What is Havening Is the title of this interview I did with Karl Smith, Director of UK Hypnosis Academy. We discuss how Havening can resolve trauma and anxiety based disorders quickly and effectively. I also do a group Havening demonstration that starts from minute 34 in the video.
Below is the transcript of the interview.
Karl Smith: Stephen do you wanna tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Stephen Travers: Yeah. So, my name’s Stephen Travers and Director of UK and International Havening. I’ve been using Havening there for over decade. I was counting it there a while ago. I’ve have done about over 15,000 havenings in the last decade. Primarily with people with anxiety based disorders, such as post-traumatic stress, panic attacks, phobias, pathological emotions and PTSD.
I’ve also trained hundreds of mental health professionals around the world and therapists. People like psychologists, psychotherapists, hypnotherapists, counselors, the EMDR trainers, people who like to do tapping and coaches. I specialize in trauma treatment using Havening and hypnotherapy. My main role as DIrector of UK and International Havening is to share Havening with health professionals. And to train them how to use it in their private practice.
Karl Smith: Brilliant. So do you want to give us a little bit of history behind, obviously I know about the Rudens, but I’m sure that some of the guys and the girls that have never heard of Havening before. Where did Havening derive from where and who are one?
Stephen Travers: Havening was developed by my good friends and colleagues, Dr. Ronald and Steven Ruden. Dr. Ronald Ruden is a Harvard university, academic he’s a medical doctor. And he has the largest private medical practice in New York City. But he is also a neuro scientific researcher.
Back in 2002, he was having a conversation with Paul McKenna in New York. Paul was talking to him about tapping techniques and Roger Callahan’s book Tapping the Healer Within. Ron being a medical doctor and neuro scientific researcher was somewhat skeptical about the explanation behind tapping meridian points.
So he decided to do a deep dive into what makes things like tapping work and EMDR. And essentially how trauma becomes encoded in the brain and the body and anxiety based disorders. From over a decades research working with thousands of his own patients, himself, and his brother developed The Havening Techniques.
Karl Smith: Brilliant. So do you want to give us a rundown about what Havening is and what people expect to see with you? And maybe even do a little bit of a bit of a run through about some of the techniques and your ideas, maybe a little bit of the science and stuff?
Stephen Travers: Havening is a psycho sensory therapy for anxiety based disorders and trauma. We use sensory touch on the palms, arms and face. We also use lateral eye movements and distraction techniques. The scientific name for Havening is amygdala depotentiation treatment.
The word Havening comes from the word Haven, like a safe Haven. So we’re bringing you to a safe place.it gives clients a felt sense of feeling safe, hence the word havening. To understand how Havening works, you have to step back and really look at the neurobiological model behind it. And understand how trauma gets encoded in the brain and the body.
What we’ve discovered is that anxiety based disorder and trauma are caused by highly distressing experiences and events, which become neurobiologically encoded in a part of the brain called the lateral amygdala. Through a very specific type of a receptor called AMPA receptors.
And we’ve figured out true using sensory touch which is obviously the Havening Techniques, how to permanently and completely remove those AMPA receptors off the neurons in the lateral amygdala, to switch off that fight, flight, freeze reaction that people have. And to ultimately resolve anxiety based disorders such as your PTSD, panic attacks, phobias, even issues like chronic pain that are caused by trauma and unresolved stress.
Havening is very consistent in terms of the results it produces. We can resolve most major or even severe traumatic memories in under 15 minutes. Sometimes it literally takes five, seven minutes.
Karl Smith: Okay. So with Havening itself, do you have any restrictions on what you work with? I mean, obviously with hypnosis, I talk about contraindications and stuff like that. Is there anything that you are not looking that you wouldn’t work with with Havening?
Stephen Travers: There are some contraindications. ,We always talk about working inside your scope of practice. So obviously, you know, there are medical doctors involved in Havening. They might work with maybe bipolar or maybe even schizophrenia if they’re qualified to work with that. Not necessarily with Havening, but they could do. I primarily work with anxiety based disorders and trauma.
he one thing that Havening doesn’t work too well on is OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, but the rest of them, it’s very consistent in terms of the results. And saying that I am choosy whom I will work with as well.
Karl Smith: Still part of the prequalification isn’t it? You have to prequalify a client, and it’s the same as what I keep harping on, on this channel as well. People don’t, pre-qualify people. There are some people out there that actually want to be sick. They want to be ill.
