Havening for anxiety offers several advantages over older, traditional Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approaches. While CBT has been a mainstay in treating anxiety disorders, newer methods like Havening provide unique benefits by directly addressing the neurological aspects of trauma and anxiety.
Here are the main advantages of Havening:
- Speed and Efficiency:
- Faster Results: Havening can achieve results more quickly than EMDR, another trauma-focused therapy. While EMDR might require several sessions to set up before addressing the trauma, Havening can be used aggressively in the first session.
- Brief Therapy: Solution-focused brief therapy recognises that we are generally unaffected emotionally by anything that happened more than three months in the past.
- Directly Targets Trauma Encoding:
- Depotentiation of Traumatic Experiences: Havening directly targets and depotentiates traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala, the brain region responsible for processing emotions. This means it can help the brain release traumatic experiences that act as a filter for present-day information processing.
- Integrative Approach:
- Adjunctive Use: Havening is adjunctive and can be integrated with various schools of thought, enhancing their effectiveness. It does not need to replace other therapeutic approaches but can augment them.
- Enhanced Client Control:
- Conversational Hypnosis: Havening helps clients access a hypnotic, freely-associating state while feeling completely in control. This is particularly useful for clients who are resistant to traditional hypnotherapy due to control issues.
- Self-Havening:
- Adaptive Tool: Clients can learn self-havening techniques to sustain progress and adapt to new challenges. Teaching couples to haven each other can also be highly valuable.
- Addresses Present-Day Symptoms:
- Focus on the Present: Havening addresses present-day symptoms by targeting the information processes in the present that were developed from past experiences. This approach acknowledges that while past experiences shape current issues, the focus of therapy should be on current symptoms.
- Suitable for Professionals with High Anxiety:
- Effective for Professionals: Havening is beneficial for professionals (e.g., nursing, medical, and legal professionals) who have severe anxiety problems that may have started in childhood or more recently. It helps mediate their neurochemical landscape shaped by chronic anxiety.
- Broader Application:
- The solution-focused approach is being successfully applied to psychotherapy, coaching, conflict management and mediation, leadership and management, education and supervision, and sports.
- Values clarification:
- ACT helps clients identify their own values while committing to put those values into freely chosen action.
Havening offers advantages over traditional CBT by providing faster, more direct access to the neurological roots of anxiety and trauma. It integrates well with other therapies, enhances client control, and provides tools for self-management. By depotentiating traumatic encodings in the amygdala and focusing on present-day symptoms, Havening offers a powerful approach to havening for anxiety, particularly for those who have not found sufficient relief with traditional methods.
Tags: Havening, anxiety, CBT, trauma, amygdala, self-havening, integrative therapy