Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes teaches Havening, a technique using soothing touch and distraction to reduce anxiety and fear. You rate your distress, imagine a safe place, apply gentle touch to your face and hands, then distract yourself while counting or humming. It works by decoupling traumatic memories from the amygdala, similar to EMDR.
Hey there everybody, and welcome to this presentation on what is havening and why do I care. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. I came across Havening very accidentally when I was trying to do some research on the bitcoin Havening. But havening is a really interesting new technique that may help people address anxiety. It's a very similar to tapping emotional freedom or EMDR in the fact that it is one technique that is falls under the umbrella of psychosensory therapy. Havening can be used to address fears and phobias, traumatic memories, grief cravings, or even chronic pain and sometimes short term pain. Let's just talk about how it's done. Now, I'm not recommending that you just randomly undertake this, especially for trauma related issues, but if you're having some mild anxiety or some mild pain, you might try it out. The first thing is rate your level of distress. So I pulled my neck a few weeks ago and I am still struggling to recover. And on a scale of one to five, it's probably a three today. And when I was right after I had gotten injured, it was probably a five or or higher if you can go off the scale. So I am doing better, but I still do have some pain. So I. You rate your level of distress, whether it's physical or emotional, then turn your attention to something positive where you feel safe and empowered. So for me, I might envision myself out in my garden with my animals, tending my chickens. You know, that's what I like to do. Then while I'm doing that, I'm going to start to rub my arms, like in a hugging motion, or my face. And you can do either one, whatever makes you feel more comfortable. And if you had a secure attachment with someone in the past, then mimic what they did that helped you feel safe and secure. Did they give you a hug or did they stroke your face to make you feel calmer? And if they didn't do either one, you may just need to try both of these. But you're going to focus on that thing that's different from your traumatic memory. You're going to focus on that in order to distract yourself. Now, the rubbing mimics the feeling a child gets when their caregiver responds to distress. If you never had a caregiver respond to your distress, you may not have experienced that a lot, but it is sort of innately wired in. So if you start doing that, you may feel a sense of comfort. Or a lot of people, when they get scared, they will cover themselves like this. They will rub their arms in order to self soothe. And that's just one of those things, like I said, that's wired in. So just to kind of sum up, you'll think of whatever's bothering you, the pain or the distressful thing, and you'll rank it. And you can rank it on any level of scale. I choose a scale that's one to five just because I think it's easier to be more accurate that way. Then turn, turn your attention to something positive that's not that thought or that issue. Start rubbing your arms or your face. In order to start creating that environment in which the body feels safe. Continue to gently rub your arms or face and close your eyes. Now not everybody is comfortable closing your their eyes. So if that is triggering for you or if that triggers dissociat, stare off at a point in, in the distance, just one color. Want a light? Something like that. You don't want to stare at a big picture. Stare at a single point in that picture or a single point on the wall while you're doing this. So you're staring at that thing or you're closing your eyes, you're rubbing your arms. Then you're going to count down backwards from 20, imagining yourself doing a visual task such as walking down a flight of stairs or removing items from a box. With each number counted, you'll visualize either taking one step or taking one item from the drawer or the box. If this is uncomfortable for you or doesn't work for you, you can also do it where you're rubbing your arms and you are humming a simple song like the ABCs. Or what you're trying to do is decouple the stress reaction. You're trying to help yourself get into your wise mind, if you will. So the purpose of this distraction displaces the recalled event, the stressful event from working memory and prevents it from continually activating the amygdala. We want to not continually activate that fear button, that smoke alarm. So the distraction is actually feel stressed. Then you turn your attention to something else so you can get into your wise mind. Pairing it with touch helps the person release those calming neurotransmitters and chemicals. When you're finished counting backward or humming, then re rate your level of distress and repeat the process until your distress level is at a one or a zero. And what you're doing in some ways is what you might consider desensitization. When you go through this 2, 3, 4, 5 times each time you go through it, it should be less triggering, less stressful. In your body and in your mind. The Havening touch, when applied under therapeutic conditions, tells the brain that we're safe and the event is escapable. It may not be ide heal, but we're safe. We can get through it. Repetitions of the process provide desensitization and decoupling of the memory with the emotional reaction. So you're decoupling, or if you think of it as the memory is tied to the amygdala with a rope, and each time you do it, you are cutting that rope sort of one strand at a time. So eventually they aren't connected anymore, or at least not nearly as strongly connected. Havening is a new tool that's being studied to help people with a variety of issues causing them distress, from physical pain to emotional pain. It is not as well studied as EMDR yet, but it implements many of the same principles.
