Havening Techniques

For some people their brain has become stuck in a pattern of high alert and sometimes certain situations or circumstances, can trigger off what might seem like a disproportionate response such as angry outbursts, overwhelming sadness, anxiety or even panic attacks.

Havening is a group of powerful techniques that have emerged from the field of neuroscience. The can be used to help identify the root cause of, and then permanently remove, unhelpful and unwanted, emotional and physical responses to events and experiences. It is the removal of these responses that allows for a much more expansive life to emerge.

Havening is known as a psycho sensory therapy, which means that is uses a sensory input, in this case touch. The touch is applied in a stroking movement because it is nurturing for us. This type of touch also sends reassuring signals to our brain giving us the instruction that we are safe.

Our body is an electrochemical organ and so the reassuring signal created by the Havening Touch creates a change in the electrical and chemical status in our brain. This, effectively, rewires the brain to switch off the alarm detector that have been associated with the memory. When this is done, the brain responds differently. The memory is still there. It just doesn’t upset you anymore. You feel safer about that experience. You find a Haven for it. A safe place.

These techniques have been developed and refined over the last fifteen years. The first official training occurred May 2013 in the UK and it has now spread across the world. This includes New Zealand where the first ever Havening Techniques training was held in Wellington August 2018.

The Havening Techniques have been developed by the Ronald A. Ruden M.D.,Ph.D. and along with his brother Steven J. Ruden, D.D.S., ICF/ACC.

Dr Ron Ruden is a Harvard MD and a chemist who has an interest in specialised areas of neuroscience such as addictions and trauma. He has one of the largest MD practices in New York City Dr Ron Ruden is a friend of Paul McKenna, a renowned hypnotist and NLP practitioner from the UK and they are great friends. Paul McKenna had shown Dr Ron Ruden how to clear phobias using an approach called TFT – Thought Field Technique – developed by Roger Callahan.

This type of approach, known as Energy Psychology, is derived from traditional Chinese medicine that employs the touching or tapping of certain acupoints on meridian channels in the body to treat and heal both physical and emotional issues such as phobias.

Paul McKenna showed Dr Ron Ruden how to clear phobias using TFT. Dr Ron Ruden was curious about this and he helped a member of his staff to overcome a phobia using TFT. This one case was enough to grab his attention and interest.

Dr Ron Ruden was sceptical about the ‘energy clearing’ theory and felt sure that there would be observable brain correlates to any positive change due to tapping. This led him on his quest to look at research that linked touch to effects in the brain.

This included EEG work that suggested some areas of skin stimulation could generate calming, restorative and nurturing Delta waves, which are a slow brain wave.

He also got curious about the benefits of massage. When he realised that Delta wave production was not reliant on stimulating meridian points, he moved away from precise tapping of these points towards what he perceived to be more naturally reassuring massage type strokes across regions that generated Delta waves.

The skin stimulation (stroking) of particular areas and also eye movements (already existing in Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) became the 'moves' of Havening as they seemed to best generate Delta Waves.

This led to 15 years of research which resulted in the Dr’s proposing a new healing system called Havening Techniques.

Havening Techniques can be used for:

• Clearing emotional and physical responses to distressing events

• Clearing any build-up of allostatic load in our systems that if left could mount up to the point of overwhelm e.g. stress and other states not related to one or more key traumatic events however just the stresses and strains of day to day living

• The management of our emotional states

• Our overall wellness

• Increasing resilience

• Improving peak performance

• Preventing traumatic experiences being stored and encoded in our brain

Some specific examples of what Havening can help with are:

• Phobias

• Chronic pain

• Distressing memories (broken relationships, shocking news, loss, embarrassment, etc.)

• Victims of natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, etc.) and man-made (war, fire, assault, home intrusion, etc.)

• Anger and other strong emotions

• Fear of abandonment

• Stress

• Self Esteem

• Cravings

• PTSD

• Panic attacks

• Sexual abuse

• Performance enhancement

• Public speaking

• Sport performance

• Emotional eating

It’s not possible to provide any guarantees but once Havening is successful, it has shown to be permanent in most cases. This is because Havening is believed to alter the biological structure of the brain.

The return of symptoms implies either the traumatic core has not yet been found or the problem has been encoded in a different way. In particular, addictive and obsessive/compulsive behaviours, certain pain syndromes and vasovagal (e.g. fainting) issues often need reinforcement or cannot be treated with the Havening Techniques at the present time.

No therapy works for all problems, but Havening is demonstrating that it’s possible to successfully treat disorders that have not been resolved by western medicine.

Although the Havening Techniques appear to have promising emotional, mental, and physical health benefits, they have yet to be fully researched by the Western academic, medical, and psychological communities and, therefore may be considered experimental. There are various research projects underway and it is anticipated that research will be published in the near future.