A Havening Techniques practitioner serves as a guide, illuminating the client’s path to healing. Havening is considered a tool, not a therapy. The way this tool is applied depends greatly on the practitioner’s scope of practise, ethical guidelines, and level of skill. Experienced and qualified practitioners can determine where Havening fits into their work.
The approach is founded on the respectful assumption that clients possess the inner resources needed to build highly individualised and effective solutions to their challenges. Practitioners utilise the precise use of language and their contributions are primarily positive in tenor. They may ask questions and make formulations that direct clients towards positive aspects of their lives, such as relationships, traits, or experiences. The goal is often to help clients create preferred futures and the pathways to reach them.
In their practise, practitioners may use exercises to help clients explore their values, assisting them in digging deeper into what matters and considering how their daily lives would look if they were living in line with those values. This can be particularly useful when anxiety makes it challenging to connect with what truly makes life worthwhile. Tools like the Valued Directions Worksheet and the Life Compass are used to identify important life areas, assess satisfaction, and set intentions for how clients would like to live. They may also track activities clients have engaged in to move towards their values.
Initial sessions involve referring to information gathered from intake forms and asking clients what initially brought them to therapy. Practitioners enquire about the area of fear and anxiety that is currently most distressing and disabling. While gathering history is at the heart of Havening, a good history isn’t necessarily a long one. Practitioners listen for emotionally laden words and follow a path to their origin, searching for powerful emotional memories that still cause distress. They may ask clients to bring specific events to mind clearly. The practitioner’s initial question, like a taxi driver asking “Where to?”, focuses on the client’s desired destination or goal.
A core component of the practitioner’s work is facilitating Havening Touch or guiding clients in Self-Havening. Practitioners explain the neuroscience behind Havening and why touch is effective, describing the nature and location of the touch and its purpose. Touch movements are simple, like washing hands, hugging, or washing the face. Consent is crucial; practitioners discuss touch and ask permission every time, even with established clients. If a client is uncomfortable with touch, the practitioner can guide them through self-havening.
Practitioners use various types of Havening, including:
- Event Havening: Used for almost any traumatically encoded situation, particularly single events. The process involves the client activating the emotional component of a distressing event, rating their distress level (SUD score), and then emptying their mind while the practitioner applies Havening Touch. The practitioner guides the client through tasks like visualising walking up steps while counting aloud and humming a familiar tune, using distraction to displace the emotional memory from working memory. They repeat the process until the SUD reaches 0 or stabilises.
- Transpirational Havening: Useful for similar emotional states across many events. The client accesses a memory evoking a specific emotion, and while the practitioner applies touch, the client chants the word representing the emotion, allowing the subconscious mind to depotentiate associated events.
- Affirmational Havening: Often used at the end of a session. While receiving touch, the client chants positive words like ‘worthy’ or ‘capable’, ensuring they experience the emotional tag beforehand.
- Outcome Havening: Allows for the implantation of desired outcomes. While touch is applied, the practitioner guides the client to imagine the preferred outcome.
- Hopeful Havening: Often used at session end. The client chants ‘hopeful’ while receiving touch, and the practitioner adds supportive words about healing and recovery.
- Role Havening: Requires intimate knowledge of the client’s circumstances and is not used initially. The practitioner takes on a role from the traumatic event and speaks words to mitigate the damage.
- Iffirmational Havening.
- Talk Transpirational Havening (TTH): Applying touch while the client talks about their issues, useful for exploring history.
A significant aspect is the ability to work content-free. This means clients do not have to disclose the specifics of a distressing event or issue. As long as they can access it in their own minds and experience the associated feelings, the practitioner can work with it. This approach is considered just as effective for clearing specific issues and helps keep the process client-centred by avoiding practitioner judgement or opinions.
Practitioners work with clients struggling with a wide range of issues, including anxiety, self-esteem, trauma, self-confidence, anger issues, phobias, nightmares, flashbacks, stress, and even physical conditions with a stress or trauma origin. They may also work with addiction, relationship problems, life-altering changes like grief or divorce, and limiting beliefs. Havening Techniques are also applied for rapid relief with specific populations like survivors, soldiers, and first responders. In some contexts, like executive coaching, Havening is used for stress management, emotional regulation, and overcoming past events to improve performance.
Practitioners often integrate Havening into their existing repertoire of tools. It can be combined with modalities like NLP, hypnosis, Strategic Intervention, or HeartMath. Some find it seamlessly fits with what they were already doing. Learning Havening can transform a practise, prompting practitioners to look for different things and think about the underlying neurology, biochemistry, and electrochemistry. Havening is often used alongside or as a “bolt-on” to other techniques, reinforcing the work already being done. Many practitioners report using Havening with a large majority of their clients, often 80-95% of their caseload.
The benefits observed by practitioners include the depotentiation of traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala, allowing the brain to release these experiences. It’s described as being quick, effective, and long-lasting. Havening can help build resilience and emotion regulation, enabling clients to feel more in control. It helps unlock barriers to inner freedom and can assist in building a new, more resourceful and resilient sense of self. Practitioners often observe profound client breakthroughs and transformations, sometimes described as miraculous. The ability to see and feel results in real-time within a session is seen as a very positive aspect.
For practitioners themselves, Havening can provide a self-protective aspect, allowing them to work with people in intense emotional pain without taking on the client’s stress. Many practitioners are passionate about Havening and believe every professional who works with people could benefit from learning it, even just for self-care. Advice often given to those considering adding Havening to their toolkit is simply to “just do it” and experience it for themselves. They believe it will transform their practise and make their work easier and more effective for clients. There is hope that Havening will eventually become a widely recognised and default approach, especially for traumatic experiences.
Summary A Havening Techniques practitioner is a guide who uses specific touch and language-based techniques to help clients process distressing emotional memories and create positive change. Working within their professional scope, they adopt a client-centred, positive, and resource-focused approach. They gather client history, identify key concerns, and apply various Havening methods, such as Event Havening for specific traumas or Affirmational Havening for building positive states. A key feature is the ability to work content-free, respecting client privacy while still achieving results. Practitioners often integrate Havening with other therapeutic tools and report significant benefits for clients, including healing trauma, reducing anxiety and stress, building resilience, and enhancing wellbeing. Many practitioners find Havening transforms their own practise and promotes self-care, strongly recommending others learn and use the techniques.