Havening Technique for Anxiety: Summary and Details

The Havening Technique for anxiety is a psychosensory treatment using touch to eliminate unwanted feelings from distressing memories and events. It’s rooted in neuroscience and can be self-applied, is rapid, gentle, and generally side effect-free. It aims to heal amygdala-based disorders like panic attacks, phobias, and PTSD.

What the Havening Technique for Anxiety Consists Of

The havening technique for anxiety involves several key elements:

• Activating the Amygdala: This involves recalling a distressing event to reactivate the encoded memory in the amygdala. The client generates a Subjective Units of Distress (SUD) number, rating their distress on a scale of 0-10.
• Applying Havening Touch: Gentle, soothing touch is applied to the upper arms, palms, and around the eyes. This touch aims to create a sense of safety, similar to a mother comforting a newborn.
• Distraction: While applying Havening Touch, the client empties their mind or engages in a distracting activity. This might involve visualising walking up a staircase, counting aloud, or humming a familiar tune.

Types of Havening

There are several variations of the havening technique for anxiety:

• Event Havening: Targets specific events and their components.
• Transpirational Havening: Diffuses chronic emotional states by releasing the emotional component of traumatic events.
• Affirmational Havening: Promotes acceptance that change is possible, increasing psychological well-being and resilience.
• Outcome Havening: Alters the outcome of a recalled event.
• Hopeful Havening: Chanting the word ‘hopeful’ while receiving Havening Touch, with the practitioner adding encouraging words.
• Role Havening: The practitioner takes on the role of someone involved in the traumatic event to offer comfort and mitigation.
• Iffirmational Havening: Used to move individuals along a path to acceptance that change is possible.

How Havening Works

Havening aims to depotentiate traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala, empowering the brain to release these experiences. By applying Havening Touch, the technique introduces delta waves, essentially creating a state of deep sleep while awake. This paradoxical situation—arousal combined with a sense of safety—has a depotentiating effect on AMPA receptors and the encoded memory.

Benefits of Havening

• Non-Re-traumatising: Clients do not relive trauma during the healing process.
• Content-Free: It can work without needing to detail the traumatic event.
• Quick and Effective: Many practitioners find it to be a swift, effective, and long-lasting technique.
• Integrative: It can be used alongside other therapeutic approaches to enhance their effectiveness.
• Self-Administered: Clients can learn self-havening techniques to sustain progress and manage day-to-day stress.

Considerations

• Facilitator Preparation: Requires experience and expertise in psychological aspects. Intention and the facilitator’s emotional state are believed to be important.
• Integration with Therapy: Havening may not replace all other forms of therapy but can support making corrections for life experiences.
• Applications: It is best used by a professional when addressing encoded trauma.

The havening technique for anxiety can be a valuable tool in managing trauma, stress, and anxiety by directly targeting the neurological pathways involved.

Havening Techniques, Anxiety, Trauma, Amygdala, Psychosensory Therapy