That sounds really hard, but some people really, really want that. They want to be ill and they want to come to a therapist just so they can say, well, I went to a therapist. Yeah. But you didn’t want it. So there’s that as well. So yeah, I get what you mean by pre qualifying. Can you still hear at me?
Stephen Travers: Yeah, I can hear you.
Karl Smith: That’s right. Cool. Yeah. So I get what you mean about pre-qualification, which is really, really important.
Stephen Travers: Like the big idea behind what I’m doing these days, like I have an intro event coming up as well at the end of September, excuse the plug. But it’s a free intro to Havening where obviously we’re gonna do a live demo on a traumatic memory. So we’re actually looking for a volunteer for that. So anyone here from this group, if you have a distressing memory or an anxiety disorder, be it PTSD, panic attacks or phobia do feel welcome to contact me, and there might be an opportunity for you to do the demo.
Karl Smith: Also what is your website, Steve, sorry?
Stephen Travers: If you go to stravershypnosis.com and if you go to the intro havening page its
Karl Smith: Okay, I got that. Right.
Why Learn Havening?
Stephen Travers: And you can read there about the free intro to Havening. You just put your name, email, and that will put you on our lists and we can send you that. There’s another link there. If you wanna go onto the website, look at the free intro event. But yeah, I suppose the big idea behind what I’m doing, and this is like my, if you like goal, when I’m working with therapists. The big idea really is this, if you’re a therapist or a mental health professional, I believe you should really care about just one thing.
And that’s your ability to achieve the best results possible for your clients as quickly, easily, as effectively as you can. As it turns out, having the ability to successfully do that, especially consistently is the difference between a therapist who has a thriving, successful therapy practice, and one who does not. It’s really about learning how to leverage those results, be through your sales and marketing to create that thriving therapy practice.
So when people do the training with me, obviously you have to be able to do the first thing first, which is to get those consistent top class results for clients. Once you can do that consistently, then you can get your reviews, your testimonials, be Google reviews, Facebook reviews, video testimonials, your YouTube channel, which you do brilliantly well Karl, where you really showcase what you can do.
And for me, that’s what it comes down to. Those are the two main things. That’s my philosophy, get the best results possible for your clients, and then communicate those results effectively through your marketing. And that’s what I teach people to do and therapists.
Karl Smith: Here is a question for you would Havening be considered like something like a pattern interrupt?
Stephen Travers: It could be, but it doesn’t work that way. And I’ve heard that many times from such people who do NLP but it doesn’t work that way. That’s not the reason it works.
Karl Smith: Okay. So do you want to go into a little bit of how you think it works? Why you think it works?
Stephen Travers: From my experience of using it for over a decades, as I said, like when we take, when we look at an anxiety based disorders, people are presenting with symptoms, be it the panic attacks, flashbacks, they’re not sleeping, they’re feeling anxious, angry, tense, hypervigilant.
You will always find that there’s going to be past traumatic events or stressful experiences that are unresolved, as in there’s still emotional charges around those experiences when the client remembers them, be it consciously or unconsciously that creates symptoms such as heart palpitating, sweating, a knot in their stomach.
So really as Havening Practitioners, we’re like detectives of trauma, where we talked with EMLI before in our last talk probably about a year ago, Karl. Where we’re looking to pinpoint, identify their traumatic events, where those AMPA receptors became encoded.
And when we find those memories, experiences in past events, we activate them. Cause when we get asked to close our eyes and think of that memory or event, if it’s traumatic encoded, those AMPA receptors will activate. Once they’re activated, we then would say to the client, open up your eyes, clear your mind, and we beginthe havening touch. And if there SUD score would say at nine or 10, zero being calm, we would then use distraction techniques as we’re havening them, or they’re havening themselves.
The distraction displaces the traumatic memory from their working memory. The sensory touch, there’s all these receptors in your skin. That’s producing a high amplitude or high amount of Delta waves in the brain, which occur in slow wave sleep. And they register at about 0.5 to two hertz per cycle, per second.
When you put electrodes in people’s heads and actually measure the brain wave activity. What the Delta waves do, they go inside the neurons, if you think of my hand as neuron. My finger is the ampo receptors, well, the Delta waves open up calcium sensitive voltage channels on the membrane of the neurons in the lateral amygdala.
