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Havening. A powerful approach for delinking encoded traumatic memories caused by stressful life experiences and for building a more resilient brain landscape.

What Is Havening Techniques®

Havening means to put in a safe place . . . to create a safe haven; it is:

» a self-care tool for reducing cumulative stress or distress in moments of activation

» a powerful approach for depotentiating traumatic events which have resulted in memories that are still affecting you in some way today

» a modality for building resilience

» a means to achieve peak performance

Recent advances in neuroscience describe Neuroplasticity as the human brain’s miraculous capacity of restructuring, reorganizing, and rewiring itself, and its ability to develop, adapt, and change throughout our life span. Every time we learn something new or experience ourselves in new-found ways, our brain creates new neural pathways in order to hold on to that new information.

Havening Techniques® works with this very malleability in that it helps us to build and access new neural pathways and networks of resiliency between the thalamus (responsible for learning and taking in new information) and the pre-frontal cortex (engaging the resources of the thinking brain and adding more logic and compassion to our responses). The more we direct this plasticity with intention towards particular goals, the more we can learn to make better choices for moving through life with more ease, authenticity, resiliency, connection, and lasting change.

In addition, with respect to our early conditioning, studies have shown that 90% of the present moment is defined by the past—and that will in turn affect the future. What this means is that when an event or experience was perceived as traumatic or highly stressful, it became immutably encoded in the cells of our amygdala, often with life-altering consequences. For example, if we have been criticized, judged, or shamed enough times, we are going to wear a lens with the belief that we are going to be criticized, judged, or shamed again—and that is going to influence our behaviours and how we show up for ourselves in the world.

Havening Techniques® has the ability to prevent this past from stampeding into the present (4 times faster than the blink of an eye . . . that’s how fast our brain reacts to perceived threats), by delinking/depotentiating these traumatic encoded memories and their neural networks of negative self-beliefs caused by our early stressful life experiences.

This highly effective Havening approach is about changing how the past is informing the present moment (trauma reprocessing), and about intentionally creating an opening for new neural networks (resilience work)—allowing us to open into increasingly more spacious awareness and a richness of possibilities, and to make better, wiser choices leading to our thriving and flourishing.

how Havening Techniques® works

Developed by Ronald A. Ruden, M.D., Ph.D., Havening Techniques® (also known as Amygdala Depotentiation Therapy - ADT), is a psychosensory modality using the simultaneous combination of: a) (Self) -Havening Touch® (creating soothing and calming Delta waves that generate an electrochemical shift that dissolves the trauma encoding on the lateral nucleus of the amygdala) and b) Havening Distraction Techniques® (giving the brain different tasks of benign, neutral and pleasant activities).
What the Distractions do is to block the negative feedback loop of rumination between the amygdala—whose mission is to constantly scan for risk, danger, or safety and to keep us safe and alive (but unfortunately it is often at the expense of our wellbeing or quality of life)—and the hippocampus, whose purpose is to store all of the threatening and non-threatening scanned data (like a library of all the stored information). This allows the healing process to proceed without interference because we are interrupting the google search of all the negative content as well as the threat signal in the emotional brain (like putting the volume down on the fire alarm).

The more we do this Havening-with-Distractions, the more space we create for our thinking brain to reassure and calm the amygdala down, preventing it from reacting in disruptive ways––and the more we support it in better differentiating between a real threat (a tiger) and a thousand overestimated threats (a thousand paper tigers). Any red-flag moment or challenge can now become an opportunity for learning, growth, and long-lasting change.