A havening practitioner uses various additional tools and processes to help people overcome anxiety, often integrating techniques from other disciplines. Havening techniques can be adapted and integrated into any therapeutic modality.
Here’s an exploration of these tools and techniques:
- Havening Techniques: These techniques involve using sensory input to alter the mind/body connection, and can eliminate unwanted feelings from distressing memories and events. Havening is a psychosensory therapy. There are a number of different types of Havening:
- Event Havening: Targets specific traumatic events.
- Transpirational Havening: Addresses chronic emotional states. It diffuses chronic emotional states and has other applications as well.
- Affirmational Havening: Connects the individual with an internal sense of hope and purposeful, positive action. It reinforces positive qualities and post-traumatic accomplishments, which may improve resilience.
- Outcome Havening: Alters the outcome of a recalled event.
- Hopeful Havening: Chanting the word ‘hopeful’ while receiving Havening touch. The practitioner adds words such as ‘I will heal’, ‘I will recover’, ‘My pain will go away’, ‘I won’t feel so terrible’.
- Role Havening: The practitioner takes on the role of an individual that was a powerful component of the traumatic event. The words spoken by the practitioner should attempt to mitigate the damage done and should be comforting and informative.
- Iffirmational Havening: Moves individuals along a path to acceptance that change is possible. *Client benefit: These techniques aim to provide a safe place electrochemically for the patient. Clients often experience a more grounded, clear, and peaceful state after a session, regardless of their initial state.
- Self-Havening: Clients learn to apply Havening techniques to themselves, providing them with a tool for self-care and immediate anxiety relief.
- Client benefit: Self-havening empowers clients by giving them a way to manage their anxiety independently.
- Facilitated Havening: A certified havening practitioner guides the client through the Havening process. The practitioner helps locate and activate the emotional core. Facilitated Havening, where the therapist applies the touch, is considered the most powerful.
- Client benefit: Provides support and expertise to ensure effective processing of traumatic memories.
- Touch: The Havening Techniques utilize touch. Facilitated Havening involves a practitioner applying touch. Self Havening involves the client applying touch to themselves. *Client benefit: the client is not re-traumatised as they’re going through the healing process by using Havening.
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): Havening practitioners may integrate NLP techniques.
- How it works: NLP uses structured terminology, body movements, and imagery to achieve specific objectives. It helps to pinpoint what causes the specific trauma. *Client benefit:
- NLP assists in the archeological dig at the beginning, using meta-model questions.
- NLP allows for seamless transition into Havening.
- NLP can also overlap with Havening techniques during the process.
- Hypnosis: Some havening practitioners use hypnosis or hypnotherapy.
- How it works: Hypnosis can reinforce the work and reach beyond the rational mind. Some practitioners use conversational hypnosis.
- Client benefit: Hypnosis helps clients access a beautiful, hypnotic, freely-associating state.
- Energy Psychology (EP): Havening Techniques developed as a result of research directed towards clarifying the underlying biology of EP. *How it works: EP is a technique derived from traditional Chinese medicine that employs touching acupoints on meridian channels to heal both physical and emotional problems. *Client benefit: It claims to treat a wide variety of conditions including pathological fear, guilt, anger, jealousy and grief phobias, somatization responses, post-traumatic stress, and chronic pain.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a defusion strategy, not an anxiety control strategy. It aims to help the client make contact with experience as it is, without all the other evaluative baggage, including verbal rules and reasons, that usually come along with it.
- Client benefit: mindfulness allows clients to notice the process of thinking, evaluating, feeling, remembering, and other forms of relational activity, and not simply the products of such activities.
- Goal Setting: A havening practitioner may use a goal setting.*Client benefit: Goal setting may help with problem behaviour.
- Values Clarification: Values are not limited to circumstances related to anxiety, but include domains that most of us typically associate with a good quality of life (e.g., family/relationships, work, social activities, play, education, spirituality, being a good citizen, and health and well-being, to name a few). The therapeutic task here is to clarify the direction of client values, while assessing client statements about valued ends and barriers to the achievement of valued directions.
- Client benefit: values clarification can assist with value-driven behaviour as an alternative to managing anxiety.
- Building Resilience: The havening practitioner assists the client in building their resilience. Havening builds the resilience of your neurochemical landscape.*Client benefit: The client is better able to find their own solutions.
- Creating a Safe Space: Havening provides that safe space electrochemically for the patient.*Client benefit: If we can’t have a safe place then we can’t heal trauma. Havening provides that safe place electrochemically for the patient.
- Distraction: Working memory is located in the prefrontal cortex, where conscious recall begins its journey to the amygdala. It can only hold one item at a time. Distraction should cause the recalled emotionally charged memory in working memory to be displaced.*Client benefit: During the Havening, the distraction has to be continuous, and to the best of the practitioner’s ability try to keep the traumatic memory away.
A havening practitioner will consider the client’s needs, preferences, and scope of practice to create an integrated and effective approach to overcoming anxiety.
In Summary
This response explores the additional tools and processes that a havening practitioner uses to help people overcome anxiety. The core of this approach is the Havening Techniques themselves, which include Event, Transpirational, Affirmational, Outcome, Hopeful, Role and Iffirmational Havening. These techniques may be used in conjunction with NLP, Hypnosis, energy psychology, mindfulness, goal setting and values clarification. The goal is to provide clients with tools for self-care, building resilience, and achieving lasting relief from anxiety.
Tags: Havening Techniques, anxiety relief, NLP, mindfulness, self-care, trauma, resilience, havening practitioner