Finding Safety Again: How Havening Supports Religious Trauma Recovery
Havening Techniques® as a psychotherapy for treating trauma, intrigued me at first, then drew me in and now makes 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. Using Havening to work with people who’ve experienced religious trauma is a powerful way to support the impact of PTSD and complex trauma from faith spaces.
Triggered
While training to become a therapist, I learnt tools to ground and settle myself when things feel hard and overwhelming, painful and triggering. Triggers happen because of events we’ve experienced and the way these have been stored in our brain’s memory centre. Also, because of the core beliefs that have developed over time, I’m too much, I’m not enough, or the panic or shame that come out of nowhere. I’ve learnt to work with my body to soothe the sensations these cause.
What Havening has changed though, is the impact of these triggers. 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.
Talk therapy isn’t enough
The body-brain connection is often missing in trauma counselling, certainly the way I was taught and what I hear from clients who say, I’ve never heard this before. We can’t out think triggers and we can’t talk through and reframe our thoughts to feel better when it’s our bodies that are reacting. We experience emotions in our bodies, they’re physiological.
How do you know you’re anxious? Your heart rate is up, you’re shaking, your breath is shallow. The alert system of the brain initiates a cascade responding to stimuli that sets it off; a smell, a place, a song, a person. This cascade works with the autonomic nervous system to flood the body with stress hormones to respond to threat. It releases glucose into the bloodstream to make us run faster from the tiger, our digestion clears out, we don’t need to eat in survival mode; or it protects us by shutting down with a massive headache or immobilising us frozen in place so the tiger thinks we’re dead, and moves on.
This reaction is necessary and quite incredible really. It is needed in the moment and is designed to resolve quickly. But trauma encoding happens when that moment isn’t resolved in an embodied way. We get stuck there and in time our nervous system can’t tell the difference between a tiger and a loud noise.
We can bring our clever brains online and change our thoughts and beliefs once we’ve been able to drop into our bodies.
Havening can heal our brain-body at the place of the cascade. It can stop the on ramp for that process. That’s the part that feels like a miracle for me.
Initially, my sceptic 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 hype-driven encounters with something I’m told will change my life in an instant. I’ve been on both sides of these encounters.
So I read everything I could find 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 use Havening to take the journey further for trauma processing too.
What are the Havening Techniques?
Havening Techniques, also known as Havening Touch, create a safe haven, a healing environment I sometimes call a “safety soup”. Havening Touch releases oxytocin, serotonin and the delta waves that are present when we sleep. We are creating physiological safety at a neurochemical level that allows for deep healing.
Havening is a set of movements that you do yourself or your therapist could do for you if that feels comfortable.
You can choose from;
· Slowly rubbing your hands together
· Crossed arms downward shoulder strokes
· Tracing above the eyebrows and the action of wiping away tears
In a guided way, while naming emotions and doing exercises to distract the brain, these 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.
This can work with traumatic events, core beliefs, phobias, anxiety, depression or any others areas we feel stuck or that become debilitating.
Give them a go, even for 30 seconds. How does that feel?
Havening for Religious Trauma Recovery
When you’re healing from the impact of harm experienced in faith spaces, if you’ve been taught you can’t trust your emotions, and your body and desires are unsafe, Havening can support you as you reconnect to yourself.
We often end up burnt out when we’ve been all in and at everything in a faith community. I so often see people exhausted and disillusioned, using words like “broken” and feeling cut off. Often when we leave these communities it can be as if we were never there. It can be so isolating and our bodies can feel overcome with emotion.
Havening is the opposite of this, it’s a beautiful way home. It’s nurturing and restorative. It’s also been shown to increase emotional resilience and support sleep.
If you’re looking for someone to support you as you make sense of your experience, our Practitioner Registry includes professionals who are experienced in religious trauma recovery and list the therapeutic approaches they use, including Havening. You deserve to feel safe, seen, and supported.
Havening Techniques® is a registered trade mark of Ronald Ruden, 15 East 91st Street, New York.