Too Good to Be True
The promise & ache of miracle cures, and, the one I'm offering you.
Let me rephrase, it’s not a miracle, or a cure, (though it has been for many), but it feels like one. Despite my openness to woo-woo, which I come by honestly from formative years spent in ashrams and then decades in the Pentecostal church, I have developed a critical mind since leaving fundamentalism, and I like data. Show me the science. Especially if you’re asking me to be vulnerable and do things that may feel a bit awkward at first.
Havening Techniques®1 as a psychotherapy fast becoming mainstream for trauma treatment, intrigued me at first, then drew me in and now make me feel so hopeful that healing from deep wounds is possible.
It’s not that I haven’t believed this before, just that it feels more accessible. And the part I think I love the most, it feels like a homecoming. Like science and modern therapy are catching up with what Indigenous cultures have always known, that touch and movement heal us.
While training to become a therapist, I learnt tools to ground and settle myself when things feel hard and overwhelming, painful and triggering. This happens because of events I’ve experienced and the core beliefs that have developed over time, I’m too much, I’m not enough, or the experience of panic or shame that comes out of nowhere. I can work with my body to soothe the sensations these cause.
What Havening has changed though, is the way I now respond to these. I can think of the events that once caused distress and could take me out for long stretches of time, and they’re like talking about what I had for breakfast. They’re just things that happened. I find this incredible.
That’s the part that feels like a miracle. But my skeptic was present because I have been burnt. I’ve had powerful sensory experiences over the years that I would still call spiritual, but I’m wary of miracles and those full of charisma telling me to lay down my doubts and just have faith. I’m wary of the in-the-moment, hype-driven encounters with something I’m told will change my life in an instant. I’ve been on both sides of these encounters. And, I’m wary of being asked to do odd things with my body, (like the time a church elder made me cough out a spirit of offence. Story for another time perhaps).
So I read everything I could find, evidence-based and anecdotal, and I trusted my therapist to take me on the journey. I’ve used Havening for grounding and regulation and offered it to clients. Now I’m able to take the journey further for trauma processing too.
Tangentially, but related, I used to be a massage therapist. Lomi lomi massage was the most beautiful. Generous and nurturing strokes from the sole to the neck in one movement could create a powerful healing experience.
Havening Techniques, also known as Havening Touch, create a safe haven, a healing environment in a similar way. Repetitive movements that you do yourself or I could do for you - you can choose from rubbing your hands, shoulder strokes, above the eyebrows and the action of wiping away tears - in a guided way, while naming emotions and doing exercises to distract the brain, can result in the memory centre filing distressing events where they belong, in the past. Not as live events crashing into the present and causing distress.
If you named your reactivity at a 9 or a 10 before the exercise, this process can take it down to 0. And it stays there. Here’s an illustration of how.
This can work with traumatic events, core beliefs, phobias, anxiety, depression or any others areas we feel stuck or that become debilitating.
As I’ve been writing in my weekly email recently, therapy is woefully inadequate for the connections we are really craving, the ways we want to be held by connections around us as we feel and heal. We need systems to change, workplaces, relationships, institutions to be kinder and more accomodating of neurodivergence and trauma, the need for rest and recovery. But while we work for these, therapy is what we have now. And, including psycho-sensory modalities feels closer to who we are as humans than many of the clinical ways we ‘do’ therapy and healing, at least in Western cultures.
I’m excited about working with clients through Havening, about the shifts I can see already as I start to introduce the concepts and movements and prepare my existing clients to experience this powerful modality. Many of whom have experienced religious trauma and the impact of leaving high control religion and cults.
If you’d like to learn more you can get in touch here. It’s my privilege to work with people in this way.
Warmly,
Jane
Havening Techniques® is a registered trade mark of Ronald Ruden, 15 East 91st Street, New York.