As they enter they create calcineurin which dephosphorlates the AMPA receptors off the neurons within minutes. And that breaks that neural pathway, disrupts it and removes the trauma. That’s the short version of what makes it work.
Karl Smith: So just thinking about it, where does it derive from where did, where do you think that initially somebody came up with this idea to use the contact points that you use? And, you know, if you want to, and just go through some of the contact points and, you know, show people.
Because the reason I say that is because I think even though we’ve done this a couple of times, there’s people asking questions, let me just go back. Is there people still don’t know what havening is? And this is just one of these things. The question from John, is it a form of bilateral stimulation?
Removing the neurobiological roots of trauma
Stephen Travers: No, it’s not. It’s not working from that perspective. Like we have a lot of EMDR practitioners and trainers, especially in the US, have trained with us. And yet they’re use that bilateral stimulation model. Havening is about the neurobiology of sensory touch and how it changes what’s happening in the brain and the body.
But at the same time, it’s very important to understand how trauma gets encoded because Havening can look deceptively simple. You know, from the outside looking in, it looks like people are just stroking and doing distraction techniques. But if you don’t aim the Havening at the encoding moment, you’ll often get mixed results. And that’s the big difference between havening and other models like EMDR and even tapping, is we’re aiming to finding an encoding moment as opposed to just treating the symptoms.
Plus there’s other applications of Havening as well, where we work on complex trauma and pathological emotions such as anger, shame, rage feelings of feeling not good enough where there’s maybe a lot of childhood trauma. But when you dig into the sciences, it is complex. And trauma and anxiety based disorders are quite complex at times and difficult to treat. In fact that’s the thing.
And you’ll often find even with Havening, you know, people will get great results with it until you don’t and that’s where your knowledge comes in. Because if you’re just treating symptoms, we often find that the issue will not completely resolve or it will come back.
Karl Smith: Do you look for the root cause or do you look at it the same way as I probably do is in the accumulation of stress rather than just a issue? A issue can tick people over the edge, there’s no dispute in that an issue can cause a problem. But it doesn’t mean that it’s the root of all evil.
Stephen Travers: There’s a lot of like that. It’s just semantics like.
Karl Smith: Semantics and you know what this profession’s like, buddy, it’s all about semantics. It’s about no, it’s purple, no, it’s puse, you know, and all that type of shit. But you know, what I’m trying to say is, is that you know, you know, what’s your thoughts on it? Do you think it’s an accumulation of stress or do you think there is a root cause?
Changing the electrochemical landscape of the brain
Stephen Travers: It’s both from my experience and the neuroscience shows us, it’s both and it’s got to do with the landscape of your brain as well. People can have a lot of past trauma and unresolved stress issues that are an accumulation of stress building if it is it not being downregulated. They have a more vulnerable neurochemical landscape. And from a biological perspective, that means they’re more prone to suffering from trauma because they’re less resilient.
Their brain neurobiology is already fragile as opposed to someone who has very little trauma or that not that stressed in their day to day life. They tend to have a more resilient neurochemical landscape. And with Havening, we’re actually changing that landscape through the sensory touch.
The sensory touch also produces calming neurotransmitters. See when there’s an electrical change in the brain, there’s simultaneously a chemical change. There is an increase in oxytocin, serotonin, and GABA, and a decrease in cortisol and adrenaline. When you’re highly stressed, there can be a gamma brain waves.
Then there is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. Now that’s fine short term, but if you are having that regularly or every day, because you’re in a stressful job or maybe an abusive relationship and this is ongoing, and you see it as inescapable, there’s a high probability you’ll become traumatized. So it’s both, it can be an accumulation od stress and it can also be a single very distressing event.
Karl Smith: Yes I always look at the accumulation rather than just an incident. And I know some therapists are taught to just delve in and try and find a incident. And I’m a firm believer that, you know, with that analogy that I use with the pressure cooker and that side of things, which works well with my clients, is that, you know, is that if we can find out what that is, then it can change the perceptual value.
That’s what I always mention is that, it just changes that. So yes, there may well be like, like for instance, in my life I had that build up of my military career of being going through all of that stuff. But there was the car accident that really, really brought it out. But I don’t see that as the root cause and I had quite a good childhood, you know.
I had a lovely, the odd foot up the ass, but, you know, nothing special, but you know, to me, I had a great childhood, but it was just my military time and that compressed amount of time there that did it. And I can’t, I could never ever have put my finger on a incident, except for the car accident, except that one car accident.
