke your bike, the safety sections of you brain said "This is bad, take a note of everything we see, hear, feel, touch or smell right now so we can avoid it in the future". It made sense to me. Every mammal does it. Think Pavlovian conditioning of dogs to drool when get food, and they get to hear a bell ring at the same time. After a while they start drooling when they hear the bell, even if there is no food.

Now think of traumatic conditioning as ten times this: Because we can die in a millisecond the conditioning of trauma is immediate - one experience is enough to record everything that may be of importance, to avoid this terrible experience from ever happening again. And of course, it will stick for life, unless it is resolved. Havening and other similar techniques offer ways to resolve this: 

Trigger the response ever so lightly

Lower the arousal within ten minutes

Done - response is gone

The hypothesis

The hypothesis of depotentiation is that when arousal is lowered, our brainwave frequency of "safe and calm and rest" is enhanced, the Delta Wave. The same brainwave we have more of in deep sleep, meditation and flow, and when we close our eyes. And in cognitive processing. And, it seems that when this happens during arousal from the reaction to a stimuli - the actual AMPA receptors on the synapses of those neurons and dissolved back into the system for use in future traumatic experiences.

The spoken interventions of Havening Techniques come from many other therapies, one example is gestalt therapy, in what is called Role Havening, where the Havening touch provides safe lowering of arousal while exploring an empty chair in a situation in the past, for example meeting a relative that has passed away and you never got to say or hear them say things that feel important.

In Outcome Havening the same principles are used to explore a different outcome in a traumatic experience, like imagining not bicycling with headphones and Beethoven blasting so high that you didn't hear the truck that crashed into you. By providing the brain (for lack of better words) with an alternative experience and a better outcome while lowering reactivity with the Havening touch, the security system of the brain can close the case, and write "resolved" while dismissing the conditioned reactions. This is very similar to hypnocoaching techniques.

A simpler version of both Role and Outcome Havening is simply using the touch to lower arousal, while exploring the experience and noting the difference. It is called Event Havening. This is very similar to exposure therapies done in the style of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy(CBT) or Prolonged Exposure (PE), with one central difference - there is no suffering and 1-3 sessions can resolve an issue, while PE can get worse and can continue up to two years. The reason seems to be that by lowering the arousal, a depotentiation takes place while CBT and PE seem to create a forced coping strategy, while the reaction remains in the background.

As in many other therapies there is an element of affirmations in Havening. From my experience this can be as bad asit can be good. Read my separate thoughts on Dangerous Affirmations here.

A vital part of Havening and any other simple technique for resolving traumatic responses is distraction - if a person starts raising arousal beyond the point of control, approaching a panic attack or flashback, also called catharsis or flooding, this is easily derailed with distraction techniques that call the attention of the working memory and mind into a playful interaction so that arousal can be lowered safely with the touch. Trauma-informed distraction follows the principles of "Clean" communication: don't say or do anything that may be a trigger for the person, and, you will never have an idea of what that is. Repeating numbers, spelling their name forward or backwards are examples of simple distractions.

Since Havening touch seems to be founded on the same mechanisms of lowering arousal as tapping and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) - all  spoken approaches of Havening can be used with them, with pretty much the same results.

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Compared to other trauma treatments

Compared to Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) where a similar physical release of conditioned responses is used, the approach of Havening or Clean Language allows treating separate issues, while TRE can open a lot at the same time and in my experience therefore needs a more qualified practitioner to lead a session.

I have used Havening within our work with the Peaceful Heart Network - working with large groups of refugees, prison populations, victims of gender based violence, gang-rehabilitation and addiction recovery. Results are great. The approach we have in the Peaceful Heart is First Aid. We use Havening as one of our two Hero techniques in First Aid Stress & Trauma (FAST). This is only Havening touch and distraction. I love Havening and the ideas behind the different Havening Techniques.

‍When it comes to lowering stress arousal and traumatic reactions in general, we find Tapping and Havening interchangeable and we often mix them. When it comes to helping someone else resolve a panic attack, we find facilitated shoulder Havening by someone the person will trust to touch them, by far the most efficient intervention.

One of the main reasons we always show both Tapping and Havening is to allow people to compare them and see which one works best for them, what the difference is - rather than trying to convince them that either is better.

Here is a simple instruction film for self-Havening from the Peaceful Heart Network, with distractions.

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