Yes, there was several incidents that went on, but that’s why I was looking at it from the perspective I come at, is accumulated stress rather than a single event. A single event can be a massive catalyst, but I don’t think that, and it is semantics, but I just think that it’s down to that accumulation of what’s gone on.
Maybe in childhood, you know, or any abuse or anything like that or things like that, that have gone on that. Go back to what you just said then where it just opens a box of further problems in the future.
Clearing the trauma and anxiety
Stephen Travers: From a clinical practical perspective the test is this; if you’re doing a history intake with someone, I know you don’t necessarily do that. I do, and I teach people how to do it, how to start to pinpoint, identify where there’s potential trauma, listen to their language where the emotive words they’re using.
Obviously I watch them as well in how they are speaking and their body language, their tone of voice and when start reacting or getting upset. If you want to check if there is an emotional charge around something ask te client to close your eyes. Think of the memory or the event or the events.
And tell me, is there a feeling, an emotion, an emotional charge, a sensation in your body. And on a measure it from 10 to 0. Zero being completely calm and highly distressed at 10, where are you on that scale ? If they say zero that is completely fine. There’s nothing there. Brilliant. But you’ll often find when you check and test, there’ll be something there.
Karl Smith: Cause the only thing I do just to come back on that is that is that we check for the contraindications first, you know, schizophrenia, bipolar personality disorders, drinking alcohol, drugs, psychosis, narcilepsy, epilepsy, even though I work with epilepsy anyway, but that’s part of that’s my intake form.
The reason that I don’t offer that, that digging around is because I like to offer a service to people. And no, I’m not, you know, I’m not just saying anything about you Steve. It’s that people have been down that counseling route before that have had to divulge and had to divulge and they feel like they go back to another therapist, their heads gonna blow up because they’ve had to do it enough.
And it does give therapists a bad name that continues do it. So I do get why you do it, but I don’t do it because of that very reason I offer that solution to people who don’t wanna do it. Doesn’t mean I don’t give a shit, it just means that I just don’t do it.
Stephen Travers: See I’m doing it from the perspective of the Havening model. I’m looking for those encoding moments. I’m looking for those AMPA receptors.
Karl Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha.
Stephen Travers: Yes, that’s what I’m doing. And with havening we also do a debrief. Well, like when you Haven someone and you bring them back to that trauma that maybe 10 minutes before it was 10 out of 10 and they were out reacting. You will find that it will be zero. It will be gone completely. And you can sit with them for three, four or five minutes and say, do your best and get the trauma back.
The emotional component of it, the physical, and when those amp receptors are de potentiated, they’re gone, they will not be able to access the emotional distress or the physical symptoms it’ll be completely cleared. And then the cognitive component of the memory will often seem like that’s the image or the sands more distant, faded, blurrier, or like, they’re looking from the outside in.
There’s some modalities of the memory change, which is very much the way NLP works in many of its anxiety protocols. It’s a lot of disassociation and association, like the fast phobia cure, but the Havening it’s very impressive for a client when they experience that as well. Especially if they have done years of therapy talking about it. And then in 15 minutes you take something that’s a major life trauma and it is gone.
Karl Smith: Yeah. Well, I’ve seen you do Steve. I’ve seen do loads of times. I’ve seen you just do it loads of times, you know, even when you came on the Kinetic Shift Course that was near five years ago, Steve, you know, when you did that, you know, we used kinetic shift. I have no qualms in saying, we were running a Kinetic Shift Course. It would not work.
And then Stephen came out the front and did a demo of havening in front of all. There was what, 55 students in that classroom and did a complete demo. And what we couldn’t shift, Steve was able to shift. And it was just because it worked with that lady on that day, didn’t it? It was, you know, so.
Stephen Travers: Yes, it was a memory around fear of water, swimming. That’s what I do. I identified the earliest memory. It was a memory when she was a child and she had a drowning event in the water . I think it was a nine on the scale and we then did Havening. Then about 10, 12, less than 15 minutes it was gone.
Karl Smith: Can you do someHavening tonight with those that are watching us who might want join in as a bit of a precursor?
Stephen Travers: Yes we can do some Havening.
Note: go to minute 34 of the video for group demo.
Also check out this demo of a fear of flyng being resolved withiin just 7 minutes using Havening see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sofh1HdwdTI&t=9s
